Seminar Questions
- Why didn’t France's political system stabilize in the first half of the nineteenth century?
- How would you characterise Hugo’s view on the barricades of 1848? How do his views reflect the conflicting currents in political consciences of the nineteenth century?
- How did Marx assess Louis Napoleon’s rise? How does his interpretation reflect his overall philosophy and theory of history?
- What does Balzac's Vautrin tell us about mid nineteenth-century Parisian society? (You should have completed Père Goriot)
Core Reading
- V. Hugo, Les Misérables, volume V, bk 1, ch 1 (use 'search' function to find the second occurence of 'Volume V' on the page)
- K. Marx, The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, prefaces, chapters I and II
- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, passage about Balzac's Vautrin and inequality in Père Goriot (very short excerpt)
- Primary sources: Documents of the Revolution of 1848 in France (three short government proclamations/decrees)
- (Textbook): J. Popkin, History of Modern France, chps. 11-14.
Further Reading
- M. Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848-1852 (1983)
- M. Price, The Perilous Crown: France 1814-1848 (2007)
- L. Collins, Government and Society in France, 1814-1848 (1970)
- D. Johnson, Guizot (1963)
- J. P. T. Bury and R. P. Tombs, Thiers (1797-1877): a political life (1986)
- T. E. B. Howarth, Citizen King: The Life of Louis-Philippe: King of the French (1961)
- D. Porch, Army and Revolution (1974)
- C. Morazé, The Triumph of the Middle Classes (1966)
- A. Jardin and A. Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction 1815-1848 (1983)
- W. Echard, Historical Dictionary of the French Second Empire, 1852-1870 (1985)
- A. Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852 – 1871 (1988)
- R. Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France (1987)
- J. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (2011)
- P. Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Desmoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (1998)
- A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imaginary (1988)
- A. Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th Century French Countryside (1998)
- J. Popkin, Press, revolution, and social identities in France, 1830-1835 (2002)
