PDF here – SKMBT_36317101910100
Keith Baker, “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” in The French Revolution. Recent Debates & New Controversies, ed. Gary Kates, Routledge, 1998 (91-140)
Class syllabus
Syllabus
Professor Helena Rosenblatt
History 72110-The French Revolution Then and Now Wednesday 4:15-6:15 p.m. 3 credits Hrosenblatt@gc.cuny.edu
Course Description:
This course is an in-depth introduction to the French Revolution and the heated debates it has engendered. We will privilege political/cultural/intellectual perspectives, focusing on the Revolution’s relationship with “modernity” and its various ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, totalitarianism, fascism, feminism, terrorism.) Scholarship on the French Revolution will be placed in historical and political context in an effort to answer the question: “what is at stake when scholars adopt certain methodologies and perspectives on the French Revolution?”
Course Learning Objectives:
Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to *Read texts more critically and effectively *Identify and summarize key ideas in texts in an articulate and persuasive manner, verbally and in writing *Demonstrate a command of the narrative and major events of the French Revolution *Display a grasp of some of the main ideological debates connected to the French Revolution
Course Requirements:
*Regular and intelligent class participation demonstrating thorough reading of all assigned materials: 30% *One-page analytical summaries of the weekly readings and two interesting discussion questions for every class: 30% (Summaries must be handed to me at the beginning of class; questions must be emailed to me and the class by 8 a.m. on Tuesday) (TEN over the course of the term) *A 15-20 page historiographical paper on one week’s readings (including some of the recommended readings.) Topics must be decided and approved by Nov. 7; final paper submitted by Dec. 12. No late papers will be accepted. 40%
(GUIDES TO THE WEEKLY READINGS WILL BE PROVIDED)
To get the most out of the course, students are advised to read at least one of the following recommended surveys of the Revolution:
William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution Oxford University Press, 2003, $15.55 ISBN-10 019925298X
Colin Jones, The Great Nation. France from Louis XV to Napoleon. London: Penguin, 2002. $12.00 ISBN 0-14-013093-4
Donald Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: the Quest for a Civic Order Malden, M.A.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003, $49.95, ISBN-10 0631233636
William Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press, 2001 $7.56 ISBN-10: 9780192853967
Jeremy Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution, 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 2009, $34.44 ISBN-10: 9780205693573
Aug 29 Introduction: The Invention of Ideology
Sept. 5 The Overthrow of the Marxist Paradigm
REQUIRED:
François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Penser la Révolution française)
You may skip the last two chapters (“De Tocqueville and the Problem of the French Revolution” and “Augustin Cochin: The Theory of Jacobinism”)
Recommended:
Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: François Furet’s “Penser la Révolution française” in the Intellectual Politics of the French Revolution” French Historical Studies 22, no 4 (Autumn 1999), pp. 557-611.
“François Furet’s Interpretation of the French Revolution,” forum published in French Historical Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn, 1990). E.J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise
Lynn Hunt, “Forgetting and Remembering: The French Revolution Then and Now,” The American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 1119-1135.
Tony Judt, “François Furet (1927-1997),” New York Review of Books 44 (Nov. 6, 1997), pp. 41-32.
Steven Laurence Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution
Sept. 12 Revisionism
REQUIRED:
Simon Schama, Citizens
RECOMMENDED
A Crtitical Dictionary of the French Revolution, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf.— Should be read with: Isser Woloch, “Review: On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 5 (Dec., 1990), pp. 14521470.
Sept. 19 NO CLASS
Sept 26 Conservatism
REQUIRED
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789 (text to be provided) –from The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, ed. and trans. Lynn Hunt (Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 1996, p. 78. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. L.G. Mitchell, ed., Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009. $8.40. ISBN: 9780199539024
Oct 3 Fascism REQUIRED
Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France. Richard Lebrun, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. $26.74. ISBN: 0521466288
Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in The New York Times Review of Books, three parts: September 27, October 11, October 25, 1990 or Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy, (London, 1992).
