history of france

Rising to the Challenge: Historians and the "Impossible" History of Paris

Rising to the Challenge: Historians and the "Impossible" History of Paris Paris: Deux mille ans d'histoire, by Jean Favier. Paris, Fayard, 1997. 1007 pp. 32.00euro (paper).

Seven Ages of Paris, by Alistair Home. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 480 pp. $35.00 US (cloth), $16.00 US (paper).

Paris: Biography of a City, by Colin Jones. London, Alien Lane, 2004. 592 pp. $29.95 US (cloth), $18.00 US (paper).

Paris, Capital of Modernity, by David Harvey. New York, Routledge, 2003. 384 pp. $25.00 US (cloth).

Planning Paris Before Haussmann, by Nicholas Papayanis. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 352 pp. $55.00 US (cloth).

We'll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since 1930, by Harvey Levenstein. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004. 368 pp. $35.00 US (cloth).

"It's you against me, now!" With these words, Eugène de Rastignac, at the conclusion of Balzac's novel, Le Père Goriot, articulates the sense of personal challenge that countless individuals have experienced when confronted by the teeming metropolis of Paris. Every inhabitant of the city, however great or humble, seeks to achieve some measure of mastery over it. And for none can the challenge be greater than for the historian who seeks to write the city's history. Jean Favier and Colin Jones frankly admit the impossibility of the task. The subject is impossibly vast, complex, diverse, and elusive. The history of Paris spans over two thousand years and is interwoven with the histories of France and Europe. Its story is one of wars, kings, and revolutions, but also of monuments, ideas, and artistic creation; of festivals and funerals, palaces and workshops, churches and sewers, prelates and prostitutes. To weave together the many threads of that story into a coherent pattern is a daunting challenge. It is remarkable, in fact, that so many recent writers have accepted that challenge. Indicative both of the burgeoning interest in the history of Paris as well as the diversity of approaches to that history is the recent publication of a special issue of French Historical Studies devoted to "New Perspectives on Modern Paris."1 Its articles consider the city from various points of view: that of the planners and bureaucrats who designed it or sought to deal with its problems and crises; that of the writers who represented it in prose and poetry; that of the urban immigrants who sought to find a place for themselves; and that of particular urban spaces whose symbolic role and function have changed over time. The approaches of the authors whose works are under review in this article reflect the diversity and interdisciplinarity of recent historiography. Three have produced synthetic works that attempt to survey the entire story of Paris, from its prehistory to the present. One focuses on the changes that attended Haussmann's reconstruction of the city under the Second Empire, while another considers the ideas of urban planners who prepared the way for Haussmann. A final writer reflects on the place of Paris and of France more generally in the twentieth-century American imagination. All succeed, in their particular fashions, in illuminating the history of the city of light.

Jean Favier's Paris: Deux mille ans d'histoire is as monumental as its subject. In the best Annales school tradition, Favier relegates the political history of Paris - "When the history of France was made in Paris" - to the final quarter of his thousand-page volume. The preceding three parts of the book focus, respectively, on the city's underlying spatial, social, and economic structures; on what he considers to be the unique and "exceptional" features of Paris; and on the elements that have determined its daily life. The result is an exhaustive analysis of every possible dimension of the city's history, explored layer by layer. Beginning with the question, "What is a Parisian?", Favier considers the fluctuating population of the city, which reached a peak of 3,800,000 in 1946 before falling back to 2,152,000 in 1990 (during which time the population of the urbanized hinterland doubled to over ten million, representing nearly one fifth of the population of France). He emphasizes that only the vaguest definition of a Parisian can be provided, since most residents of Paris have been relatively recent arrivals; in 1833, only one in two was born in Paris. He goes on to consider the spatial determinants of the city, describing the succession of walls which enclosed it, from the Philip Augustus wall of the thirteenth century to the Thiers wall of the nineteenth, as well as the constant expansion of the city as it spilled over these artificial barriers to its growth. The development of administrative structures and the efforts by administrators and urban planners to impose order on Paris - culminating in Haussmann's reconstruction of the city - are comprehensively described, with the note that administrative quartiers bore little relation to the lived experience of the quartier, which was much more loosely defined by residents, usually in relation to a particular landmark, monument, trade, ethnic group, or gathering place. The Parisian, states Favier, perceives his quartier as his village. Until the 1950s, many women would go hatless in their own quartier, something they would not do if they were to go beyond its informal limits. In describing this disjuncture between administrative structures and collective mentalities, Favier notes one instance among many of the tendency for the organic life of the city to prevail over structures conceived to channel or control it.

