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Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris 1945-1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
In her latest book, Rosemary Wakeman does for Paris what Kristin Ross (in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies) and Gabrielle Hecht (in The Radiance of France) did for France as a whole: she finds a compelling new angle on the story of national reconstruction after the trauma of the Second World War. Wakeman's innovation is to investigate "public space"-both as lived, socially produced, material places and as imagined, mentally mapped scripts and spaces. Her narrative brings the city to life, dramatizing urban history by vividly depicting cityscape (set), people (characters), and events (plot). Her playful and polished prose provokes the reader's imagination, recalling the sites, sounds, and smells of street life. For those familiar with Paris, the book is a true pleasure to read, bubbling and bristling with local insights and colorful details.
This detailed account of Paris's everyday life not only generates literary appeal, but also has clear scholarly and analytic goals. The canonical view of the 1950s portrays Paris as still dazed by the fog of war, making the era feel like a gap in historical narratives. Many portrayals focus so much on the overwhelming force of post-war modernization that public life seems deflated, squashed by state power and urban planning (even somewhat unexpectedly in more subversive readings like those of Jacques Tati or Kristin Ross). This topdown view gives national actors more credit than local actors, Wakeman contends, and overlooks the vibrant life of the 1950s at street level. What makes the 1950s special, she argues, was the creative energy of local groups staking claim to the capital. This was a largely left-wing and working-class populist staging of the heroic peuple born of the Popular Front, the Resistance, and the Liberation. This creativity was, she admits in her conclusion, eventually compromised by state power, modernizing city planning and American-style commercialization, but only under the Fifth Republic in the 1960s. Her argument thus reframes the word "reconstruction"-before the city was literally rebuilt in the 1960s, Parisians struggled to imagine...