Lecture Description
Modern Paris was indelibly shaped by the rebuilding project ordered by Napoleon III and carried out by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s. The large-scale demolition of whole neighborhoods in central Paris, coupled with a boom in industrial development outside the city, cemented a class division between center and periphery that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Curiously, this division is the obverse of the arrangement of most American cities, in which the inner city is typically impoverished while the suburbs are wealthy.
Course Index
- Introduction
- The Paris Commune and Its Legacy
- Centralized State and Republic
- A Nation - Peasants, Language, and French Identity
- Workshop and Factory
- The Waning of Religious Authority
- Mass Politics and the Political Challenge from the Left
- Dynamite Club: The Anarchists
- General Boulanger and Captain Dreyfus
- Cafes and the Culture of Drink
- Paris and the Belle Epoque
- French Imperialism (Guest Lecture by Charles Keith)
- The Origins of World War I
- Trench Warfare
- The Home Front
- The Great War, Grief, and Memory (Guest Lecture by Bruno Cabanes)
- The Popular Front
- The Dark Years: Vichy France
- Resistance
- Battles For and Against Americanization
- Vietnam and Algeria
- Charles De Gaulle
- May 1968
- Immigration
Course Description
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.