History 549: Readings in the Old Regime and French Revolution
Fall 2010: Wednesdays, 1:30 – 4:20 p.m.
History Department Seminar Room, Dickinson Hall
David A. Bell
September 22. Organizational Meeting
September 29. Background
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution
(entire)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Vol. I: Author’s
Introduction;
part II, chapters 6-8. Vol.
II: Part II, chapters
1-8;
part IV (entire).
Colin Jones, The Great Nation (entire – for background purposes,
if necessary)
October 6. The Old Regime State
William
Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France,
(1985),
pp. 1-33, 223-339.
David
Parker, “Sovereignty,
Absolutism and the Function of the Law in
Seventeenth-Century
France,” Past and Present, no. 122 (1989),
pp.
36-74.
David
Bien, “Officers, Corps and a System of State Credit: The Uses of
Privilege
under the Ancien Regime,” In Keith Baker (ed.), The
Political Culture of the Old Regime (1987), pp. 89-114.
Michael Kwass, Privilege and the
Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-
Century
Ralph Giesey,
“The King Imagined” in Keith Baker (ed.), The Political
Culture of the Old Regime (1987), pp.
41-59.
Roger
Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (1991),
pp.
111-35 (ch. 6).
William
Doyle, “The Parlements,” in Keith Baker (ed.), The Political
Culture
of the Old Regime (1987), pp. 157-168.
Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (1996),
pp. 1-13, 58-85.
Dale Van Kley,
The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Old
Regime
(1984),
pp. 3-12, 166-225.
October 13. France and its Empire
Paul
Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce:
Globalization and the French
Monarchy (2010), pp. 1-51, 168-94.
Richard
Drayton, “The
Globalization of France: Provincial cities and
French Expansion c. 1500–1800,” History of European Ideas,
vol. 34, no. 4 (Dec. 2008), pp. 424-430.
Leslie
Choquette, “Frenchmen into Peasants” Proceedings of the
American
Antiquarian Society, vol. 104, no. 1 (1994), pp. 27-49.
Saliha
Belmessous, “Etre francais en Nouvelle-France: Identité
française
et identité coloniale aux dix-septième et dix-huitième
siècles,” French Historical Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2004), pp.
John
Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and
Citizenship in French Saint-
Domingue (2006), pp. 1-194.
Sankar
Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire
(2006), pp. 1-71.
October 20. Social and Economic Structures
George
Taylor, “Non-capitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French
Revolution,”
American Historical Review, vol. 72
(1967), pp.
William
Doyle, “Was There an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-
Revolutionary
France?” Past and Present, no. 57
(1972), pp.
Colin
Lucas, “Nobles, Bourgeois and the Origins of the French
Revolution,” Past and Present, no. 60 (1973), pp. 84-126.
Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social
Change,”
in Colin Lucas, ed., Rewriting the French
Revolution
(1990), pp. 69-118.
Michael
Kwass, “Ordering the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution
and
the Classification of Objects in Eighteenth-Century France,
Representations, no. 82 (2003), pp. 87-116.
Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie (2003), pp. 1-68.
David A.
Bell, "Class, Consciousness, and the Fall of the Bourgeois
Revolution," Critical Review, nos. 2-3 (2004), pp. 323-51.
William H.
Sewell , “The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism
in
Eighteenth-Century France,” Past &
Present, no. 206 (2010),
Pierre
Goubert, “The French Peasantry of the Seventeenth Century: A
Regional
Example,” Past and Present, no. 10 (1956), pp. 55-77.
Philip
Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society:
The French
Countryside, 1450-1815 (1996), pp. 3-20, 193-205.
October 27. The Cities and Popular Culture
David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (2001), pp. 1-83,
115-141.
Daniel
Roche, Le peuple de Paris (1981), pp.
5-65, 99-197.
William
Sewell, Work and Revolution in France:
The Language of
Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (1980), pp. 1-91.
Robert Darnton, “Peasants Tell Tales” and “The Great Cat Massacre,”
in The Great Cat Massacre (1984), pp. 9-65, 75-101.
Roger Chartier, “Texts, Symbols and Frenchness,” in Cultural History
(1988), pp. 95-111.
Robert Darnton, “History and Anthopology,” in The Kiss of Lamourette
(1990), pp. 329-353.
Dominic
LaCapra, “Chartier, Darnton and the Great Symbol Massacre,”
in Journal of Modern History, vol. 60 (1988), pp. 95-112.
November 10. A New Political Culture
Jürgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere
(1989 edition), pp. 1-102.
Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1990), pp. 1-27,
109-127, 167-199.
Roger Chartier, Cultural Origins (1991), pp. 1-37, 92-135.
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (2008), pp. 15-69.
David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (2001), pp. 1-49,
107-139.
Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (1996),
pp. 191-302.
November 17. Defining the Enlightenment
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982),
pp. 1-40, 167-210.
Daniel
Gordon, “The Great Enlightenment Massacre,” in Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 359 (1998), pp.
129-156.
David A. Bell, “Why Books Caused a Revolution: A Reading of Robert
Darnton,” in ibid., pp. 179-188.
