Teaching Representations of the French Revolution
- Editors: Julia Douthwaite Viglione, Antoinette Sol, Catriona Seth
- Pages: 378
- Published: 2019
- ISBN: 9781603294652 (Hardcover)
- ISBN: 9781603294003 (Paperback)
“The text serves as an excellent reference book on the Revolution . . . [and] as a teaching manual for courses in French history, culture, and current events. It is an excellent read for its own sake as well as an important pedagogical tool.”
—The French Review
In many ways the French Revolution—a series of revolutions, in fact, whose end has arguably not yet arrived—is modernity in action. Beginning in reform, it blossomed into wholesale attempts to remake society, uprooting the clergy and aristocracy, valorizing mass movements, and setting secular ideologies, including nationalism, in motion. Unusually manifold and complicated, the revolution affords many teaching opportunities and challenges. This volume helps instructors seeking to connect developments today—terrorism, propaganda, extremism—with the events that began in 1789, contextualizing for students a world that seems always unmoored and in crisis.
The volume supports the teaching of the revolution’s ongoing project across geographic areas (from Haiti, Latin America, and New Orleans to Spain, Germany, and Greece), governing ideologies (human rights, secularism, liberty), and literatures (from well-known to newly rediscovered texts). Interdisciplinary, intercultural, and insurgent, the volume has an energy that reflects its subject.
Acknowledgments (ix)
Introduction (1)
Part I: Historical Contexts
A Narrative Chronology of Events in Revolutionary France (25)
Teaching the French Revolution as Myth and Memory (30)
Teaching the Revolution through a Military Lens (41)
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and Laïcité: Frenchness, Islam, and French Hip-Hop (50)
Part II: Rhetoric, Rights, and Revolution
Rights, Revolution, Representation: Thinking through the Language of the French Revolution (69)
Human Rights and Human Wrongs: Slavery and Colonialism in a Time of Revolution (78)
Teaching the French Revolution at a Community College: Challenges and Benefits (87)
Teaching Republican Culture through Caricature: The Scandal of Charlie Hebdo (97)
Part III: Writing the Revolution
Editors’ Choice: Essential Texts of the French Revolution (111)
Teaching the Revolution’s Theater as Cultural History (124)
The French Revolution and the German Chimera: Theatricality, Emotions, and the Untransferability of Revolution in J. H. Campe’s Briefe aus Paris (134)
The Sans-culottides: Learning Revolutionary-Era French Culture through Celebration and a Reading of Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize (146)
Rethinking History: The “Marseillaise Noire” and Legacies of the Revolution in Creole New Orleans (155)
Writing to Appreciate the Enigmas of Danton’s Death and Monsieur Toussaint at the Community College (166)
Part IV: The Revolution in Art and Mass Media
“Speaking to All the Senses at Once”: The French Revolution through the Visual Arts (177)
The French Revolution and the Beginning of Modern Communications (187)
Ideas on the Table: Teaching with the Faïences Révolutionnaires (197)
The French Revolution and Modern Propaganda (206)
French Revolutionary Women: A Century of Media Representation (216)
Engaging Students in Research: Stop-Motion Videos, Strip Cartoons, and the Waddesdon Manor Collection of Prints (228)
Part V: Global Reverberations
Teaching the Revolution Debate: Edmund Burke, His Radical Respondents, and William Blake (241)
How Should an Invisible Event Be Taught? The Haitian Revolution as Pedagogical Case Study (253)
Teaching Perspective: The Relation between the Haitian and French Revolutions (264)
Exile, Displacement, and Citizenship: Émigrés from the French Revolution to the Twenty-First Century (275)
The French Revolution Effect: France, Italy, Germany, Greece (285)
Teaching the French Revolution in Late-Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century German Literature Classes (296)
The French Revolution’s Echo in Spain through Literary and Satirical Representations (305)
From Transnational Political Thought to Popular National Iconography: Latin America’s Cult of Liberté in the Age of Revolution (314)
Part VI: Resources
French Revolution: Dates and People (339)
Major Battles of the Revolutionary Period (341)
Filmography (343)
Revolutionary Artwork (345)
Notes on Contributors (353)
Index (359)
“[T]his volume, with its clear, jargon-free prose, welcomes newcomers to the field, especially professors who may be daunted by teaching the French Revolution for the first time.”
—Clorinda Donato, California State University, Long Beach
