Course Guide - French 307: Paris Maymester 2021 -: The 19th Century - Books - A Selection

McAuliffe brings to life a pivotal era encompassing not only the physical restructuring of Paris but also the innovative forms of banking and money-lending that financed industrialization as well as the city's transformation. This in turn created new wealth and flaunted excess, even while producing extreme poverty. Even more deeply, change was occurring in the way people looked at and understood the world around them, given the new ease of transportation and communication, the popularization of photography, and the emergence of what would soon be known as Impressionism in art and Naturalism and Realism in literature--artistic yearnings that would flower in the Belle Epoque. Napoleon III, whose reign abruptly ended after he led France into a devastating war against Germany, has been forgotten. But the Paris that he created has endured, brought to vivid life through McAuliffe's rich illustrations and evocative narrative.

This book is about a major historical figure, Napoleon III, and a political regime. It examines how Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (nephew of the first Napoleon) was able to secure election as President of the Republic and subsequently to launch a coup d'etat to establish a Second Empire. It then considers the ways in which power was exercised by the new imperial regime. Later, apparent stability led Napoleon III to engage in a difficult process of transition towards a more liberal regime; but at the point of success, the decision was taken to go to war against Prussia which resulted in a catastrophic defeat and the destruction of his regime.

The revolution made possible the unprecedented concentration of political authority that Napoleon accrued, and his success in mobilizing human and material resources. Without the political changes brought about by the revolution, Napoleon could not have fought his wars. Without the wars, he could not have seized and held onto power. Though his virtual dictatorship betrayed the ideals of liberty and equality, his life and career were revolutionary.

Napoleon III and Europe investigates, outside the field of France's own political development, those positive changes in the organization of Europe and the world which Napoleon III effected. It examines Napoleon III's attitude towards the so-called nationality principle with regards to the Balkans, and the attention he gave to the fate of the Christian nations in European Turkey. Napoleon's role in the unification of Italy is also discussed. Comprising 10 chapters, this book begins with an analysis of Napoleon's Balkan policy in relation to the Ottoman Empire, as well as his attitude towards the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The two areas of Europe in which the problem of nationality was most acute and complex are considered, namely, the empires of the Hapsburgs and the Turks. Attention then turns to Napoleon's policy towards Italy and its unification. The process of Italian unification is discussed in relation to European politics during Napoleon III's reign. Napoleon's foreign policy on Europe and the diplomatic actions of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck are also examined, along with his contributions to the development of European politics and culture. The final chapter is a selective bibliography of Europe between 1852 and 1890.

This book provides a concise, accurate, and lively portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte's character and career, situating him firmly in historical context. (…) By his late twenties, Napoleon was already one of the greatest generals in European history. At thirty, he had become absolute master of Europe's most powerful country. In his early forties, he ruled a European empire more powerful than any since Rome, fighting wars that changed the shape of the continent and brought death to millions. (…) . Bell emphasizes the importance of the French Revolution in understanding Napoleon's career. The revolution made possible the unprecedented concentration of political authority that Napoleon accrued, and his success in mobilizing human and material resources.

Originally published in 1968, this book follows the life of Louis Napoleon, from his birth, to his exile and education, his time as a 'political pretender', a 'political prisoner' and finally, a citizen.

In the two decades between 1850 and 1870 Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, created the modern city of Paris out of the congested and ill-equipped capital of the 18th century. They gave Paris many of its present major streets, its great municipal parks, the Central Markets, the Opera House and other well-known buildings, as well as a water supply system and a network of sewers that still serve the city. The various factors of the venture: the city's rapidly increasing population, the challenging engineering problems, the political complications, and the clash of personalitites involved are here considered. The author presents the whole undertaking in the perspective of French political and economic history, shows its relation to the public health movement of the mid-nineteenth century, and explains its significance in the history of city planning. Originally published in 1958. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and middling provincials, of obscure historians and intellectual luminaries. Arguing that the "local" and modernity were interlaced, rather than inimical, between the 1820s and 1890s, Gerson explores the diverse uses of local memories in modern France--from their theatricality and commercialization to their political and pedagogical applications. The Pride of Place shows that, contrary to our received ideas about French nationhood and centralism, the "local" buttressed the nation while seducing Parisian and local officials. The state cautiously supported the cult of local memories even as it sought to co-opt them and grappled with their cultural and political implications. The current enthusiasm for local memories, Gerson thus finds, is neither new nor a threat to Republican unity. More broadly yet, this book illuminates the predicament of countries that, like France, are now caught between supranational forces and a revival of local sentiments.

Fin 1897. L'affaire Dreyfus déchire la France. S'opposent avec violence les défenseurs de la révision du procès et les ligues patriotes ou antisémites. C'est dans ce contexte que Zola écrit sa Lettre à la France - " aux petits, aux humbles, à ceux qu'on empoisonne et qu'on fait délirer " - et sa Lettre à la jeunesse- à l'occasion de l'agression d'un grand dreyfusard par les ligueurs étudiants. (See: Babelio [https://www.babelio.com/livres/Zola-Lettre-a-la-jeunesse-Lettre-a-la-France/412582].

