24-Lecture Course: France Since 1871 (HIST 276)

August 25, 2010 · 0 comments

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France has undergone many social, economic, and political transformations to emerge as the modern France it is today. This course looks at revolutions throughout France, industrialization, and the disruption caused by two world wars. Political responses of parties are also analyzed.

John Merriman is a Professor of History at Yale University. His focus is on European history and he has published numerous papers on the topic. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Course Materials

1. Introduction (#1)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Professor Merriman lists the books on the syllabus, and offers a brief précis of each of them. Three of the principal themes of the course will be national identity, linguistic identity, and the consequences of the two world wars. Although the course will consider some well-known historical figures, such as Hitler and de Gaulle, it will also examine the individual histories of ordinary people. 00:00 - Chapter 1. Course Introduction 05:48 - Chapter 2. Overview of t...

2. The Paris Commune and Its Legacy (#2)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The Paris Commune of 1871 remained a potent force in Europe for several generations afterwards. The reprisals following the fall of the Commune anticipated the great massacres of the twentieth century. While the brief reign of the communards witnessed serious adversity in the form of food shortages and disease, it also presided over many progressive social measures, such as the relative emancipation of women. The brutality of the army's actions against the communard...

3. Centralized State and Republic (#3)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Despite various attempts at reform, France remains the most centralized state in Europe. The organization of the country around the Parisian center was originally a consequence of the French Revolution, which gave birth to the departmental regions. These regions have retained an oppositional relationship towards the metropolitan center. In 1875, an enduring republic was formed despite the competing claims of the Comte de Chambord and the Orleanists. This republic ow...

4. A Nation? Peasants, Language, and French Identity (#4)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The problematic question of when people in France began to consider themselves part of a French nation, with a specifically French national identity, has often been explained in terms of the modernizing progress of the French language at the expense of regional dialects. In fact, the development of French identity in rural France can be seen to have taken place alongside a continued tradition of local cultural practices, particularly in the form of patois. French id...

5. Workshop and Factory (#5)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Religion in France after the Revolution can be understood in terms of two forms of de-Christianization. The first of these is political, and takes place in the de jure separation of church and state. The second is a decline in religious practice among individual citizens. While the history of the former change is well documented, the latter is a more ambiguous phenomenon. Despite the statistical decline in religious participation in the nineteenth and twentieth cent...

6. The Waning of Religious Authority (#6)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The Industrial Revolution in France is often said to have been entirely overshadowed by British industrial development. This analysis is inaccurate because it ignores the significance of domestic and other non-factory occupations. Indeed, it was the class of artisan workers, rather than industrial factory workers, who were first responsible for the organization of labor movements. One of the great innovations of the factory was the imposition of industrial disciplin...

7. Mass Politics and the Political Challenge from the Left (#7)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The history of socialism in France can be understood in terms of the competition between revolutionary socialists and reform socialists. The former advocated abandoning electoral politics, while the latter attempted to improve conditions for workers by means of reforms within the political system. These two attitudes found figureheads in Jules Guesdes and Paul Brousse, respectively. Reform socialists and revolutionary socialists are united under the leadership of Je...

8. Dynamite Club: The Anarchists (#8)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Anarchists, unlike syndicalists and other leftists, seek to destroy the state rather than to capture state power for themselves. Emile Henry and other late nineteenth-century radicals inaugurated the modern practice of terrorism in their individualism and their indiscriminate choice of civilian targets. Despite the terrifying consequences of individual acts of terrorism, these pale in comparison to the consequences of state terrorism. 00:00 - Chapter 1. The Roots o...

9. General Boulanger and Captain Dreyfus (#9)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Two of the major crises of nineteenth-century France, the Boulanger Affair and the Dreyfus Affair, can be understood in terms of the rising forces of anti-Semitism and Far Right politics. The German conquest of Alsace and Lorraine, in particular, fueled nationalist and right-wing sentiments, especially in rural France. Political orientations and prejudices were formed by the popular media of the time, such as illustrated periodicals and patriotic songs. 00:00 - Cha...

10. Cafés and the Culture of Drink (#10)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Because drinking is such an integral part of French culture, alcohol abuse has been historically ignored. Although there have been celebrated attempts to address this problem, such as Zola's L'Assomoir, it is only in the past five or ten years that the government has seriously tried to tackle the problem of alcoholism. One of the major ways in which alcohol is embedded in the cultural identity of the country is the close association of certain wines and liquors with...

11. Paris and the Belle Époque (#11)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Modern Paris was indelibly shaped by the rebuilding project ordered by Napoleon III and carried out by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s. The large-scale demolition of whole neighborhoods in central Paris, coupled with a boom in industrial development outside the city, cemented a class division between center and periphery that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Curiously, this division is the obverse of the arrangement of most American cities, in whic...

12. French Imperialism (Guest Lecture by Charles Keith) (#12)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) France's colonial properties were thought of in the latter half of the nineteenth century as consolation for the bitter loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. As civilian administrators came to replace military personnel in the colonies, and as more and more French settlers arrived, empire and colonialism came to play an important function in France's cultural self-presentation. World War I heralded the eventual decline of the French empire, a decline realized at t...

13. The Origins of World War I (#13)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The traditional, diplomatic history of World War I is helpful in understanding how a series of hitherto improbable alliances come to be formed in the early years of the twentieth century. In the case of France and Russia, this involves a significant ideological compromise. Along with the history of imperial machinations, however, World War I should be understood in the context of the popular imagination and the growth of nationalist sentiment in Europe. 00:00 - Cha...

