Background Reading
Alfred Cobban, History of Modern France (three volumes)—these were written in the 1960s and the publisher (Penguin) has recently issued replacement volumes. Cobban's books are still worth reading, however, and you should find that used copies are readily and cheaply available.

Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (2002)—this is the new eighteenth-century volume in the Penguin series.

Rod Kedward, France and the French: A Modern History (2006)—this replaced Cobban's volume on twentieth-century France.

Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times (six editions)—like Cobban, this is now slightly outdated, but there are many copies in existence.

Reading for Discussion (short extracts will be provided in class)
Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935); full text available on-line. This is the "outline" for his Arcades Project (English trans. 1999).

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856).

Further Reading
Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983).

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (1983).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), available on-line.

Peter Sahlins, "Natural Frontiers Revisited: France's Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century," American Historical Review 95 (1990), pp. 1423-1451 [available on-line via JSTOR].

See also: "Paris, Capital of the Ninteenth Century" and "Thirty Modern Years"