History of French and Italian culture - part two 3700-CS1-3-HKFRWL

Topics discussed will include: the formation of countries on the ruins of the Roman Empire, the development of the knighthood and the burgher class as the main audiences of culture in native languages, the feudal and monarchic ideology vs. the burgher worldview. Romanesque art in France, the Gothic style and its variations. Giants of Italian and European literature: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Special features of the French and Italian Renaissance, architecture and painting in Renaissance France and Italy. The impact of the French religious wars. Classicism in the context of the absolute monarchy, the rationalism of Descartes. Culture and art at Versailles, the Revolution and the republican system, the Napoleonic era - France’s institutional, academic, and cultural development, the Restoration and the Second Empire, the development of Paris, technical progress; France’s colonial expansion and how it influenced people’s interest in exotic cultures, the Franco-Prussian War and the Third Republic. The process of unification in Italy and its impact on Italian intellectual life. The development of fine arts, painting. World War I, the socialist movement, the wild 1920s-1930s, fascism, World War II, decolonization, the French Fifth Republic, May 1968, France and Italy today.