In no respect was this tendency for the city to transcend artificially imposed limits more apparent than in its economy. Favier gives due importance to the economic foundations of Paris, with particular attention to the city's significance as a port. In the 1830s, the maritime traffic served by Parisian docks equalled that of all other major French ports put together. The expansion of industry into the suburbs, first to escape corporate regulation and then to escape the octroi or customs toll that was levied until 1943, reflected the impossibility of regulating the city's growth. Haussmann's annexation of the suburbs in 1860 was much resented, not just because it divided suburban villages but also because it pushed the octroi boundary outwards, depriving industries of the tax haven which had in many cases determined their choice of location.

In considering the features that made Paris "an exceptional city," Favier insists upon the city's function as a capital and upon its role as the focal point for the processes of centralization that have so powerfully fashioned French society, drawing provincial students to the Sorbonne and to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, artists to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and writers to the publishing houses and literary salons. Favier focuses on the construction of physical installations for the location of state power. The elaboration of the royal palaces of the Cité, the Louvre, Vincennes, and the Tuileries was a manifestation of the expansion of royal authority under Capetian, Valois, and Bourbon rulers. Functioning effectively as a capital city from the time of Philip Augustus, Paris preserved that role even when kings were absent, as was the case for much of the fifteenth century. The uneasy relationship between French rulers and their capital, a constant feature of the history of Paris, was already manifest during the reign of Charles V (1364-80), who preferred as his palace Vincennes, outside the city limits, and who built the Bastille fortress to cover his escape route from the city in the event that its citizens became fractious. The concentration of political power in Paris was only partially undermined after Louis XIV established his court at Versailles in 1682. The King's ministers may have followed him to Versailles, but their principal residences and wealth remained in Paris. The offices of the Controller-General were still to be found in Paris even after those of other ministries had moved to Versailles during the reign of Louis XV.

While its role as political capital and as cultural, economic, and administrative centre are obvious features that have made Paris "exceptional," Favier also insists upon other, less obvious features. A chapter on festivals considers the many types of public demonstration that have enlivened Paris streets, from the triumphal entry of Louis XIV in 1660 to the Festival of Federation of 1790; from the riotous carnival celebrations of the nineteenth century to the stodgy July 14 military parades of the twentieth. Marriage celebrations and funerals are also listed, including the transfer of Napoleon's ashes to the Invalides in 1840 and the pantheonization of Victor Hugo, which attracted 800,000 spectators in 1885. Favier's attention to the longue durée leads him to identify the festive spirit as a recurrent feature of the history of Paris. The city has experienced not one, but many "belles époques," when transitory moments of political and economic calm gave Parisians a chance to kick up their heels, such as in the aftermath of the Jacobin terror, during the second Empire, or during the années folles of the 192Os. Favier notes that such festivity was never for everyone, nor did it last.

It is the richness of its detail, particularly concerning the features of everyday existence, that renders Favier's history invaluable. The history of the city's bridges is minutely documented, as is that of its street names, its hospitals, police and fire services, railway stations, and its bus and metro systems. One learns that in 1848, out of four thousand kilometers of railway track in France, thirteen hundred of them extended from Paris; that 200,000 Parisians turned out to watch the ascent of a manned hot-air balloon from the Tuileries on 1 December 1783; that fifty million visitors attended the Exposition of 1900; that the English philanthropist Richard Wallace provided the city with fifty drinking fountains in 1873, each supplied with a cup on a chain that was only removed in 1952, for hygienic reasons; that the demi-monde of prostitution counted 217 maisons closes (licensed brothels) around 1850 and 152 in 1870; that in 1818, there were 133 police stations, of which the National Guard manned 57, the line army 53, the gendarmerie 16, and the fire service 7. There are remarkably few errors, given the book's scope and detail. One regrets the lack of footnotes, while understanding that they would have made the work impossibly large.

