HIST 554 - Culture&Society:18th C France

Credits: Variable

The historiography of 18th-century France has long been dominated by two central concerns: understanding the Enlightenment (usually through methods associated with the history of ideas) and understanding the causes of the French Revolution (using methods associated mainly with social, economic and political history). More recently, however, two historiographical shifts have taken place. First, historians are increasingly careful to avoid the distorted teleological vision created by looking at the Ancien Regime through the lenses of the French Revolution. Second, the discipline of history has become more interdisciplinary and, almost paradoxically, has discovered that a particular society such as 18th-century France can best be understood be treating various aspects of history fibers in the social warp and cultural woof of a single piece of cloth. This course seeks to integrate these interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary elements of the new historiography. It begins with two units on the social structure of 18th-century France. The first unit illustrates the teleological vision evident even in relatively recent works on the nobility; the second unit shows how such teleology has largely been avoided when analyzing the poor. The following four units reveal how other disciplines such as art history, sociology and anthropology have been blended with social history to produce a new understanding of elite and popular cultures, especially as manifest in religious practices, reading and consumerism. The final two units each begin with important contributions from the field of historical philosophy (Habermas, Foucault) and tie together social and political concerns by examining public order and then the public sphere, an heuristic device leading back to the French Revolution and the question of historical teleology.