The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and aesthetic debates that gave birth to our understanding of the individual as a self-creating, self-determining agent. Carla Hesse tells this story, delivering a capacious history of how French women have used writing to create themselves as modern individuals. Beginning with the marketplace fishwives and salon hostesses whose eloquence shaped French culture low and high and leading us through the accomplishments of Simone de Beauvoir, Hesse shows what it meant to make an independent intellectual life as a woman in France. (...)

Published in 1981: This book is two-hundred Catalogues of the Major Exhibitions reproduced in facsimile in forty-seven volumes.

Pierre Mettra nous présente avec beaucoup de passion l’une des plus grandes affaires judiciaires de la Troisième République. Accusé et condamné à tort pour un crime qu’il n’a pas commis, Alfred Dreyfus subit de plein fouet l’antisémitisme latent de cette fin de XIXe siècle. Un long combat s’engage alors afin de démontrer son innocence. Mais l’affaire devient rapidement un problème de société et les dissensions finissent par gagner l’Assemblée. La République vacille à son tour et Paris est sur le point d’imploser. » Stéphanie Dagrain (ed.)

Originally published in 1981, French Cities in the Nineteenth Century analyses large-scale processes of social change, and looks at how this affected the growth of towns and cities of nineteenth century France. The book addresses how this change affected the politics of life in France during the nineteenth century, as well as how the city was organised. Urbanization created new uses of space, and new concerns for the people that lived among them and the book looks at how social change was a collective experience for the people of France and how this transformed the societies in which they lived.

"Ce fut le 15 avril 1664 que Louis XIV manda près de lui Lenôtre et lui ordonna de dresser les plans du jardin des Tuileries. Neuf mois après, ils furent approuvés par le roi, et ce magnifique jardin fut planté sur une longueur de 500 toises et une largeur de 170." Préface; Du jardin des Tuileries; Des dames dinerai-je ?; La terrasse des Feuillans; Le lion messager; Les deux terrasses, ou petits bastions; Comment deux lignes parallèles, prolongées à l'infini, ne se rencontrent jamais; Des oiseaux; Des chaises; Le printemps aux mimes; Des femmes coquettes; De l'été aux Tuileries; Les jolies et gracieuses; Des sentimentales; Des enfans; Nouvelle authentique; Le lévrier et le petit dessin; Le monsieur aux mollets; Les gardes nationaux et les chiens; Des demoiselles à marier, ou la pêche aux maris.

Extrait : "Avec les heures avancées de la soirée, dès que le silence s'est fait sur Paris et que lentement, comme à regret semble-t-il, le soleil a disparu derrière les hautes maisons dont il a, un instant, incendié les toits, on dirait que, tout à coup, la ville se transforme ainsi qu'en un changement à vue. Même l'aspect topographique paraît se modifier..."

Extrait : ""Je n'ai jamais rien été, je ne suis rien, et je ne serai jamais rien. Pourquoi alors, me demandera-t-on, raconter vos souvenirs ? Pourquoi ? Parce que, favorisé par le hasard, j'ai eu cette bonne fortune, depuis 1840, d'être toujours placé aux premières loges pour voir et entendre les comédies et les tragédies qui ont été jouées à Paris, et approcher de très près les grands comédiens qui ont tour à tour paru sur la scène.

A sparkling account of the nineteenth-century reinvention of Paris as the most beautiful, exciting city in the world In 1853, French emperor Louis Napoleon inaugurated a vast and ambitious program of public works in Paris, directed by Georges-Eugè Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine. Haussmann transformed the old medieval city of squalid slums and disease-ridden alleyways into a "City of Light" characterized by wide boulevards, apartment blocks, parks, squares and public monuments, new rail stations and department stores, and a new system of public sanitation. City of Light charts this fifteen-year project of urban renewal which -- despite the interruptions of war, revolution, corruption, and bankruptcy -- set a template for nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban planning and created the enduring landscape of modern Paris now so famous around the globe. Lively and engaging, City of Light is a book for anyone who wants to know how Paris became Paris.

Focusing on one of photography's birthplaces, Paris and the Cliché of History tells the story of how photographs came to be imagined as documents of the past. Author Catherine E. Clark analyzes photography's effects on historical interpretation by examining the formation of Paris's first photo archives at the Musée Carnavalet and the city's municipal library, their use in illustrated history books and historical exhibitions and reconstructions such as the 1951 celebration of Paris's 2000th birthday, and the public's contribution to the historical record in amateur photo contests. Despite the photograph's growing importance in these forums, it did not simply replace older forms of illustration, visual documentation, or written text. Photos worked in complex and shifting relation to other types of pictures as photographers, popular historians, and publishers built on the traditions and iconography of painting and engraving in order to both document the past scientifically and objectively and to reconstruct it romantically. In doing so, they not only influenced how Parisians thought about the city's past and how they pictured it; they also ensured that these images shaped how Parisians lived their own lives--especially in deeply charged moments such as the Liberation after World War II.