COMP 314
Paris on Fire: Incendiary Voices from the City of Light Fall 2024
Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed RLFR 316 / WGSS 315

During the 1830s, Honoré de Balzac described Paris as a “surprising assemblage of movements, machines, and ideas, a city of one hundred thousand novels, the head of the world,” but also characterized the French capital as a “land of contrasts,” a “monstrous wonder,” a “moral sewer.” Similarly, writers from Victor Hugo to Émile Zola have simultaneously celebrated Parisian elegance and condemned the appalling misery of Paris’s urban poor. Since 1889, Paris has been fêted as the “City of Light” for its Enlightenment legacy, Eiffel Tower modernity, and luminous energy, captured in countless paintings, photographs, and film. However, Paris is also the site of revolution, resistance, and riots. From revolutionary revolt (1830, 1848, 1871), to wartime resistance (1870, 1914-18, 1940-44), to reformist and race riots (1968 and 2005), Paris has repeatedly sparked with incendiary passion and political protest. As fires raged during the 2005 riots, many heard the echo of Hitler’s 1944 question, “Is Paris burning?” and asked: why was Paris burning again at the dawn of the twenty-first century? Following the 2015 terrorist attacks, many wondered yet again what the future would hold for the City of Light. To answer these questions, we will examine the social, political, and literary landscape of Paris during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, from urbanization and modernization, to occupation and liberation, to immigration and globalization. Readings to include poetry, short stories, and novels by Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Verne, Zola, Apollinaire, Colette, Duras, Perec, Rochefort, and Charef. Films to include works by Clair, Truffaut, Godard, Minnelli, Clément, Lelouch, Luhrmann, Kassovitz, Besson, and Jeunet. Conducted in French.