Favier's compartmentalized history of Paris - demographics in one box, economics in another, architecture in a third, and so on - points to the difficulty of understanding the city or encapsulating its identity as a whole. The difficulty is underlined by David Harvey, who notes the fragmentary character of much urban writing. TJ. Clark has noted that even as the modern city began to emerge in all its complexity, the demand was created for some form of literary or artistic expression that would be capable of representing it as a totality.2 Writers and artists can resort to metaphor and allegory to achieve that representation. The personification of Paris as a woman has a long history (only briefly, in the aftermath of the July Revolution, has the city been given a male persona). The anthropomorphizing of the city as a sentient being has played a crucial role in the imagination of the city since at least the eighteenth century. Two of the histories considered here also resort to anthropological metaphor to describe Paris. Colin Jones follows Peter Ackroyd's example in defining his history of Paris as "the biography of a city."3 Alistair Home is much closer to Balzac, however, in personifying Paris as a woman. "Has any sensible person," he asks, "ever doubted that Paris is fundamentally a woman?" (p. xiii). In a prologue that will undoubtedly cause feminists to gnash their teeth, Home describes the city's "feminine" traits: "sexy and beautiful, but also turbulent, troublesome and sometimes excessively violent" (p. xiii). Home is unapologetically old-fashioned in Seven Ages of Paris, telling the history of Paris with affection, flair, and an eye for the colourful anecdote. Apocryphal stories are not disdained and the phrase "legend has it ..." makes frequent appearances. There are no concessions made to the Annales school, or even to those historians who have followed Georges Lefebvre in viewing history from the perspective of ordinary men and women. Home very much sees the history of Paris from the top down, from the perspective of the rulers who sought to place their imprint upon it. He is at his best in describing their personalities, liaisons, and foibles. Philip Augustus, Henri IV, Louis Napoleon, and Charles de Gaulle receive plaudits for their contributions to the city's development, while Napoleon I receives a somewhat mixed review: praise for building the Ourcq canal and the quais along the Seine; praise for introducing the system for numbering Paris streets and censure for so many unfinished projects and monuments (the rue de Rivoli, the Palais de Chaillot, and the Arc de Triomphe). In his characterization of these historical figures, Home steers clear of revisionist historiography. His vision of Louis XIV as an all-powerful autocrat has long been superseded by studies of seventeenth-century absolutism and his representation of Napoleon rescuing France from the corrupt and incompetent government of the Directory owes more to Napoleonic propaganda than to recent scholarship.4

The ordinary people of Paris do not figure prominently in Home's narrative. Generally, his view of them reflects the condescension of the upper classes whose scandals and amusements he so vividly evokes. In discussing the "underclass" of restoration Paris, he uncritically accepts Chevalier's equation of "labouring classes" and "dangerous classes" and cites Eugène Sue to the effect that there were 30,000 thieves in the city.5 Revolutionary movements are given short shrift. The revolution of 1789 is described in language worthy of Taine as the product of "dark forces" released from the earth in a volcanic explosion. The emphasis, even in his reasonably balanced account of the Commune of 1871, is placed upon the irrationality of mob violence and, again echoing Taine, on the role of women. At least he does admit the possibility, if not the likelihood, that the stories of pétroleuses fire-bombing bourgeois homes were mythical. Ironically, most of the violence that punctuates the narrative was perpetrated by the state, not by revolutionary insurgents. Home describes with grisly relish the flaying alive, castration, and dismemberment of the d'Aulnay brothers by Philip the Fair, as well as the quartering of Henri IVs assassin, Ravaillac.

The reader with an eye for colourful detail and elegant prose, not to mention for racy scandal and rumour, will no doubt forgive the book's shortcomings. Its final, lyrical chapter, devoted to the cemetery of Père La Chaise, provides a charming and affectionate tribute to the city and some of its more illustrious inhabitants.

