Learning Outcomes:
On completion of the module students will have honed their ability to discuss topics in French social, intellectual and cultural history, whilst situating them in the broader sweep of French historical development. They will have acquired a better sense of the place of France within modern European and world history. They will have enhanced their analytical skills, practising on a wide variety of primary sources. They will have developed their skills in researching a historical topic, structuring a historical argument and writing a long historical essay.
Indicative Module Content:
Week 1. The French Revolution (seminar on The Declaration of the Rights of Man and on Robespierre)
Week 2. Napoleon (seminar on David and the art of the French Revolutionary Era)
Week 3. Culture and Society in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (seminar on Delacroix and French Romanticism)
Week 4. The French Revolutionary Tradition 1830-1871 (seminar on Victor Hugo and Les Miserables)
Week 5. The Advent of Modernity under the Second Empire and the Third Republic (seminar on the Paris of Haussmann and the Impressionists)
Week 6. The Army and French Society From the Commune To The First World War, 1871-1918 (seminar on Zola and the Dreyfus Affair)
Week 7. Culture and Society in the Interwar Years (seminar on the Popular Front in Film)
Week 8. The French Experience in World War Two (seminar on Collaboration and Resistance)
Week 9. The Drama of Decolonization: From Indochina to Algeria and From the Fourth Republic to the Fifth (seminar on Sartre, Camus and Existentialism)
Week 10. Gender and Society in the 1960s (seminar on the New Wave in French Cinema)
Week 11. France since May 1968 (seminar on the Bicentenary of the French Revolution)