Collecting David Harvey's finest work on Paris during the second empire, Paris, Capital of Modernity offers brilliant insights ranging from the birth of consumerist spectacle on the Parisian ...boulevards, the creative visions of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, and the reactionary cultural politics of the bombastic Sacre Couer. The book is heavily illustrated and includes a number drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier, one of the greatest political caricaturists of the nineteenth century.
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.
Montmartre Hewitt, Nicholas
09/2017, Volume:
45
eBook
‘What is Montmartre? Nothing. What must it be? Everything’, proclaimed Rodolphe Salis in 1881, when his cabaret Le Chat Noir launched an entertainment boom in the 9th and 18th Arrondissements of ...Paris which would dominate the worlds of popular and high culture until the First World War. Montmartre’s music-halls, circuses, cinemas, accompanied by extra frisson of crime and prostitution, coexisted with burgeoning art movements sprung from the cabarets, which spearheaded the avant-garde in painting, theatre and literature. The story, however, did not end in 1914 and Montmartre retained its role as a magnet for tourists, lured by the Moulin-Rouge and the Sacré-Coeur, and, despite the competition from Montparnasse, as a major centre for artistic creativity in the inter-war years. Crucial to this continuity was, not merely the survival of many of the most important players from the pre-War period, but especially the role of the humorous press and the Montmartre caricaturists and illustrators who congregated in the Restaurant Manière. In this new study, Nicholas Hewitt charts the continuity of Montmartre culture from the Belle Epoque to the Occupation through its many overlapping frontiers and explores its vital ingredients of sexuality, kitsch, bohemia, mass culture and the political and social ambiguities of such a mixture.
The dead of Paris, before the French Revolution, were most often consigned to mass graveyards that contemporaries described as terrible and terrifying, emitting "putrid miasmas" that were a threat to ...both health and dignity. In a book that is at once wonderfully macabre and exceptionally informative, Erin-Marie Legacey explores how a new burial culture emerged in Paris as a result of both revolutionary fervor and public health concerns, resulting in the construction of park-like cemeteries on the outskirts of the city and a vast underground ossuary.
Making Space for the Dead describes how revolutionaries placed the dead at the center of their republican project of radical reinvention of French society and envisioned a future where graveyards would do more than safely contain human remains; they would serve to educate and inspire the living. Legacey unearths the unexpectedly lively process by which burial sites were reimagined, built, and used, focusing on three of the most important of these new spaces: the Paris Catacombs, Père Lachaise cemetery, and the short-lived Museum of French Monuments. By situating discussions of death and memory in the nation's broader cultural and political context, as well as highlighting how ordinary Parisians understood and experienced these sites, she shows how the treatment of the dead became central to the reconstruction of Parisian society after the Revolution.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris was widely acknowledged as the cultural capital of the world, the home of avant-garde music and art, symbolist literature and bohemian culture. Edinburgh, ...by contrast, may still be thought of as a rather staid city of lawyers and Presbyterian ministers, academics and doctors. While its great days as a centre for the European Enlightenment may have been behind it, however, late Victorian Edinburgh was becoming the location for a new set of cultural institutions, with its own avant-garde, that corresponded with a renewed Scottish national consciousness. While Morningside was never going to be Montparnasse, the period known as the Belle Epoque was a time in both French and Scottish society when there were stirrings of non-conformity, which often clashed with a still powerful establishment. And in this respect, French bourgeois society could be as resistant to change as the suburbs of Edinburgh. With travel and communication becoming ever easier, a growing number of international contacts developed that allowed such new and radical cultural ideas to flourish. In a series of linked essays, based on research into contemporary archives, documents and publications in both countries, as well as on new developments in cultural research, this book explores an unexpected dimension of Scottish history, while also revealing the Scottish contribution to French history. In a broader sense, and particularly as regards gender, it considers what is meant by 'modern' or 'radical' in this period, without imposing any single model. In so doing, it seeks not to treat Paris-Edinburgh links in isolation, or to exaggerate them, but to use them to provide a fresh perspective on the internationalism of the Belle Epoque.