14. Trench Warfare (#14)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The sacred union that united France's political parties during World War I contributed to a resilient morale on the home front. Germany's invasion of France, and the conflict over Alsace-Lorraine in particular, contributed to French concern over atrocities and the national investment in the war effort. New weapons and other fighting technologies, coupled with the widespread use of trenches, made fighting tremendously difficult and gruesome on all fronts. 00:00 - Ch...

15. The Home Front (#15)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) 1917 is a critical moment in World War I, as the Bolsheviks seize power in Russia and Woodrow Wilson leads the U.S. into war on the side of the Allied powers. Although morale held steady on the home front in France, there were multiple mutinies and strikes as the war progressed. These mutinies were not in favor of German victory; rather, they were in protest of corruption at home, in the form of incompetence and profiteering. Literary and historical records of World...

16. The Great War, Grief, and Memory (Guest Lecture by Bruno Cabanes) (#16)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The human cost of World War I cannot be understood only in terms of demographics. To better understand the consequences of the war upon both soldiers and civilians it is necessary to consider mourning in its private, as well as its public dimensions. Indeed, for many French people who lived through the war, public spectacles of bereavement, such as the Unknown Soldier, were also conceived of as intensely private affairs. Both types of mourning are associated with a ...

17. The Popular Front (#17)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) A plethora of Far Right and fascist organizations emerged in the wake of World War I. Economic depression, nationalism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia all played a part in this upsurge. On the left, the tension between communist revolutionaries and socialist reformers was reconciled, for a time, in the Popular Front government of Leon Blum. While the Popular Front would eventually fall, it pioneered many of the reforms and progressive measures that French workers enjo...

18. The Dark Years: Vichy France (#18)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) For decades after the end of World War II the question of French collaboration with the Nazis was obscured. One of the reasons for this was the desire of de Gaulle and others to downplay the central role of communists in resisting the occupation. In fact, many French civilians were involved to greater or lesser degrees in informing upon their fellows or otherwise furthering the interests of the German invaders. Under the Vichy regime, right-wing politics in France d...

19. Resistance (#19)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) If the extent of French collaboration during World War II has been obscured, so too has the nature of resistance. Although the communist Left represented the core of the resistance movement, resistors came from any different backgrounds, including in their ranks Catholics, Protestants, Jews and socialists. Unlike the relationship between de-Christianization and right-wing politics, in the case of the resistance there is no clear correlation between regional location...

20. Battles For and Against Americanization (#20)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Anti-Americanism in France has historically been directed toward the U.S. government and corporations rather than American citizens. In the wake of World War II, the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe was considered by many to be a form of American imperialism. Along with the establishment of American military bases on French soil, the years after World War II bore witness to a great influx of American products, notably refrigerators and Coca-Cola. French concern o...

21. Vietnam and Algeria (#21)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) France's colonial territories were of very high importance after the embarrassment of occupation during World War II. Algeria, in particular, was a complicated case because it involved large numbers of French settlers, the pieds-noirs. Despite international support for Algerian independence, right-wing factions in the military and among the colonizers remained committed to staying the course. After Charles de Gaulle presided over French withdrawal, the cause of the ...

22. Charles De Gaulle (#22)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) Charles de Gaulle's importance in postwar French political life was matched by his importance in the nation's collective imagination. This authority was consciously contrived by de Gaulle, who wished to bear upon his figurative body the will of the French people to maintain the power of their nation in the face of a political environment characterized by the opposition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Ultimately, de Gaulle's symbolic originality proved more la...

23. May 1968 (#23)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) The student protests of May 1968 in France were linked to international protests against the American war in Vietnam and other political and social consequences of the Cold War. In many respects, the terrible condition of many schools in France that led students to revolt remains a problem. Recent attempts to impose American-style reforms on the university system have met with protests that echo some of the demands made in '68; although, other conditions for revolut...

24. Immigration (#24)

- France Since 1871 (HIST 276) French culture is threatened both by European Unification and the rise of xenophobia within France itself. The defeat of the referendum on the European Constitution testified to the dissatisfaction of many people in rural France with the economic realities of the new international community. Racist policies targeting residents of France's poor suburbs threaten the national ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity. These problems remain to be resolved if France is ...

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24-Lecture Course: France Since 1871 (HIST 276)

1. Introduction (#1)

2. The Paris Commune and Its Legacy (#2)

3. Centralized State and Republic (#3)

4. A Nation? Peasants, Language, and French Identity (#4)

5. Workshop and Factory (#5)

6. The Waning of Religious Authority (#6)

7. Mass Politics and the Political Challenge from the Left (#7)

8. Dynamite Club: The Anarchists (#8)

9. General Boulanger and Captain Dreyfus (#9)

10. Cafés and the Culture of Drink (#10)

11. Paris and the Belle Époque (#11)

12. French Imperialism (Guest Lecture by Charles Keith) (#12)

13. The Origins of World War I (#13)

14. Trench Warfare (#14)

15. The Home Front (#15)

16. The Great War, Grief, and Memory (Guest Lecture by Bruno Cabanes) (#16)

17. The Popular Front (#17)

18. The Dark Years: Vichy France (#18)

19. Resistance (#19)

20. Battles For and Against Americanization (#20)

21. Vietnam and Algeria (#21)

22. Charles De Gaulle (#22)

23. May 1968 (#23)

24. Immigration (#24)

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