Roger Chartier, Cultural Origins, pp. 38-91.
Daniel Gordon, Postmodernism and the French Enlightenment (2001),
pp. 1-6, 201-220.
Antoine
Lilti, “Sociabilité et mondanité: Les hommes de lettres dans
les
salons parisiens au XVIIIe siècle,” French
Historical
Studies, vol. 28 (2005), pp. 415-445.
Jeffrey
Burson, “Theological Renewal and Enlightenment:
Confrontations
at the Sorbonne, c.1730-1750,” French
History,
vol. 23, no. 4 (2009), pp. 467-90.
Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind (2010), pp. 1-36, 154-240.
Antoine
Lilti, “Comment écrit-on l’histoire intellectuelle des
Lumières
? Spinozisme, radicalisme et philosophie.”, Annales :
Histoire,
Sciences sociales, vol. 64, no. 1 (2009), pp.
171-206.
November 24. Defining the French Revolution
François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), part I.
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984),
pp. 1-119.
Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1991), pp. 203-23,
252-305.
Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (1976), pp. 262-82.
Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes (tr. 1980), pp. 1-71, 223-264.
William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France (1980), pp. 92-113.
December 1. Terror and War
David A. Bell, The First Total War (2007), pp. 1-185.
Dan
Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right:
Republicanism, the Cult of
Nature, and the French Revolution (2009), entire.
December 8. The Revolution, the Self, and Gender
Mona Ozouf, “La Révolution française
et la formation de l’homme
nouveau,” in Mona Ozouf, L’homme régénéré (1989), pp. 116-
157.
Carla Hesse, “La Preuve par la
lettre,” Annales: HSS, vol. 51
(1996), pp.
Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language (2001), pp. 1-12, 123-
180.
Paul Friedland, “Parallel Stages,” in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman,
eds., The Age of Cultural Revolutions (2002), pp. 218-50.
William Reddy, “Sentimentalism and
Its Erasure: The Role of
Jan
Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self:
Politics and Psyche in
France, 1750–1850 (2005), pp. 1-100.
Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette,” in Gary Kates
(ed.), The French Revolution (1998), pp. 279-301.
Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996), pp. 1-56.
Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment (2001), pp. 31-78.
December 15. Coming to Terms with the Revolution
Isser Woloch, The New Regime (1994), pp. 1-56, 90-162.
Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics After the Terror (2008),
pp.
1-25, 108-140,
287-308.
Howard
Brown, Ending the French Revolution:
Violence, Justice, and
Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (2006), pp. 1-65,
213-33, 325-358.
Pierre
Serna, La république des
Girouettes—1795–1815 et au delà:
Une
anomalie politique; La France de l’extrême centre (2005),
pp. 11-28, 364-466, 537-545.
Course Requirements:
1.
Class Discussion. Students are expected to attend all meetings
of the course. Students are expected to have done all the readings carefully,
and to participate in discussion of them.
2. Critical
Questions. For each class, each student should write two substantive,
critical questions about the readings. These questions should probe and
challenge the readings, testing their arguments, evidence, and/or internal
coherence. You may wish to model the questions after the ones asked in the Davis
Seminar. They may address two individual readings, or multiple readings, in
whatever combination makes sense to you. The questions should be addressed
directly to the authors of the works. They do not need to be more than a few
sentences, and in no case should they be more than one double-spaced page
each. Please print them out and hand them in at the end of class.
3. Responses. Each week, one
student will stand in for the authors of the readings, and respond to the
critical questions, as paper presenters do in the Davis Seminar. A schedule
will be worked out in the first week.
4. Writing
requirements: Each student in the course will write a 20-30 page bibliographical
essay that starts with the theme of one or more weeks of readings, and takes in
all the important and relevant recent scholarship on the subject. The essay
should be modeled on the sort of review essays that appear in learned journals
(e.g. The Historical Journal,
or The Journal of Modern History). It should ask what the “state
of play” is in the particular area under investigation: what sources, methods
and theories are being employed in recent research, what the deficiencies of
current research are, and how these deficiencies might be addressed. This essay
is due Friday, January 14, 2011. If any
student prefers to do a research paper instead, that can be arranged in
consultation with the instructor.
5. Grading.
All students will receive standard letter grades. Critical questions and
responses will count for roughly 25% of the grade. Class discussion will count
for roughly 25% of the grade. The bibliographic essay or research paper will
count for roughly 50% of the grade. However, these percentages are only
guidelines. The instructor will determine the final grade based on his overall
judgment of each student’s performance.
6. Language.
All students are expected to have a good reading knowledge of French. If you do
not have this knowledge, and wish to take the course anyway, please discuss
with the instructor.
Books:
You are not required to purchase any books. All articles will be linked to on the web version of this syllabus, and should be available to anyone trying to access them from a Princeton University computer, or a computer equipped with a Princeton VPN. All books will be on reserve in the History Graduate Student Reading Room on level C of Firestone library. If you have difficulties finding any readings, please contact the instructor immediately by e-mail (dabell@princeton.edu).