Monarchy is Having a Moment. Take "Kings & Queens" to Find Out Why

New gen ed course! FR0070 draws on and interrogates our ongoing fascination with kings and queens to study the construction, representation and undoing of monarchy in France and French-speaking world regions. How did kings and queens—and the favorites, mistresses, artists, writers, artisans, courtiers and institutions around them—legitimize their authority, construct and communicate their image, craft their rule and connect to their subjects from the medieval period to the end of the Old Regime? What made queenship different from kingship in a nation bound by Salic law? Did the rise of the absolute monarchy in the 17th century create a shift in attitudes towards gender and power? How did gender, sexuality and race inform the politics of rule and the representations of rulers? How did the expansion of the French colonial empire influence attitudes toward the monarchy? How do concepts of kingship/queenship—what a monarch looks like and what a monarch does—change over time? And how do we construct our present in relation to premodern kings and queens? Think Madonna as Marie Antoinette. 

We will be interested in the performances, portraits, fashions, decors, castles and gardens of power—how kings and queens danced and dressed, how they posed and primped. We will also interrogate the undoing of this power. What happens when a monarch gets old? Dies young? Doesn’t have children? Loses their teeth? Falls in love? Wants a friend? How else was monarchy “undone"—critiqued, contested, reformed, punished and abolished—on the way to the creation of the French Republic and the Republic of Haiti? And what do kings and queens mean to us in contemporary culture, as citizens/residents of a democratic republic—if we can keep it? 

DSAS gen eds: Historical Analysis, Geographic Region.
Taught in English, no prerequisites.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 2:05 to 4:05 p.m.