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Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870-71) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth- Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City (London: Macmillan, 2002).
Colin Jones, Paris: The Biography of a City (New York: Viking, 2004).
Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris before Haussmann (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Pierre Pinon, Paris, biographie d'une capitale (Paris: Hazan, 1999).
As Colin Jones, in the introduction to his Paris: The Biography of a City, noted, given how many titles have been published on the city of Paris, one might think it would be nearly impossible to say something new about the French capital. Nonetheless, new monographs are published regularly examining previously unexplored aspects of Parisian history, attesting both to our fascination with the French capital and to its seemingly inexhaustible historical importance.1 An overview of the city's history, however, must surely be a different story. At first glance, attempting to re-write this oft-told tale appears akin to an effort to reinvent the wheel. And yet, within a five-year period, between 1999 and 2004, four major books appeared on the history of Paris: Pierre Pinon's Paris, biographie d'une capitale, Alistair Horne's Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City, Patrice Higonnet's Paris: Capital of the World, and Colin Jones's Paris: The Biography of a City. All written by eminent scholars, these four works seek to relate a familiar story in a new light, and all but one-that by Alistair Horne-do so by drawing upon the insights of cultural history in an effort to complicate the narrative of the capital's history. As a result, rather than merely a setting in which history happens, Paris becomes an actor in that history, capable of shaping the course of events through its impact on the individuals who live within it. Furthermore, in these histories, the capital exists as much in memory and the imagination as it does in wood, stone, or concrete.
This essay will discuss how a cultural approach to the history of Paris changes not only our...