THE GRADUATE CENTER PH.D. PROGRAM IN HISTORY FALL 2011
Professor Helena Rosenblatt History 71500-The French Revolution Monday 4:15-6:15 p.m. 3 credits [email protected]
Course Description: This course is an in-depth introduction to the French Revolution and the debates surrounding it. We will privilege political/cultural/intellectual perspectives, reading some of the most innovative and thought-provoking work on a number of key topics, such as the causes of the Revolution and its radicalization; the nature and legacies of the revolutionary wars and Terror; the question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influence; the Revolution’s performance in the areas of gender and race; and the ideologies it engendered.
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 scholarly debates surrounding 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 in to me at the beginning of class; questions must be emailed to me and the class by 8 a.m. on Monday) *A 15-20 page historiographical paper on a topic chosen in consultation with me. Topics must be decided and approved by Nov. 7; final paper submitted by Dec. 12. No late papers will be accepted. 40%
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A DRAFT SYLLABUS—THE READINGS AND TOPICS ARE SUBJECT TO MINOR REVISION. THE FINAL VERSION WILL BE HANDED OUT IN CLASS ON THE FIRST DAY.
RECOMMENDED SURVEYS OF THE REVOLUTION:
Jeremy Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution, 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 2009, $34.44 ISBN-10: 9780205693573 William Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press, 2001 $7.56 ISBN-10: 9780192853967 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
Aug 29 Introduction
Sept 5 Labor Day--No Class
Sept 12 François Furet and Revisionism
REQUIRED:
François Furet, “The French Revolution is Over” and “The Revolutionary Catechism,” in Interpreting the French Revolution. Transl. Elborg Forster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, $35.34, ISBN 0-521-28049-4
Lynn Hunt, “Forgetting and Remembering: The French Revolution Then and Now,” The American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 1119-1135.
RECOMMENDED:
Jack Censer, “The Coming of a New Interpretation of the French Revolution?” Journal of Social History, vol. 21, no 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 295-309.
Vivian Gruder, “Whither Revisionism? Political Perspectives on the Ancien Régime,” French Historical Studies, vol. 20, no 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 245-285.
Tony Judt, “François Furet (1927-1997),” New York Review of Books 44 (Nov. 6, 1997), pp. 41-32.
Claude Langlois, “The French Revolution and ‘Revisionism’” The History Teacher, vol. 23, no 4 (Aug., 1990), pp. 395-404.
“François Furet’s Interpretation of the French Revolution,” forum published in French Historical Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn, 1990).
Isser Woloch, “Review: On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 5 (Dec., 1990), pp. 1452-1470.
Sept 19 New Approaches
REQUIRED Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution New York: Vintage, 1989 $1977, ISBN 0-679-72610-1
RECOMMENDED
François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880 Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 $39.34 ISBN- 10: 0631198083
Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon 1715-99. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. $34.95 ISBN 0-231-12882-7
(Other surveys listed above)
Sept 26 Marie Antoinette
REQUIRED
Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion. What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006. $11.56, ISBN-10: 0312427344
Vivian Gruder, “The Question of Marie-Antoinette: The Queen and Public Opinion before the Revolution,” French History 16 (2002): pp. 269-98.
Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette,” in Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen, ed. Dena Goodman, New York: Routledge, 2003. $23.95 ISBN 0-41593- 395-1.
Sarah Maza, “The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785-1786): The Case of the Missing Queen, in Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen, ed. Dena Goodman, New York : Routledge, 2003. $23.95 ISBN 0-41593-395-1.
RECOMMENDED
Thomas Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia, and the Queen,” French History 14 (2000): pp. 241–71.
Thomas Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: Marie Antoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 579- 617
Jacques Revel, “Marie Antoinette,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, transl Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen, ed. Dena Goodman, New York : Routledge, 2003. $23.95 ISBN 0-41593-395-1.
Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, trans. Julie Rose, New York: Zone Books, 1999.
Oct 3 The “Liberal Phase”
REQUIRED:
Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789-1790. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. $34.23. ISBN: 9780271028880
RECOMMENDED:
Timothy Tackett, “The Constituent Assembly and the Terror,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Vol. 4 The Terror, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Oxford: Pergamon, 1994), pp. 39-54.
