Focusing on one of photography’s birthplaces, Paris and the Cliché of History tells the story of how photographs came to be imagined and deployed as documents of the past. It uncovers the changing conventions that drove the formation of public photo archives, the inclusion of photos on the pages of illustrated books, their place in historical exhibitions and public festivals, and the organization of amateur photo contests to document Paris. It explores how contemporaries looked at photos, new and old, through the lenses of war, occupation, urban renovation, and other traumas. From this point of view, Paris and the Cliché of History offers new versions of familiar stories about Haussmannization, the professionalization of history, the cultural effects of World War I, and the 1944 Liberation of Paris as well as the first in-depth accounts of the 1951 celebration of Paris’s birthday (the Bimillénaire de Paris) and the 100,000 photographs submitted to an ambitious effort to document the city for the future: the amateur photo contest “This was Paris in 1970.” It calls for historians to pull the curtain on using photographs as transparent windows onto the past and proposes a historical methodology that registers photographic production, circulation, and preservation as part and parcel of history itself. Ultimately the book presents a compelling argument for the importance of this history of photographs to the story of Paris since 1860 and to arguments about its reduction to a museum city, or merely an image, since the 1960s.