FRENCH THRU CURRENT EVENTS

The course will offer students an understanding of fundamental underlying concepts that structure French society and that are necessary to grasp if one wants to follow current events in France. This course could be of interest not only to CC students but also to students enrolled at SIPA or Teacher’s College.

Moreover, this course would allow for a comparative approach to how same events are covered in US, or other foreign media, and in France.

Given that this course will deal with current events, the readings will depend entirely on how the news unfolds. Students will be given an introduction to the various media outlets available to them: the press, television and online sources. As the course unfolds, I will adapt the choice of sources that best follow events as they happen. 2022 for example, will be the year France assumes the presidency of the European Union. It will also be the year of the presidential elections. For such events, I will propose specific institutional sources. On the other hand, events that could not be anticipated will require some form of guidance in terms of sources.

In spite of the obvious unpredictability of the specific content of this course, certain key concepts necessary to understand current events in France will be presented. These may vary slightly from one semester to another, but would include, without being limited to: the structure of government and public institutions, political parties, unions and “associations”, social benefits and “the welfare state”, public vs. private sector, “Paris is France”, universalism, secularism and “laïcité”, cultural exceptionalism, the figure of the intellectual, national identity, immigration, geography of France and demographics, relation to Europe, geopolitics, globalization and sovereignty. Of course, the choice of themes and concepts in a given semester would be influenced by dominant topics in the French news.