A study of the technological, theoretical, and cultural significance of the transparency of the glass structures of François Mitterand's Grands Projects in Paris.
Montmartre Hewitt, Nicholas
09/2017, Letnik:
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.
Belle-époque Paris witnessed the emergence of a vibrant and diverse dance scene, one that crystallized around the Ballets Russes, the Russian dance company formed by impresario Sergey Diaghilev. The ...company has long served as a convenient turning point in the history of dance, celebrated for its revolutionary choreography and innovative productions. This book presents a fresh slant on this much-told history. Focusing on the relation between music and dance, Davinia Caddy approaches the Ballets Russes with a wide-angled lens that embraces not just the choreographic, but also the cultural, political, theatrical and aesthetic contexts in which the company made its name. In addition, Caddy examines and interprets contemporary French dance practices, throwing new light on some of the most important debates and discourses of the day.
When not at war, armies are often used to control civil disorders, especially in eras of rapid social change and unrest. But in nineteenth century Europe, without the technological advances of modern ...armies and police forces, an army's only advantages were discipline and organization - and in the face of popular opposition to the regime in power, both could rapidly deteriorate. Such was the case in France after the Napoleonic Wars, where a cumulative recent history of failure weakened an already fragile army's ability to keep the peace.After the February 1848 overthrow of the last king of France, the new republican government proved remarkably resilient, retaining power while pursuing moderate social policies despite the concerted efforts of a variety of radical and socialist groups. These efforts took numerous forms, ranging from demonstrations to attempted coups to full-scale urban combat, and culminated in the crisis of the June Days. At stake was the future of French government and the social and economic policy of France at large.InControlling Paris, Jonathan M. House offers us a study of revolution from the viewpoint of the government rather than the revolutionary. It is not focused on military tactics so much as on the broader issues involved in controlling civil disorders: relations between the government and its military leaders, causes and social issues of public disorder, political loyalty of troops in crisis, and excessive use of force to control civil disorders. Yet somehow, despite all these disadvantages, the French police and armed forces prevented regime change far more often than they failed to do so.Jonathan M. Houseis the William A. Stofft Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. His previous books includeCombined Arms Warfare in the 20th Century;A Military History of the Cold War, 1944-1962; and, with David M. Glantz,When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.
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.
"It is a living museum of a long-gone Jewish life and, supposedly, a testimony to the success of the French model of social integration. It is a communal home where gay men and women are said to ...stand in defiance of the French model of social integration. It is a place of freedom and tolerance where people of color and lesbians nevertheless feel unwanted and where young Zionists from the suburbs gather every Sunday and sometimes harass Arabs. It is a hot topic in the press and on television. It is open to the world and open for business. It is a place to be seen and a place of invisibility. It is like a home to me, a place where I feel both safe and out of place and where my father felt comfortable and alienated at the same time. It is a place of nostalgia, innovation, shame, pride, and anxiety, where the local and the global intersect for better and for worse. And for better and for worse, it is a French neighborhood."-fromMy Father and I
Mixing personal memoir, urban studies, cultural history, and literary criticism, as well as a generous selection of photographs,My Father and Ifocuses on the Marais, the oldest surviving neighborhood of Paris. It also beautifully reveals the intricacies of the relationship between a Jewish father and a gay son, each claiming the same neighborhood as his own. Beginning with the history of the Marais and its significance in the construction of a French national identity, David Caron proposes a rethinking of community and looks at how Jews, Chinese immigrants, and gays have made the Marais theirs.
These communities embody, in their engagement of urban space, a daily challenge to the French concept of universal citizenship that denies them all political legitimacy. Caron moves from the strictly French context to more theoretical issues such as social and political archaism, immigration and diaspora, survival and haunting, the public/private divide, and group friendship as metaphor for unruly and dynamic forms of community, and founding disasters such as AIDS and the Holocaust. Caron also tells the story of his father, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to France and once called the Marais home.
The Paris Commune lasted for only 64 days in 1871, but during that short time it gave rise to some of the grandest political dreams of the nineteenth century-before culminating in horrific violence. ...Following the disastrous French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, hungry and politically disenchanted Parisians took up arms against their government in the name of a more just society. They expelled loyalists and soldiers and erected barricades in the streets. In Massacre, John Merriman introduces a cast of inimitable Communards-from les pétroleuses (female incendiaries) to the painter Gustave Courbet-whose idealism fueled a revolution. And he vividly recreates the Commune's chaotic and bloody end when 30,000 troops stormed the city, burning half of Paris and executing captured Communards en masse. A stirring evocation of the spring when Paris was ablaze with cannon fire and its citizens were their own masters, Massacre reveals how the indomitable spirit of the Commune shook the very foundations of Europe.
A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after ...World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.
Paris mushroomed in the thirteenth century to become the largest city in the Western world, largely through in-migration from rural areas. The resulting dialect-mixture led to the formation of new, ...specifically urban modes of speech. From the time of the Renaissance social stratification became sharper as the elites distanced themselves from the Parisian 'Cockney' of the masses. Nineteenth-century urbanisation transformed the situation yet again with the arrival of huge numbers of immigrants from far-flung corners of France, levelling dialect-differences and exposing ever larger sections of the population to standardising influences. At the same time, a working-class vernacular emerged which was distinguished from the upper-class standard not only in grammar and pronunciation but most markedly in vocabulary (slang). This book examines the interlinked history of Parisian speech and the Parisian population through these various phases of in-migration, dialect-mixing and social stratification from medieval times to the present day.