Barry Shapiro, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789-1790. $53.00. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0521530547
Oct 10 Columbus Day No Class
Oct 17 The King and Radicalization:
Timothy Tackett, When the King took Flight Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2003. $18.63. ISBN 0-674-01054-X
David Jordan, The King’s Trial. Louis XVI vs. The French Revolution. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 2004. $23.01. ISBN: 0-520-23697-1
RECOMMENDED:
Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution. Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. $31.20 ISBN: 0-231-08259-2
John Hardman, Louis XVI New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. $26.00. ISBN: 0300060777
Oct. 24 The Terror
REQUIRED:
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 and Keith Baker, “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” in Dale Van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of rights of 1789 (Stanford, Calif. 1994), pp. 154-196.
OR R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005, $26.20, ISBN-10: 0691121877
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
Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass., 1935. ISBN: 0844612111
Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. $21.34. ISBN: 9780195158939.
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
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.
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.
Oct. 31 “Regeneration”
REQUIRED:
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 1984 $20.34 ISBN-10: 0520241568.
RECOMMENDED
Lynn Hunt, “Pornography and the French Revolution,” in The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity. Ed. Lynn Hunt New York: Zone Books, 1993.
Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1789-1799 Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornelle University Press, 1996. $196.51, ISBN-10: 0801432332
Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1991. $32.50. ISBN-10: 0674298845
Mona Ozouf, “Regeneration,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, transl Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005 $55.00 ISBN 0-520- 24180-0.
Nov 7 The Haitian Revolution
REQUIRED
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. $29.95 ISBN 0-674-01304-2.
or
Jeremy Popkin, You are All Free. The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. $18.82. ISBN: 0521731941
RECOMMENDED
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution New York: Vintage, 1963. $10.88. ISBN: 9780679724674
Carolin E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below Knoxville, Tenn: University of Tennessee Press,1990. $20. 97. ISBN: 0870496670
James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. $25.00. ISBN: 9780226514673
Nov 14. Women and the Family
REQUIRED:
Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. $29.95. ISBN: 9780520248168
RECOMMENDED:
Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. $151.50. ISBN: 0801424046
Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and their Revolution. Transl. Katherine Streip, Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 1998. $35.30. ISBN: 9780520067196
Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutger’s University Press, 1992. ISBN: 0813517990
Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789- 1830. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. $23.95. ISBN:9780801474088
Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. $24.79. ISBN: 9780802068378
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. $20.00. ISBN: 9780520082700
Lynn Hunt, “Male Virtue and Republican Motherhood,” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The Terror, Vol. 4 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, 1994), pp. 195-208.
Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution Ithaca: N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1988. $17.23. ISBN: 9780801494819
Dorinda Outram, “Le Langage mâle de la vertu: Women and the Dsicourse of the French Revolution,” in Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., The Social History of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 120-135.
Nov. 21 The Question of Rousseau
REQUIRED
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men: by Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Related Documents ed. Helena Rosenblatt. Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2010. $15.95 ISBN-10 9780312468422.
RECOMMENDED:
Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution. Itahca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. $45.00. ISBN: 0801495571
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.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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. ISBN: 0804738645
Nov. 28 Revolutionary Legacies: War and Nationalism
REQUIRED
David A. Bell, The First Total War. Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. $27.00 ISBN 978-0-618- 34965-4
or
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: 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 Longman Group, 1986. $56.97. ISBN: 0582490510
T.C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars 1787-1802 Hodder Arnold Publication,1996, $50.57. ISBN: 0340569115
Dec 5 The Birth of Liberalism
REQUIRED:
Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Transl. Stuart Gilbert. New York, Doubleday: 1983. $10.12. ISBN: 0385092601.
RECOMMENDED:
Benjamin Constant, Political Writings.Ed. Biancamaria Fontana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, $29.40. ISBN: 9780521316323
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man Being and Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution
Dec 12 The Origins of Conservatism and Fascism?
REQUIRED
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. L.G. Mithcell, ed., Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009. $8.40. ISBN: 9780199539024
Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France. Richard Leburn, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. $26.74. ISBN: 0521466288
RECOMMENDED:
Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. $21.34. ISBN: 9780195158939