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History 508: Revolutionary France, 1750-1815. Did fashion and scandalous images of Marie Antoinette cause the French Revolution? What incited slaves in Haiti to rise up and claim their freedom in the 1790s? This course will focus on the turbulent decades of the French Revolution from a cat massacre in 1739 to Napoleon's fall at Waterloo in 1815. We will try to figure out why some French citizens marched off to war while others were led to the guillotine. The debates about many aspects of the Revolution -- its origins, the Terror, and its legacy to name only a few--continue to fascinate historians. The most recent work brings models drawn from gender studies and literary theory to explain the Revolution’s trajectory and impact. Those polemics make the Revolution a vital area for graduate and undergraduate studies. We will be approaching the Revolution, then, not only to understand the "events" that constitute it, but especially to explore the models and methods that scholars have used to explain the Revolution and its course. Readings include recent scholarship, both articles and monographs, such as: Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution; Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon; David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France; The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820, Colin Jones & Dror Wahrman eds.; Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France; Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France. Assignments: Short writing assignments and longer final thematic essay.

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