HSY2250

Cultural landscapes in Paris, from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire

Proposed to be offered next in 1999

David Garrioch

8 points
* Intensive lectures, tutorials and field trips for 35 hours per week over one month (late November/December 1997)
* Paris
* Prohibition: HSY3830

Objectives Students completing this subject should have acquired a detailed knowledge of the social, physical, and cultural development of Paris between the mid eighteenth and the mid nineteenth century, and should be acquainted with general theories of urban change.

Synopsis Paris was the principal centre of the Enlightenment in the eighteeenth century, the centre of revolutionary ideology from 1789 to the mid nineteenth century, and a model of urban renovation and transformation during the Second Empire. Each of these movements and events was accompanied by profound shifts in culture and ideology which were reflected in changes in the urban environment, through architecture, town planning, material culture, as well as in the ways people used urban space. This subject explores these changes through the study of Paris and its transformations between 1750 and 1870. Topics covered will include the Enlightenment critique of the city; the philosophy and practice of Enlightenment urbanism; the impact of medical thought; the material culture of Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; revolutionary ideology and the uses of urban space; the transformations of post-revolutionary Paris; disease, revolution, and class conflict; public transport and bourgeois Paris; and urban renewal and its effects. Key themes, throughout the subject, will be the links between ideology and urban landscape, between gender and urban space, and between class and ideas of the city.

Assessment Field report or class paper (1000 words): 15%
* Historiographical essay (1500 words): 20%
* Essay (2000 words): 40%
* Examination (1.5 hours): 25%
* Note: the field report is to be submitted in Paris, the remaining work by the end of week eight of first semester 1998.

Recommended texts

Eltin R A The architecture of death: The transformation of the cemetery in eighteenth-century Paris MIT press, 1984
Green N The spectacle of nature. Landscape and bourgeois culture in nineteenth-century France Manchester U P, 1990

Prescribed texts

Monash history/ASA Paris cultural landscapes handbook