FYSM 216 - Napoléon and Josephine's Paris,1799-1815

Institution:

Trinity College

Subject:

Description:

After the great battles of Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805, Europe opened wide to French domination. The Napoleonic Empire was established with Paris as its administrative and moral core. This seminar explores the lives of those Parisians to whom fortune and fame beckoned from the moment of Napoléon's coup d'état in 1799 on. We will study Napoléon, of course, but also Josephine de Beauharnais, whose first husband died in the Revolutionary Terror and whose marriage to Napoléon was a way for this impoverished aristocrat to reinvent herself. We will look at the life of the painter, David, former Jacobin and follower of Robespierre, now court painter to the Empire. Tallyrand, the General Bourrienne, and the writer Stendhal are some of the other dramatis personae of this seminar that examines in turn those Parisians who set themselves in opposition to the Empire. These include Germaine de Sta l, who so angered Napoléon with her feminist novels that he banished her from Paris and her companion, Benjamin Constant, whose speech to the Tribunat in 1800 remains a stirring statement against authoritarian government. The Paris of the Empire is revealed through the memoirs, letters, novels, and portraits of these Parisians. Through our encounter with their words and images, we will reconstruct the salons, the ministries, the palaces, the streets and the monuments of a Paris some of whose physical traces have faded but whose moral issues remain with us t 1.00 units, Seminar

Credits:

1.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.Trincoll.edu

Phone Number:

(860) 297-2000

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Semester

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