Social History and Enlightenment (slides)
Absolute Monarchy and National Regeneration
Scandals, Loans, and Taxes (slides)Background Reading
Censer and Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, pp. 9-14, 28-35.Discussion: Private and Public: Rousseau, Kant, Necker,
and Marie Antoinette (9 and 11 February 2011)
Second Assignment due in class (postponed from last week because of weather).
Jacques Necker, Introduction to his Compte-rendu au Roi (Account to the King, 1781), on-line at the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity website or on the cd-rom.
Sarah Maza, “The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited: The Case of the Missing Queen,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (1991), available as an e-book via IUCAT.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750), also sometimes called Rousseau's First Discourse. This is in the library (in both the Basic Political Writings and the Collected Works of Rousseau) and IUCAT also includes links to on-line reproductions of the eighteenth-century editions. It is also conveniently available on-line in a more contemporary translation. [postponed from last week because of weather]
Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784) available on-line.
[postponed from last week because of weather]
AS YOU READ ALL FOUR OF THESE SELECTIONS, KEEP THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS IN MIND: "What's private and what's public, according to this author? What should be private? What should be public? How do the categories of public and private shape each other?"
Further Reading
David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (2001).
Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979).
-----, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982).
-----, "Google and the Future of Books," New York Review of Books Feb. 12, 2009, on-line.
William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (1996).
Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (2000).
Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (1993).
John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue (2006).
Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (2005).
Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette wore to the French Revolution (2006).
Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, "Marie Antoinette,
Portrait with a Rose" (1783), in the Museum
at the Palace of Versailles
Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105:1 (February 2000); on-line with supporting primary-source materials.