The course will examine several important events and controversies in this history, with a particular focus on the confrontation between the ancien régime in France and the intellectual vanguard which we now associate with the French Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclopédie).
We will trace the history of the debate surrounding the origins of the French Revolution, the historiography of the French Enlightenment, the rise of the cult of ‘celebrity’, and the controversy over whether ‘books can cause revolutions’. We will explore the broader European and transatlantic context of these developments, running from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) to the American War of Independence (1776), and encompassing a broad range of scholarship on the history of reading, culture, music, travel, political thought, and religion. In the course of our five sessions, we will come to a much clearer understanding of how the French Revolution – one of the most astonishing events in early modern European history – came to pass.
Taught through a mixture of lecture and class discussion, the course will explore the central themes of this period with a wide range of contemporary and secondary source materials – written, visual, material and musical.
