Abstract
This chapter argues that by the 1840s Paris was cast as the unchallenged capital of amusement, elegance and fashion and that Paris became the capital of modernity to a significant extent. Paris had been the center of elegance and fashion since the era of Louis XIV, and through Restoration was frequently called the capital of taste and pleasure. However, new print media and the dramatic expansion of publishing from the 1830s enabled the rapid enhancement of the reputation of Paris for a much broader audience through countless publications devoted to Paris, visitors’ accounts, guidebooks, magazines, and other texts and images. The regime of the July Monarchy, along with publishers and entrepreneurs, collectively engaged in what can be construed as city marketing. This chapter builds on recent, nuanced interpretations of Paris of the July Monarchy as simultaneously including archaic and modern dimensions and undergoing some rapid changes in the 1840s, but focuses on the modern character much more.1 This chapter argues that the modernity of Paris, especially of the elegant areas frequented by tourists, became increasingly dominant in the French and foreign imaginary about Paris by the early 1840s.
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Notes
See Philippe Vigier, Paris pendant la Monarchie de Juillet (1830–1848) (Paris: Association pour la publication d’une histoire de Paris. Diffusion Hachette, 1991)
See Carol Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Maurice Agulhon, Le Cercle dans la France bourgeoise 1810–1848 (Paris: EHESS, 1995).
Philip Mansel, Paris between Empires 1814–1852 (London: John Murray, 2001), 322–323.
Bertier de Sauvigny, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, 126; W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3.
Mariana Starke, Travels on the Continent: Written for the Use and Particular Information of Travellers (London: John Murray, 1820), 6.
Lady Morgan, France in 1829–30, 2nd ed. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1831) v.1, 47, 51.
Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2.
Lloyd Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 15–22
Louis Desnoyers, Jules Janin, Old-Nick et al., Les Etrangers à Paris (Paris: A. Warée, 1844).
A. Lemaistre, A Rough Sketch of Modern Paris (London: J. Johnson, 1803), 175.
Lady Morgan, France in 1829–30, cited in Charles Simond, Paris de 1800 à 1900 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Ciel., 1900–1901) v.1, 383–384
Jules Janin, The American in Paris during the Summer (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1844), 70.
Victor Ratier, “Les Champs-Elysées” in Charles Philipon ed., Paris et ses environs. reproduits par le Daguerréotype (Paris: Aubert et Cie., 1840), 3
Delphine de Girardin, Lettres parisiennes v.1, Aug. 2, 1839: 498–499.
Hittorff, Un architecte du XIXe, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Le Musée, 1986), 75–109; Jean Aillaud ed., Les Champs-Elysées 1789–1989 (Paris: Le Ministre de la Culure, de la Communication des Grands Travaux et du Bicentenaire, 1990), 33.
Hittorff, Un architecte du XIXe, 75–109; Donald David Schneider, The Works and Doctrine of Jacques Ignace Hittorff (1792–1867): Structural Innovation and Formal Expression in French Architecture (New York: Garland Press, 1977), 431–493.
Pozzo di Borgo, Les Champs-Elysées, 19, 101. On café-concerts see Concetta Condemi, Les Cafés-concerts. Histoire d’un divertissement, 1849–1914 (Paris: Ircam, 1992).
Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, III, Sept 23, 1846, 365
Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, La France et les Français vus par les voyageurs américains, 1814–1848 (Paris: Flammarion, 1982)
Anne Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante ou la formation du Tout-Paris, 1815–1848 (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 331.
Georg Kohlmaier and Barna von Sartory, Houses of Glass: A Nineteenth-Century Building Type, trans. John C. Harvey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 37
Victor Hugo, The Memoirs of Victor Hugo. With a Preface by Paul Meurice, trans., John W. Harding (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1899), 265, 266.
M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 68.
Richard Becherer, Science Plus Sentiment: César Daly’s Formula for Modern Architecture (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 176.
John Sanderson, Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1838), 62–63.
Un Flâneur, “Le Flâneur à Paris” in Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un v.6, 98, 104–105. On the flâneur see Keith Tester ed., The Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994)
Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
Esther Leslie, “Flâneurs in Paris and Berlin,” in Rudy Koshar ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002)
Dana Brant, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–10.
