Part 1. Short Answers

After reading the assigned texts, respond to ten of the following questions concretely and concisely. Write the number of the question next to your response so that I know which question you are responding to. Answers should be around 5 sentences long (~80 words). No citation needed.

1. What does Stovall mean by “white freedom”? Does this idea change how you read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen? Why? Which articles? In what way exactly?
2. What insight does Grégoire’s Report on the French language provide us concerning the state of French and France at the time of the first French Revolution? What are his main arguments and how does he support these arguments?
3. What is the state of the French language in France a century after Grégoire’s report near the turn of the twentieth century, when the Third Republic is in power? What has changed? For whom?
4. What kind of critique of society does Balzac offer in Père Goriot? What role does the family and/or normative gender play in this critique?
5. Offer an analysis of the representation of the Revolution of 1848 in the engraving, “Anniversary of the Universal Democratic and Social Republic: Triumph”(Links to an external site.)
6. Why has the Paris Commune of 1871 been difficult to incorporate into national histories of France?
7. In Peasants into Frenchmen, Weber writes that “the famous hexagon [metropolitan France, excluding overseas departments and territories] can itself be seen as a colonial empire shaped over the centuries”(485). Do you think this is a useful way of thinking about (European) France? Why or why not?
8. How did the Third Republic republicanize the nation? Feel free to focus on one or two methods or to give a general overview of the process.
9. Using your knowledge of the installation of the Third Republic, offer an analysis of the painting “La Marseillaise,”(Links to an external site.) painted by Jean Béraud in 1880.
10. How did France’s empire shape identities (either personal or national, or both) in the metropole?
11. What role did sex and gender play in French discussions about and governance of Algeria during the Third Republic?
12. How did the rise of mass culture change the nature of the crowd in Paris?
13. How did the mass press influence the Dreyfus Affair?
14. If you had to choose one person/place/thing/event that we’ve discussed that has had the biggest effect on the world as we know it or seems to echo the most into our present, what would it be? Why?

Part 2.  Long Essay

Write a formal, coherent analysis (~400 words) of the topic below. Please support your argument with at least three texts from the assigned readings, properly citing them (MLA format). You can also refer to outside sources as long as you cite them with a full bibliographic entry, but the majority of your focus should be on the assigned readings.

Topic: How does class inform our understanding of French national identity in the modern period? Feel free to also look at class and national identity formation through the lens of gender, sexuality, race, and/or language.

Part 3. Research essay based on a topic of your choice

This part will take the form of a research project based on a theme, topic, or concept of your choice. Through the lens of the assigned readings’ themes/discussions, you can choose to work on something purely historical or you can situate a present-day issue in historical context.

It will take the form of a traditional paper (approximate 6 pages long, doubled-spaced, 12-pt font, Times New Roman), and you should include at least two peer-reviewed sources and a bibliography page with citation information for all sources used (MLA format).

Assigned Readings:

1. The Spirit of Revolution

Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, Chapter 3: “Black Slavery, White Freedom: Freedom and Race in the Era of Liberal Revolution”

2. The Rise of the Bourgeoisie

Balzac, Père Goriot

3. Class Struggle

Roger Price, Documents on the French Revolution of 1848, Introduction and selected revolutionary documents

Kristin Ross, “Notes on the ‘Cellular Regime of Nationality,’” History of the Present, 4, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 1—22.

4. Installing the Republic:

Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, ch 6: A Wealth of Tongues and ch 29: Cultures and Civilization

Republican Empire:

Jules Ferry on Colonization (1884)

Julia Clancy-Smith, “Islam, Gender, and Identities in the Making of French Algeria,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (University Press of Virginia, 1998), 154–174

5. Mass Culture and Mass Politics

Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, Chapter 1, 13–44.

Zola, “J’Accuse”

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