Our syllabus has been revised in order to take into account the fact that we got a few days behind. No assignment or reading has changed, though some due dates have. Please note the following:
Monday, February 18: Discussion of Père Goriot
Friday, February 22: Biographies Due
Monday, February 25: Discussion of The Eighteenth Brumaire
The updated syllabus can be downloaded via the link on the right side of the page.
All PowerPoint slides relevant for our first quiz are now available on the right. Please note that because we are a bit behind, this quiz will not include material on Napoleon. We will spend Wednesday reviewing the chronology and events of the French Revolution
You may find Charles Walton’s review of the new film version of Les Misérables interesting:
Victor Hugo was no Karl Marx, but he did believe in progress through revolution — a fact that viewres of Tom Hooper’s new film Les Misérables, would never guess. Adapted from the immensely popular musical version of Hugo’s classic (first performed in Paris in 1980), Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one. It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.
…
Why does the movie-musical present revolution as pointlessly utopian rather than as a venerable, if tragic vehicle of change, as Hugo saw it? The reason, perhaps, has to do with our own pessimistic view of revolution. In recent decades, cynicism has replaced idealism, and revolution has come to be seen as the high road to totalitarianism. Utopianism leads only to guillotines, gulags, and killing fields, not to freedom. Today, we tend to see revolution not through Hugo’s optimistic lenses but through those of his pessimistic contemporary, Alexis de Tocqueville.
Please read this review for class on Monday. Now that we’ve read a bit of Tocqueville ourselves we’ll discuss whether you agree or disagree with Professor Walton.
Historian of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century France, David Bell, puts the French intervention in Mali into its historical and contemporary political contexts:
It remains to be seen whether France’s military intervention in Mali will be considered a military success, but it already seems possible to count it a political one. The war has earned support from across the French political spectrum, President François Hollande has garnered acclaim for his leadership, and the French public broadly supports the country’s stated humanitarian mission. The intervention recalls the days when “la grande nation” laid claim to an ambitious international role, particularly within its former colonial empire.
But in today’s France, this portrait of unity and resolve is actually something of an aberration. Far from expressing a confident sense of mission, the French public has recently been more inclined to a sense of decline, malaise, paralysis and crisis. And it is at least partially justified.
Via Arthur Goldhammer.
This is the homepage of History 235: Modern France at Kenyon College for the Spring 2013 semester. Here students will find a copy of the syllabus, both in HTML (above) and in pdf (to the right), as well as other resources such as handouts and PowerPoint slides. This blog will contain announcements and students should either subscribe or check the site frequently.