Gaëtan Niépovié, (pseudonym of Karol Frankowski), Etudes physiologiques sur les grandes métropoles de l’Europe occidentale (Paris: Ch. Gosselin, 1840), 26–29, 40, 108, 118.
Jules Janin, Un Hiver à Paris, 3rd ed. (Paris: Cumer, 1845), 32, 93.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York and London: Da Capo Press, 1986), 13.
Honoré de Balzac, “Histoire et Physiologie des boulevards de Paris. De la Madeline à la Bastille,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Honoré de Balzac (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2009), 445–456: 446–447.
John P. Hiester, Notes of Travel, Being a Journal of a Tour in Europe (Philadelphia: James M. Campbell, 1845), 97.
Cited in Siegfried Kracauer, Orpheus in Paris, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (New York: Alfred A. A. Knopf, 1938), 70.
Bonnie L. Grad and Timothy A. Riggs, Visions of City and Country: Prints and Photographs of Nineteenth-Century France (Worcester: Worcester Art Museum and the American Federation of Arts, 1982), 226–253.
Daniel Oster and Jean-Marie Goulemot, La Vie parisienne. Anthologie des moeurs du XIXe siècle (Paris: Sand/Conti, 1989), 21
See in particular the extremely popular Paris Anecdote. Les industries inconnues (Paris: P. Jannet, 1854/1984) by the nightwalker, Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont. Also see Delattre, Les Douze Heures noires; Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998).
Janin, Un Hiver à Paris, 191. Ségolène Le Men and Luce Abélès, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Panorama social du XIXe siècle, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1993).
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T. O. Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978) v.2, 505–518.
Heinrich Heine, French Affairs. Letters from Paris, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, v.2 Lutetia (New York: United States Book Company, 1893) Dec. 11, 1841: 253.
Ludwig Börne, “Briefe aus Paris,” Gesammelte Schriften 9, 5–9, cited in Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1997), 159.
Caroline Le Roy Webster, ”Mr. W. & I,” Being the Authentic Diary of Caroline Le Roy Webster, during a Famous Journey with the Hon. Daniel Webster to Great Britain and the Continent in the Year 1839 (New York: Ives Washburn, 1942), 164–165.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson v.1, 1813–1835, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 386, 390–391.
Le Roy Webster, Mr. W & I 169; Anne-Claude Lelieur and Raymond Bachollet, Célébrités à l’affiche (Lausanne: Conti, 1989), 56.
Henry Coleman, European Life and Manners in Familiar Letter to Friends (London: John Petherham, 1849) v.1, 35
John Henry Sherburne, The Tourist’s Guide: Or Pencillings in England and on the Continent (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieher, 1847)
Paris et ses environs par arrondissement. Distribué aux voyageurs dans les principaux hotels, Apr. 1845. Dollingen and Desorgy’s Le Panorama de l’industrie, guide de l’acheteur (Paris: Dollingen et Desorgy, 1837)
G. M. Dreyfus ed., Annuaire de la publicité (Paris: Ollendorf, 1895), 171.
Later in the century the readership of the magazine changed to the conservative middle class. Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age, trans. Andrew Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 120.
Reprinted in Edmond Texier, Tableau de Paris (Paris: Paulin et le Chevalier, 1852) v.2, 198
Martha Babcock Amory, The Wedding Journey of Charles and Martha Babcock Amory (Boston: Privately Printed, 1922), 19.
David Garrioch, Neighborhood and Community in Paris, 1740–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 56–96.
David van Zanten, “Mais quand Baron Haussmann est-il devenu moderne?” in Bowie, Modernité avant Haussmann, 152–164; David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 1, 8–10.
For balanced views of the old and new boulevards see in particular Robert Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988)
Christopher Mead, “Urban Contingency and the Problem of Representation in Second Empire Paris,” JSAH (June 1995) 54:2, 138–174: 167.
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© 2009 H. Hazel Hahn
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Hahn, H.H. (2009). Paris, the Capital of Amusement, Fashion, and Modernity. In: Scenes of Parisian Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101937_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101937_3
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