Colin Jones's Paris: Biography of a City is the general survey that has the most to offer. Based on profound and current scholarship, Jones's book is engagingly and unpretentiously written. Although warning that the task is impossible, Jones weaves together the many layers of the city's history with an unerring deftness of touch. His narrative balances consideration of the city's built environment with the lives of the people who inhabited or passed through it. The city's incarnation of successive power systems in its statues, squares, and monuments is dealt with; however, the Parisian tendency to resist authority is noted, not only through periodic bouts of revolution but also through more mundane acts of individual assertiveness. The many Parisian sites of memory that have established themselves in the French collective consciousness are given their place, but Jones also recognizes "places of forgetfulness" such as the Arènes de Lutèce, a restored Roman amphitheatre in the fifth arrondissement, largely ignored except by children in search of a playground. Jones notes the quirky attitudes of Parisians to the city they inhabit, unmindful of its history and with an often "squiffy" sense of its geography.

In Jones's account, Paris is not just the stage where the history of France was played out, but an essential actor in the drama of that history. Having already written an outstanding history of eighteenth-century France,6 Jones provides an authoritative interpretation of the role of Paris in the culture wars of the eighteenth century. Building on the work of Daniel Roche, David Garrioch, and others,7 he emphasizes the importance of Paris in fostering a cosmopolitan, consumer culture that simultaneously undermined traditional neighborhood solidarities and the authority of the monarchs, who had abandoned Paris for Versailles. The social stratification that emerged in eighteenth-century Paris, with the wealthy leaving the central districts for the western suburbs, helped to prepare the social conflicts of the Revolution. The character of the French Revolution was fundamentally determined by the modern urban culture that first began to emerge in eighteenth-century Paris.

Jones possesses an enviable ability to integrate cultural and social history and to explain the broader implications of changes in fashion or social practice. This is most apparent in the many feature boxes that are interspersed throughout the book's chapters, providing insightful essays which pursue particular themes, sites and individuals over the longue durée. The essay entitled "Catacombs," for instance, provides the occasion for a survey of changing attitudes toward death in the modern city, with the late eighteenth century representing a turning point. Traditionally interred in mass graves in Church cemeteries at the city's centre, the dead were now exiled to its periphery, first to fill the underground galleries of the catacombs and then to lie in the pastoral setting of cemeteries like Père La Chaise, where the living could come to seek communion with them. In the nineteenth century, celebrants of the cult of the dead paraded in their thousands to Père La Chaise on All Souls' Day.

Although the harsh material conditions that, until relatively recently, were the lot of most Parisians are never forgotten, Jones is also well aware of the power that Paris has exerted over the imagination. This awareness informs his delightful essay on Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métw. "it proves easier to keep Zazie out of the Métro than to take the Métro out of Zazie" (p. 499). There are echoes of Richard Cobb at his most sympathetic in Jones's dissection of the mundane rituals of taking a ride on the metro. His reminder that riding the metre, with its plethora of stops named for individuals and events from French history, is a form of ancestor worship, is both witty and insightful.

One of the most powerful myths concerning Paris to have excited imaginations is the myth of modernity. This was a myth explored obsessively by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, a vast, posthumously published compendium of reflections on Paris as the capital of nineteenth-century modernity.8 Other writers, notably Patrice Higonnet, have taken up this idea, explaining and interpreting the many Parisian myths and identitities that have captivated writers, artists, and ordinary people.9 There are strong echoes of Higonnet in Jones's book, which emphasizes the intermingling of art and reality in the identification of Paris with modernity. In the nineteenth century, Paris became both the site and the subject matter of artistic modernism, as well as the focus for intense debate about the nature of modernity. It was the power that Paris exerted over the imagination that prompted De Amicis to say that "one never sees Paris for the first time; one always sees it again" (p. 387). Ever aware of the longue durée, however, Jones puts the myth of modernity firmly in its place, reminding us that Paris has been "mythically modern" ever since the time of Philip Augustus: the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment were all golden ages of Parisian modernity.

