History and Culture of France in Summary

Syllabus

Sequences

1) Facing Clio: generalities, issues, approaches or “the story of stories”

2) The long or the short Middle Ages? Landmarks and distinctive traits of the time (vassalism, chivalry, crusades, serfdom, theocentrism and theocracy, etc.)

3) France in the Middle Ages; courtesy, mysticism; cathedrals; Romanesque, Gothic. The Middle Ages

4) Rebirth: rupture or continuity? Notion of paradigm shift/epistemological revolution

5) First modernity through its episteme; tension between classicism, mannerism and baroque

6) The Enlightenment and their project of emancipation; preromantic awakening and mutations at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries

7) The Age of modern nations, bourgeois revolutions, industry, scientism and the transformation of the relationship between artist and society

8) At the twilight of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century: between the feeling of decadence and the optimism of the Belle Époque

9) The cataclysm of 1914–1918 and its consequences; interwar phases

10) The second war; the post-war period with its phenomena: consumer society, late capitalism, acceleration of technological and cultural evolution, decolonization, advent of postmodernity…

11) …and the contemporary. Mass culture and elite culture – gap or levelling? The “post-” era. Attempt at synthesis, questions, controversies, perspectives

Annotation

The course offers a panorama of the history of France articulated with that of Europe. He approaches this vast “matter” in a point of intersection of general history (of which the main approaches will be sketched), the history of ideas, culture and literature, even the arts.