Department of French
Paper Fr 9
French Literature, Thought, and History, from 1789 to 1898
Reading list
Part IB core texts 2009/2010
Download the 2009 exam paper.
This paper will be offered for the final time in this format in 2011/2012. From 2012/2013, it will be replaced at Part IB by Fr5: Revolutions in Writing, 1700-1900 and at Part II by Fr11: Gender, Desire and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Culture.
Many historians would argue that modern European history began in 1789, and the aim of Fr9 is to chart the cultural changes triggered by the French Revolution, urbanisation, and modernity. Viewed retrospectively, Fr9 also helps contextualise the origins of twentieth-century French culture. Historically, the century zigzagged between contrary political regimes, and was shaped by the fall of Napoleon, and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814-15, the July Revolution of 1830, the Revolution(s) of 1848 and their aftermath, and the Franco-Prussian War and Commune of 1870-71; it was not until the 1870s that France's republican future was confirmed.
The writers you will study on Fr9 were vocal participants in this process of cultural change, responding in extremely diverse ways, both aesthetically and politically, to the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary moments which define this unsettled era. Whilst the century saw experimentation in many genres, including theatre, autobiography, and journalism, the paper particularly highlights innovations in fiction and poetry. It enables students to study in depth major aesthetic developments from Romanticism and Realism to Early Modernism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Decadence, including writers such as Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Nerval, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, and Rachilde. A number of cultural contexts which shaped this literature will also be explored, particularly the development of nineteenth-century Paris and Parisian Bohemia; shifts in gender relations, early feminism, and the redefinition of the family; discourses on social marginality and madness; the growth of science and technology; journalism and the press; the myth of Napoleon and the importance of the Napoleonic Code; political thought and historical writing; art criticism and emerging images of modernity.
As with French period papers in general, we prescribe two topics for Section A, which are currently:
- Desire and Transgression
- Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Although students need only write on one topic in the exam or portfolio, Fr9 works best if students use both of these topics to filter their reading for the paper (not least because virtually all of the authors you will study deal with these topics one way or another).
It is up to supervisors and supervisees to determine together exactly how many authors and texts they cover, but we would recommend about seven, with fortnightly supervisions. Section B of the exam will usually not name specific authors, but allow candidates to choose which author to bring to bear on their chosen question (though there will also be a few author-specific questions aimed exclusively at Part IB candidates). Please note: this is different from the set-up you will find in past papers prior to Tripos 2009. Obviously, Section B supervision (and therefore also portfolio) essay titles will be directed towards the particular author being studied that fortnight. As with other French period papers, we would encourage supervisors and students to think about Section B authors in the context of six topic areas, which are listed below. These topics, which will be addressed in various ways in the lecture series, are designed to help you to filter your study of particular authors through particular issues. As you can see, an author can sometimes be studied via more than one category:
- The 'roman personnel', e.g. Chateaubriand, Constant, Nerval, Claire de Duras
- Early realist fiction, e.g. Balzac, Stendhal
- Rethinking representation after 1848, e.g. Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval, Vallès
- Naturalist writing, e.g. Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans
- Women's writing, e.g. Sand, Cottin, Rachilde
- Poetry, e.g. Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Rimbaud, Mallarmé
Finally, Section C of the paper involves an unseen commentary on a short passage of French prose or poetry. In the exam, there will be a choice of three different types of text, typically poetry, fictional prose, and non-fictional or discursive prose.