If modernity did not exactly arrive in Paris with Baron Haussmann, his reconstruction of the city nevertheless marked a significant new stage of development. It is this reconstruction of Paris that is at the heart of David Harvey's Paris: Capital of Modernity, an extensive revision of his Consciousness and the Urban Experience, first published in 1985.10 To Harvey, a concept of central importance to the myth of modernity is that of a radical break with the past. Haussmann, in his own interpretation of the legendary rebuilding of Paris during his tenure as Prefect of the Seine, insisted upon such a break by emphasizing its divergence from previous models or precedents. Haussmann's myth of a radical break was necessary to justify the Empire and to dismiss as irrelevant the welter of reform proposals of the 1840s that might have served as rivals to his own authoritarian solutions to the problems of Paris. Harvey does not admit that Haussmann's prefecture constituted a complete rupture with the past - his plans owed too much to earlier projects and to think-tanks like the Simeon Commission, as well as to the spirit of Enlightenment rationalism. Nevertheless, he does recognize that it was a major turning point.

The Paris of 1870 was very different from that of 1853. Furthermore, Haussmann had set in motion a process of urban transformation that continued long after his fall from power. The miles of new boulevards that replaced narrow, winding streets, the fountains and sewers that improved water supply and waste disposal, the parks that transformed the cess-pits and quarries of Montfaucon and Montsouris into urban gardens for bourgeois leisure, all represented part of a broader, multi-dimensional transformation of urban society. That transformation, says Harvey, had 1848 as its turning point and was manifest in artistic and literary terms, as well as in material ones. Harvey's goal is to use the methodology of historical-geographical materialism, which he has elaborated in previous theoretical works, to examine the many dimensions and inter-relationships of an urban society in the throes of radical change.

Capitalism and class figure prominently in Harvey's interpretation. His analysis of "the organization of space relations," for example, emphasizes that Haussmann's building program was dictated by the needs of capital. Whatever else he may have intended - cleansing the city centre of slums and workers, creating an impressive display of imperial grandeur - the effect of Haussmann's labours was to transform the built environment of the city in the interests of capital by facilitating the circulation of goods and people. Harvey emphasizes that ultimately the rigid structures of the empire could not contain the emergent forces of capitalism and would, like Haussmann himself, eventually fall victim to them. Several chapters are devoted to the relationships between financiers, property-owners, and the state. Haussmann's slippery financial manipulations are explored in the context of a state that sought desperately to forge a class alliance that would ensure the support of both the bourgeoisie and working class. Harvey is impatient with revisionists like Roger Gould who have downplayed the importance of class in the social and political conflicts of the period.11 He emphasizes not only the increasing social segregation of the city as workers were pushed into the suburbs, but also the polarized representation of society - bourgeoisie versus working class - in contemporary rhetoric.

Despite its focus on the material forces that underlay the spatial and social relations of the city, some of the most insightful elements of Harvey's book focus on the cultural dimension. The efforts of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Zola to interpret and define modernity figure prominently, and a lengthy chapter on Balzac emphasizes the writer's understanding of the forces beginning to transform urban society during his own time. Penetrating behind the surface appearance of things, Balzac lays bare the character of modern capitalism, with its aspiration "to annihilate space and time." Similarly, Daumier's sketches are held by Harvey to represent a prescient understanding of the embryonic forces beginning to transform society. The many illustrations that help to sustain Harvey's arguments are one of the delightful features of this book. Daumier's representations of omnibus and railway travel, for example, effectively demonstrate how the new forms of transport undermined traditional notions of intimacy and privacy. In the same way, Harvey brilliantly employs Baudelaire's prose poem, The Eyes of the Poor, to illustrate the ambiguity of the new boulevards, which had become a point where ownership of public space was contested by bourgeois who disported themselves in splendid new restaurants, and by dispossessed workers and their families who could only observe, with "their great saucer eyes," the spectacle of middle class consumption.

One of the themes emphasized by Harvey is that modernity reaches back to tradition for sources of inspiration. One chapter, added since the book was first published, focuses on the Utopian schemes and practical plans for rebuilding Paris during the 1830s and 1840s. Much of what Haussmann accomplished was prefigured by these earlier proposals, which were nonetheless inspired by political ideas that were incompatible with Bonapartism. It is these earlier ideas that are the subject of Nicholas Papayanis's Planning Paris Before Haussmann. While not denying Haussmann's importance in bringing the modern city into being, Papayanis challenges the originality of Haussmann's ideas. In the extensive archive of plans for urban reform from the first half of the nineteenth century, Papayanis finds all the major elements that constitute modern city planning. These elements include comprehensive planning for the city as an organic whole, and emphases on the circulation of goods and people, on order and security, and on hygiene and health. It is clear from Papayanis's thorough investigation that, before Haussmann built the modern city of Paris, it had already been imagined by others. In fact, eighteenth-century thinkers, including writers like Voltaire, architects such as Pierre Patte, and officials like Nicolas Delamare had already made the decisive break between the baroque conception of the city as a space for architectural display to a utilitarian model of the city as rationally planned for the benefit of its inhabitants. Eighteenth-century writers already call for city streets to be made open and clear to facilitate movement, safe and hygienic, open to the air, illuminated by street lamps, and bordered by sidewalks.

