France - FR316 - Fairy Tales & the French Renaissance

FR316 - Fairy Tales & the French Renaissance

Toulouse, France

Last Offered: Summer 2026

As valuable portals into the values and anxieties of the cultures that created them, fairy tales and folklore are more than just stories for children. In this course we will study French fairy tales—from the original versions of familiar stories like “Cinderella” to lesser-known tales like “The Pig King”—to bring to life the grandeur and the contradictions of 16th and 17th-century France. By the time Charles Perrault was writing about a sleeping princess awoken by a kiss, real French explorers and colonizers had been seizing their own magical kingdoms in a place they called the New World. The genre of French fairy tales and short stories will serve in this class as a laboratory in which to explore how fantasies of “happily ever after” conflict with the dangers lurking in dark forests, giving us new insights into the French Renaissance, a time of revolutionary technologies and amazing artistic innovation, but also of bloody wars of religion and emerging authoritarian régimes.

Course led by Prof. Alistaire Tallent