Course Readings

The specific assignment for each of these readings appears in the Class Schedule under the relevant week and day.

Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, fifth edition (W.W. Norton, 1995). (textbook)

Gracefully written and widely acclaimed, France in Modern Times continues to be a standard text in the field of modern French history. The author's distinctive, engaging voice makes this more than a reference: it is a book to be read for pleasure. Its subject is France's development as a nation state, its focus the evolution of a distinctive political system, social structure, and culture. The author weaves historical interpretations into the narrative.

In the Fifth Edition, the author revised the chapters on the French Revolution to take account of the recent revisionist scholarship on its history and legacy. The chapters on postwar France are up-to-date and offer a tentative assessment on the state of France in the final years of the twentieth century. The historiography in the book is current as well.

The late Gordon Wright was long a distinguished professor of history at Stanford University. He was president of both the American Historical Association and the Society for French Historical Studies, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many other books include Raymond Poincaré and the French Presidency; Rural Revolution in France; The Ordeal of Total War: 1939-1945; and Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France.

Emile Guillaumin, The Life of a Simple Man, ed. Eugen Weber (University Press of New England, 1983).

In order "to show the gents of Moulins, of Paris and elsewhere, just what a sharecropper's life is like," Emile Guillaumin, under the guise of fiction, wrote this story of "Tiennon," a French peasant born fifty years before him in 1823. A peasant himself, Guillaumin was unique in that, after a few years of schooling, he continued to work his small farm in central France to the end of his life, reserving nights for study and writing. Guillaumin felt that the French peasant had been misrepresented in contemporary literature—either romanticized as in George Sand or depicted as a dumb victim of the forces of nature as in Zola—and wanted to correct the picture. The result is a moving first-person story that can be read as a fictional account, as well as the best kind of material for historians seeking to understand how nineteenth-century French peasants really lived.

Eugen Weber is Professor of History and Dean of the College of Letters and Science at UCLA. He has written many books on France, including Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (1976).

Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999).

The Dreyfus affair—the infamous account of Jewish army officer and French citizen, Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly convicted of treason in 1894—was the most significant political and social crisis of fin-de-siècle Europe. In the first book designed to introduce students to the broad outlines and significant legacies of the affair, the author deftly interweaves text with documents, tracing the course of events. He highlights the many issues connected with the case, including anti-Semitism, militant nationalism, socialism, the birth of modern Zionism, and the separation of church and state. Sixty-six documents are embedded in the narrative, offering students a broad range of sources to examine, including newspaper editorials, letters, trial testimony, and diary entries. A list of the principal characters is included in the appendices.

Michael Burns (Ph.D., Yale University) is professor of modern European history at Mount Holyoke College and has taught at Yale University and the École des Hautes Études. His publications on the Dreyfus affair include Rural Society and French Politics: Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair (1984) and Dreyfus: A Family Affair, from the French Revolution to the Holocaust (1992), which was awarded the Prix Bernard Lecache of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism. Burns serves as advisory editor for the Blackwell series New Perspectives on the Past.

Colette, Chéri (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001).

Chéri, together with The Last of Chéri, is a classic story of a love affair between a very young man and a charming older woman. The amour between Fred Peloux, the beautiful gigolo known as Chéri, and the courtesan [La] de Lonval tenderly depicts the devotion that stems from desire, and is an honest account of the most human preoccupations of youth and middle age. With compassionate insight Colette paints a full-length double portrait using an impressionistic style all her own.

Born in 1873 in France, Colette was the author of many acclaimed novels noted for their intimate style. Other Colette titles from FSG include The Complete Claudine, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances, Vagabond, and The Complete Stories of Colette. She died in 1954.

Isaac Levendel, Not the Germans Alone: A Son's Search for Truth of Vichy (Northwestern University Press, 2000).

On the eve of D-Day, Isaac Levendel's mother left her hiding place on a farm in southern France and never returned. After 40 years of silence and torment, he returned to France in 1990 determined to find out what had happened. This is the story of how, with perseverance, luck, and official help, he gained access to secret wartime documents laying bare the details of French collaboration—and the truth about his mother's fate.

  Primary Sources

I will distribute the primary source readings in class throughout the semester. The actual reading assignment for each day is listed in the Class Schedule. All primary source readings are required.

 Web Gallery

This collection of artwork is required viewing for this class. Links to the Web Gallery also appear in the Class Schedule under the relevant week and day. Click on the artist's palette above to access an index of the Web Gallery.