World War I gave colonial migrants and French women unprecedented access to the workplaces and nightlife of Paris. After the war they were expected to return without protest to their homes-either ...overseas or metropolitan. Neither group, however, was willing to be discarded.
Between the world wars, the mesmerizing capital of France's colonial empire attracted denizens from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Paris became not merely their home but also a site for political engagement.Colonial Metropolistells the story of the interactions and connections of these black colonial migrants and white feminists in the social, cultural, and political world of interwar Paris. It explores why and how both were denied certain rights, such as the vote, how they suffered from sensationalist depictions in popular culture, and how they pursued parity in ways that were often interpreted as politically subversive.
In the wake of the Second World War, ideas of Europe abounded. What did Europe mean as a concept, and what did it mean to be European? Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962 makes the case that ...Paris was both a leading and distinctive forum for the expression of these ideas in the post-war period. It examines spaces in the French capital in which ideas about Europe were formulated, articulated, exchanged, circulated, and contested during this post-war period, roughly between the escalation of the Cold War and the end of France's war of decolonisation in Algeria. Such processes of making sense of Europe are elucidated in urban, political and cultural spaces in the French capital. Specifically, the Parisian café, home and street are each examined in terms of how they were implicated in ideas about Europe. Then, the Paris-based Mouvement socialiste des états unis d'Europe (The Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe) and the far-right wing Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (The Federation of Nationalist Students) are examined as examples of political movements that mobilised around--very different--concepts of Europe. The final section on cultural Europeanising spaces draws attention to the specificities of the Europeanism of exiles from Franco's Spain in Paris; the work of the great scholar of the Arab world, Jacques Berque, in the context of his understanding of the Mediterranean world and his understanding of faith; and finally, the work of the legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, by looking at the capacities and limitations of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson's political, social, and aesthetic commitments
Mary McAuliffe’s Dawn of the Belle Epoque took the reader from the multiple disasters of 1870–1871 through the extraordinary re-emergence of Paris as the cultural center of the Western world. Now, in ...Twilight of the Belle Epoque, McAuliffe portrays Paris in full flower at the turn of the twentieth century, where creative dynamos such as Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan set their respective circles on fire with a barrage of revolutionary visions and discoveries. Such dramatic breakthroughs were not limited to the arts or sciences, as innovators and entrepreneurs such as Louis Renault, André Citroën, Paul Poiret, François Coty, and so many others—including those magnificent men and women in their flying machines—emphatically demonstrated. But all was not well in this world, remembered in hindsight as a golden age, and wrenching struggles between Church and state as well as between haves and have-nots shadowed these years, underscored by the ever-more-ominous drumbeat of the approaching Great War—a cataclysm that would test the mettle of the City of Light, even as it brutally brought the Belle Epoque to its close. Through rich illustrations and evocative narrative, McAuliffe brings this remarkable era from 1900 through World War I to vibrant life.
On a rainy day in May 2007, the mayor of Paris inaugurated the Jardins d'Éole, a park whose completion was hailed internationally as an exemplar of sustainable urbanism. The park was the result of a ...hard-fought, decadelong protest movement in a low-income Maghrebi and African immigrant district starved for infrastructure, but the Mayor's vision of urban sustainability was met with jeers.
Drawing extensively from immersive, firsthand ethnographic research with northeast Paris residents, as well as an analysis of green architecture and urban design, Andrew Newman argues that environmental politics must be separated from the construct of urban sustainability, which has been appropriated by forces of redevelopment and gentrification in Paris and beyond. France's turbulent political environment also provides Newman with powerful new insights into the ways in which multiethnic coalitions can emerge⎯even amid overt racism and Islamophobia⎯in the struggle for more just cities and more inclusive societies.
A tale of multidimensional political efforts,Landscape of Discontentcuts through the rhetoric of green cities to reveal the promise that environmentalism holds for urban communities anywhere.