RECOMMENDED:
Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs
Richard Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant
Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity
Oct 10 Feminism REQUIRED
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman You may skip chapter V Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/293/
RECOMMENDED Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France Christine Fauré, “From the Rights of Man to Women’s Rights: A Difficult Intellectual Conversion,” in Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women, ed. Chrstine Fauré, trans. Richard Dubis et al. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 109-20
Jacques Guilhaumou and Martine Lapied, ”Women’s Political Action during the French Revolution,” in Fauré, Political and Historical Encyclopedia, pp 71-87
Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution.
Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette. Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution. Recent Debates and Controversies, ed. Gary Kates.
Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
Oct. 17 Rousseau REQUIRED Selections from Rousseau’s Social Contract (to be provided)
Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. $45.00. ISBN: 0801495571
RECOMMENDED
François Furet, “Rousseau and the French Revolution,” in The Legacy of Rousseau eds. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 168-182
Bernard Manin, “Rousseau,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, transl Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762-1791 London: Athlone Press, 1965
Gordon McNeil, “The Cult of Rousseau and the French Revolution” Journal of the History of Ideas 6, no. 2 (April 1945), pp. 197-212.
James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2000. $24.95. SBN:0804738645
Oct 20 Terror/ Totalitarianism
REQUIRED:
Keith Baker, “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” in The French Revolution. Recent Debates & New Controversies, ed. Gary Kates, Routledge, 1998 (91-140) Text to be provided.
Mona Ozouf, “War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1792-1794), The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Dec, 1984), pp. 579-597
Timothy Tackett, “The Flight to Varennes and the Origins of the Terror,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques vol 29, No. 3 (fall, 2003), pp. 469-493
Timothy Tackett, “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 691-713.
RECOMMENDED
David Andress, The Terror. The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. $ 26, ISBN 0-374-27341-3
Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010 ISBN-10: 0226184390 $24.20
Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass., 1935.??? ISBN: 0844612111
R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005, $26.20, ISBN-10: 0691121877
D. M. G. Sutherland, Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French Revolution. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. $95.00 ISBN 978-0-521-88304-7.
Oct 27 Liberalism
REQUIRED:
Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to all Representative Governments and “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Political Writings, Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought 1993, ISBN-10: 0521316324.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” https://www.wiso.unihamburg.de/fileadmin/wiso_vwl/johannes/Ankuendigungen/Berlin_twoconceptso fliberty.pdf
RECOMMENDED:
Aurelian Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds. Moderation in French Political Thought
Marcel Gauchet, “Constant,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, transl Arthur Goldhammer, pp.924-932
French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt eds.
George Kelly, Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism
Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, transl Rebecca Balinski.
Oct 31 SECULARIZATION
REQUIRED:
Timothy Tackett, “The French Revolution and Religion to 1794” article to be provided
Suzanne Desan, “The French Revolution and Religion, 1795-1815” article to be provided Mona Ozouf, “The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer” article to be provided
RECOMMENDED
Helena Rosenblatt, “On the Need for a Protestant Reformation: Constant, Sismondi, Guizot and Laboulaye,” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day eds. Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 115-133.
Helena Rosenblatt, “On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion,’” French Politics, Society and Culture 25, 3 (Winter, 2007), pp. 1-18
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. part I
Nov 7 Sister Revolutions
REQUIRED:
Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightening, American Light, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0571199895
RECOMMENDED . Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in the Age of Revolutions
Rachel Hope Cleve, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence From AntiJacobinism to Anti-Slavery
François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation
Phillip Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution
Nov 14 Nationalism
REQUIRED:
David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. $45.00. ISBN: 9780674012370
RECOMMENDED:
David A. Bell, The First Total War. Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It.
T.C. W. Blanning, “The French Revolution and Europe,” in C. Lucas (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution.
J.-P. Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: from Citizen-Soldiers to Instruments of Power. Out of Print.
T.C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
T.C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars 1787-1802
Nov 21 No classes
Nov 28 The Haitian Revolution
REQUIRED:
Jeremy Popkin, You are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery, Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521731941
RECOMMENDED:
Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue
David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime,
Pierre Serna, ed. Républiques soeurs; Le Directoire et la Révolution atlantique
Dec. 5 Global Revolutions
REQUIRED
The Age of Revolutions in a Global Context c. 1760-1840, ed. David Armitage, pages TBA
The French Revolution in Global Perspective, eds. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson, chapters 1-8
RECOMMENDED
Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Dec. 12 Concluding Discussion
