City of light, city of shadows: Paris in the Belle Époque

A thematically driven history of a vastly changing Paris from the 1870s to World War I. The term Belle Époque was applied later to this period, as a nostalgic celebration of the Eiffel Tower, Beaux Arts, and the can-can, yet in reality it was a time of massively disruptive advances in building, technology, equality, social justice, politics, and economics. Rapport, a professor of history at the University of Glasgow and author of 1848: Year of Revolution and The Unruly City, focuses primarily on two dominating currents--radical politics and the concept of modernity--throughout this authoritative work. The author begins with the tension involved in the construction of the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, symbol of reactionary French Catholicism, and the Eiffel Tower, centerpiece for the Universal Exposition of 1889--both of which were the result of significant technological progress. That progress also brought electricity (Paris became "the city of light") as well as industrial displacement, already underway with the other construction projects of Baron Georges Haussmann. As Rapport points out, the resultant squeezing of the poor in Montmartre was poignantly portrayed in the "naturalism" of novelist Emile Zola. Other themes Rapport tackles are the growth of consumerism; the codification of literacy; the abolition of censorship, thus feeding a huge newspaper industry; and the rise of feminism, which the author illustrates through the work of author Marguerite Durand, publisher of La Fronde. The author also looks at the social pressure from both right and left to address the deepening sense of social injustice and inequalities in the form of violent anarchism and syndicalism, and he devotes several chapters to the Dreyfus Affair--especially the role of the media in airing the truth (Emile Zola's "J'accuse") and spurring proliferation of what might be called "alternate facts." A strikingly rendered portrait of the era's fervent belief in progress. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.