The accelerating pace of industrialization and demographic expansion gave an increased urgency to the issue of urban reform at the beginning of the nineteenth century; however, the evident inadequacy of the city's infrastructure resulted in engineers taking over from architects as the leading advocates of urban planning. While distinguishing between various schools of thought - Functionalist, Saint-Simonian, and Fourierist - Papayanis strongly objects to the conventional characterization of any of these schools as "utopian." Even the Saint-Simonians, who were most inclined to think of the ideal city as an abstraction, developed practical plans for the real city of Paris. Stéphane Flachat, for example, devised plans for improving the city's water supply, completing the rue de Rivoli and opening up the crowded central districts of the city. Among the Fourierists, often dismissed for imagining idealized communities or phalansteries in the countryside, there was Perreymond, whose Etudes sur la ville de Paris provided practical proposals for new streets to improve traffic flow and for a massive reconstruction of the city centre - including filling in the left arm of the Seine - to provide a vital central location for important public buildings and services. Papayanis argues that Perreymond's focus on the functional arrangement of space makes his work one of the seminal documents in the history of modern urban planning.

The difference between the Functionalists on the one hand and the SaintSimonians and Fourierists on the other was that the former did not question the existing social and political order. Nevertheless, all three groups were united by their preoccupation with order and security and by their willingness to ignore the specific interests of inhabitants, who might get in the way of their hegemonic schemes for imposing a rational order upon the city. In this, as in so many other respects, they anticipated both Haussmann and many twentieth-century planners, such as Le Corbusier. Papayanis employs the insights of Foucault to interpret plans for the arrangement of space as a way of defining power relations. Thus, a maison commune proposed by Levicomte and Rolland for centralizing police and other essential public services in the heart of each arrondissement was to serve as a means of surveillance and control, regulating the "social question" that became such a preoccupation of the nineteenth century. One can imagine the distaste with which Richard Cobb would have viewed these early modern urban planning projects. Cobb's judgements of modern urban planners were uniformly hostile: "They have little time for individuals and their trying, unpredictable ways, tending to think only in terms of human destiny ... as if people, in rectangular blocks of a thousand, or ten thousand, were to be assimilated to a gigantic set of Lego."12 Writing in 1985, Cobb complained that the urban planners had already assassinated the city he had come to love in the years following the second World War. With the displacement of the last pockets of working-class residents from Belleville and the north-eastern districts, traditional Paris would be dead.

Yet, if the imagination of urban planners has had a powerful impact on the urban reality of Paris, Paris itself has had an impact on people's imaginations that has spanned the globe. This is conclusively demonstrated by Harvey Levenstein's We'll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France Since 1930. A sequel to an earlier volume on American visitors to France before 1930,13 Levenstein's book is filled with a rich testimony from twentieth-century Americans concerning the place of Paris in their cultural baggage. Although Levenstein documents the overall love-hate relationship between Americans and France, it is remarkable to what extent his narrative is dominated by Paris. There have been times - between the wars, for instance - when regions like the Riviera have threatened to eclipse the capital, but for most Americans France meant Paris. Paris meant different things, however, to different Americans at different times. To African-Americans before the civil rights movement it meant freedom: freedom from racial discrimination and freedom to cross the racial divide in social, cultural, and sexual intercourse. For co-eds from American colleges between the wars, Paris represented cultural sophistication, a place to familiarize oneself with the Louvre, polish one's French, acquire the latest fashions and enhance one's self-esteem. For demobilized GIs after World War Two, Paris stood for a good time and easy sex. For students in the 1960s, it stood for the Café des Deux Magots and existentialism - and for easy sex. For middleaged women since the 1950s, Paris has been associated with romance - and sometimes with sex.

