Course Description
This interdisciplinary course examines France’s widespread, sustained and continued influence our individual and worldwide scenarios. Such profound and sometimes unrecognized legacy stems onto political, intellectual, linguistic and cultural portions of our lives.
Students will experience French civilization by learning while on campus about France’s history from its beginning to contemporary times, stressing certain periods that will be experienced first-hand upon out summer visit. We will also visit topics such as society, citizenship, sociopolitical structures, culture, ideologies and through various resources; we will be exposed to art, literature, cinema, music and of course gastronomy.
Based in Paris, the class navigates Francois I’s Renaissance in the Loire castles, Marie Antoinette’s final trek through Paris to the guillotine, and Hemingway’s walk through the streets of the Latin Quarter. Students engage in debates about absolutism, nationalism, revolution, and human rights in the country that saw the most radical, idealistic, and brutal revolution in Europe. They encounter the personalities that have shaped world history–Voltaire, Rousseau, Maximilien Robespierre, Olympe de Gouges, Napoleon Bonaparte, –as well as the figures that revolutionized art history: Pierre Rodin, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. The class visits the Louvre, Orsay, Invalides, Sainte-Chapelle, Eiffel Tower, and other museums and monuments of Paris. Included in the program visitation are the castles of the Loire, the beaches of Normandy, the French Alps, Fontainebleau, Versailles, and Lyon.
For more information on the travel portion of the two-semester program, please refer to its Study Abroad page.