Description. This course offers a historical exploration of France and the Francophone world from the Religious Wars in the 1500s up to the Revolution of 1789. This critical moment witnessed the emergence of France as a modern state and, ultimately, a nation, with a centralized administration, an official language, and the claim to a shared French culture and national identity. We will read a mixture of historical documents from the time -- literary texts, political and philosophical writings, and adminstrative documents – along with secondary works to study the following:
* new theories and practices of kingship and monarchical power (absolutism; divine right, Versailles, the court and the cult of royal grandeur; the importance of military campaigns) as well as efforts to limit the scope and power of the king (noble and Parlementary resistence and revolt during the Fronde; the rise of public opinion in the eighteenth century, emerging ideals of the "Nation" and theories of "citizenship")
* cultural, literary and linguistic politics; culture and literature in the service of royal propaganda and the court; writers as critics of the king in a period of control and censorship; efforts to elevate and regulate French as the language of the King and both the royal court and the judicial courts
* social upheavals; the traditional "orders" -- the nobility, the clergy, the "third estate" -- transformed by the expanding administrative state and by economic and cultural changes brought on by new realities: urbanization, mobility, new consumption patterns entailed by global trade and colonialism
* shifting attitudes towards marriage and gender; notions of private life and the domestic sphere
* religion and politics, after the Religious Wars of the 1560s-1590s, with the establishment of a large Protestant population in a commited but strategic Catholic monarchy; tensions with Rome and the development of an autonomous French Catholicism in Gallicanism
* the importance of new media and communications environments; the rise and impacts of printing and the expansion of books and literacy; royal propaganda, censorship, and the use of pamphlets to contest royal power; creating and shaping public opinion; the postal system and the establishment of new interpersonal networks and a sense of privacy