In part, American visitors created the city they imagined. Levenstein quotes one of the Americans who was drawn to Montparnasse in the 1940s: "It was the Americans who really made Montparnasse at that period. [W]e gave the spirit to Montparnasse" (p. 103). As ever, image and reality reproduced one another.

Levenstein's book is an insightful, often amusing survey of the sometimes tense relationship between American visitors and their French hosts. American distaste for the French - whether for their lack of personal hygiene, their rudeness, or their determination to fleece Americans - has been matched by French objections to American boorishness and arrogance. At times, notably when an American army of demobilized servicemen ran amok in the aftermath of World War Two and during the recent war with Iraq, relations have been particularly hostile. The post-World War Two American Army's publication of a book for its forces entitled 772 Gripes About the French, which cleverly dismantled the myths that obstructed Americans' appreciation of French society, at least attempted to improve those relations.

Levenstein shows that, in recent years, Paris has lost something of its significance in the American mind. Enrollment in French language and cultural studies programs has dropped at American colleges. And while the attractions of French food and wine have been boosted by journalists preaching their health benefits, the attraction of Paris has dimmed for many young Americans. For African-Americans, too, the rise of racial tensions in France has diminished the country's allure. The primacy of Paris as capital of art has been lost, too, since World War Two. Nevertheless, the books under review themselves bear witness to the continuing power over the imagination exerted by Paris. In an age when massive urbanization has created a score of cities in the developing world that have surpassed the size of Paris, it is surely appropriate that historians have risen to the challenge of exploring the history of this first great metropolis and the many ways it has been lived, experienced, and imagined.

University of Regina

1 Charles Rearick, one of the editors of this volume, provides an excellent introduction situating the contributors' work in the context of recent writing on the history of Paris. Charles Rearick, "Introduction: Paris Revisited," French Historical Studies, 27 (2004), pp. 1-8. Some of the notable recent works on the History of Paris are: the twenty-one volumes of the Nouvelle histoire de Paris, which extends from Paul-Marie Duval, De Lutece oppidum à Paris capitale de la France (Paris, 1993) to Jean Bastié, Paris de 1945 à 2000 (Paris, 2000); Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris (Paris, 1996); Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d'une ville, XIX^sup e^-XX siècle (Paris, 1993); Johannes Willms, Paris: Capital of Europe: From the Revolution to the Belle Epoque (New York, 2002); Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2002); Philip Mansell, Paris Between Empires, 1814-1852: Monarchy and Revolution (London, 2001).

2 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985). Clark's book is an exploration of how Manet and the impressionists sought to answer this demand.

3 Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (New York, 2003).

4 On Louis XIV, see in particular, William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (New York, 1985); on the Directory and Napoleon, see Martyn Lyons, France under the Directory (New York, 1975), Martyn Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (New York, 1994) and Jean Tulard (Irans. Teresa Waugh), Napoleon: the Myth of the Saviour (London, 1984).

5 Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1958). For a powerful critique of the Chevalier thesis, see B.M. Ratcliffe, "Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe. Siècle? The Chevalier Thesis Reexamined," French Historical Studies, 17 ( 1991 ): pp. 542-74.

6 Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715-99 (London, 2002).

7 On Daniel Roche's contribution to the History of Paris, see David Garrioch, "Daniel Roche and the History of Paris," French Historical Studies, 27 (2004), pp. 733-40. see also David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002).

8 Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999).

9 Patrice Higonnet, Paris Capital of the World (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002).

10 David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, 1985).

11 Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995).

12 Richard Cobb, "The Assassination of Paris," in David Gilmour (ed.), Paris and Elsewhere: Selected Writings, (New York, 2004), p. 212.

13 Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago, 1998).

Ian Germani is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Regina. He is co-director, with Dr. Thomas Bredohl, of the course "Capitals of Modernity: Paris and Berlin," an on-site, comparative exploration of the two cities' histories. [For further information see: http://www.uregina.ca/arts/history/forms/ParisBerlinAd.pdf]

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