Charles de Gaulle's importance in postwar French political life was matched by his importance in the nation's collective imagination. This authority was consciously contrived by de Gaulle, who wished to bear upon his figurative body the will of the French people to maintain the power of their nation in the face of a political environment characterized by the opposition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Ultimately, de Gaulle's symbolic originality proved more lasting than his political innovations.

1. Introduction
2. The Paris Commune and Its Legacy
3. Centralized State and Republic
4. A Nation - Peasants, Language, and French Identity
5. Workshop and Factory
6. The Waning of Religious Authority
7. Mass Politics and the Political Challenge from the Left
8. Dynamite Club: The Anarchists
9. General Boulanger and Captain Dreyfus
10. Cafes and the Culture of Drink
11. Paris and the Belle Epoque
12. French Imperialism (Guest Lecture by Charles Keith)
13. The Origins of World War I
14. Trench Warfare
15. The Home Front
16. The Great War, Grief, and Memory (Guest Lecture by Bruno Cabanes)
17. The Popular Front
18. The Dark Years: Vichy France
19. Resistance
20. Battles For and Against Americanization
21. Vietnam and Algeria
22. Charles De Gaulle
23. May 1968
24. Immigration

This course covers the emergence of modern France. Topics include the social, economic, and political transformation of France; the impact of France's revolutionary heritage, of industrialization, and of the dislocation wrought by two world wars; and the political response of the Left and the Right to changing French society.