Between Past and Future: Responsibility in the Wake of the French Revolution

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What does it mean to be responsible for one's own time? In France, this question has carried particular weight since the French Revolution broke with the monarchy and social hierarchy of the Ancien Régime. If modernity begins with the conviction that one can — indeed should — seize the present in order to shape the future, the Revolution further opened a gap between past and future, forcing an entire society to reckon with a new relationship to time. Where earlier generations had assumed that what was to come would broadly resemble what had been, the future was now radically unknowable: something to be invented and contested. Reflecting later on this new condition, Alexis de Tocqueville would capture the challenge it poses in a striking formula: "When the past no longer illuminates the future, the mind walks in darkness." In French culture, the difficulty of that negotiation is legible in the opposition between distinctively progressive figures meant to guide the people toward the future — from the "intellectuel" incarnated by Emile Zola to the "écrivain engagé" theorized by Jean-Paul Sartre — and a robust reactionary tradition that rejected modernity outright in the name of a return to the past. This course invites students to take a middle stance: to reflect on their own responsibility today by engaging in a true dialogue between past and future. We will do so through French novels, essays, and films, exploring what responsibility means across the crises that define our contemporary moment: from terrorism and the erosion of representative democracy to climate change and the upheavals induced by artificial intelligence. Taught in French.