Paris Dreams Paris Memories

“A rich and entertaining history of the French capital’s predominant myths and ‘image-making’ from the nineteenth century to the present.” —Roxanne Panchasi, H-France Review How did Paris become the world favorite it is today? Charles Rearick argues that we can best understand Paris as several cities in one, each with its own history and its own imaginary shaped by dream and memory. Paris has long been at once a cosmopolitan City of Light and of modernity, a patchwork of time-resistant villages, a treasured heirloom, a hell for the disinherited, and a legendary pleasure dome. Focusing on the last century and a half, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories makes contemporary Paris understandable. It tells of renewal projects radically transforming neighborhoods and of counter-measures taken to perpetuate the city’s historic character and soul. It provides a historically grounded look at the troubled suburbs. Further, it tests long-standing characterizations of Paris’s uniqueness through comparisons with such rivals as London and Berlin. Paris Dreams, Paris Memories shows that in myriad forms—buildings, monuments, festivities, and artistic portrayals—contemporary Paris gives new life to visions of the city long etched in Parisian imaginations. “A pleasure to read.” —Catherine Clark, H-Urban “Fascinating.” —Nicoleta Bazgan, Contemporary French Civilization “Rearick is an expert guide.” —Jeffrey H. Jackson, Rhodes College “Like a pleasant stroll through the city, one finds much that one has already seen, but also plenty that one has not.” —Stephen Sawyer, French History “Rearick has written not so much a history of Paris, but a history of the history of Paris.” —William Irvine, York University

"This beautiful mémoire will beguile everyone who loves France and should be essential reading for anyone going there for the first time. Ethel and Sara have captured a beloved place through the rosy, whimsical, wacky, tender and honest lens of childhood. Forget three-star dining and luxury travel; this is the France that I love and remember with pleasure. The recipes are simple and soul satisfying--from café fare and home cooking to street food and a village feast. I was enchanted with the evocative photos and charmed by every memory." --Alice Medrich.

In this book, the author provides a comprehensive overview of the intense and sustained work on the relationship between collective memory and history, retracing the royal roads pioneering scholars have traveled in their research and writing on this topic: notably, the politics of commemoration (purposes and practices of public remembrance); the changing uses of memory worked by new technologies of communication (from the threshold of literacy to the digital age); the immobilizing effects of trauma upon memory (with particular attention to the remembered legacy of the Holocaust). He follows with an analysis of the implications of this scholarship for our thinking about history itself, with attention to such issues as the mnemonics of historical time, and the encounter between representation and experience in historical understanding. His book provides insight into the way interest in the concept of memory - as opposed to long-standing alternatives, such as myth, tradition, and heritage - has opened new vistas for scholarship not only in cultural history but also in shared ventures in memory studies in related fields in the humanities and social sciences.

The thrilling story of the Bonnot Gang, a band of anarchist bank robbers whose crimes terrorized Belle Époque Paris, and whose escapades reflected the fast-paced, dizzyingly modern, and increasingly violent period on the eve of World War I. For six terrifying months in 1911-1912, the citizens of Paris were gripped by a violent crime streak. A group of bandits went on a rampage throughout the city and its suburbs, robbing banks and wealthy Parisians, killing anyone who got in their way, and always managing to stay one step ahead of the police. But Jules Bonnot and the Bonnot Gang weren't just ordinary criminals; they were anarchists, motivated by the rampant inequality and poverty in Paris. John Merriman tells this story through the eyes of two young, idealistic lovers: Victor Kibaltchiche (later the famed Russian revolutionary and writer Victor Serge) and Rirette Maîtrejean, who chronicled the Bonnot crime spree in the radical newspaper L'Anarchie. While wealthy Parisians frequented restaurants on the Champs-Élysées, attended performances at the magnificent new opera house, and enjoyed the decadence of the so-called Belle Époque, Victor, Rirette, and their friends occupied a vast sprawl of dank apartments, bleak canals, and smoky factories. Victor and Rirette rejected the violence of Bonnot and his cronies, but to the police it made no difference. Victor was imprisoned for years for his anarchist beliefs, Bonnot was hunted down and shot dead, and his fellow bandits were sentenced to death by guillotine or lifelong imprisonment. Fast-paced and gripping, Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits is a tale of idealists and lost causes--and a vivid evocation of Paris in the dizzying years before the horrors of World War I were unleashed.

Paris and the Cliché of History traces the changing historical meanings of photographs of this city during a century marked by urban renovation, war, occupation, liberation, and visual documentation. Challenging the idea that photographs merely document the past, it calls for new methods of reading photos as material objects with histories of their own and sheds insight on the capital's reduction to an image in the twentieth century.

Thirty-two writers share their observations and revelations about the world's most seductive city. "Whether you have lived in Paris or not, this captivating collection will transport you there." —National Geographic Traveler Paris is “the world capital of memory and desire,” concludes one of the writers in this intimate and insightful collection of memoirs of the city. Living in Paris changed these writers forever. In thirty-two personal essays—more than half of which are here published for the first time—the writers describe how they were seduced by Paris and then began to see things differently. They came to write, to cook, to find love, to study, to raise children, to escape, or to live the way it’s done in French movies; they came from the United States, Canada, and England; from Iran, Iraq, and Cuba; and—a few—from other parts of France. And they stayed, not as tourists, but for a long time; some are still living there. They were outsiders who became insiders, who here share their observations and revelations. Some are well-known writers: Diane Johnson, David Sedaris, Judith Thurman, Joe Queenan, and Edmund White. Others may be lesser known but are no less passionate on the subject. Together, their reflections add up to an unusually perceptive and multifaceted portrait of a city that is entrancing, at times exasperating, but always fascinating. They remind us that Paris belongs to everyone it has touched, and to each in a different way.

Drawing upon a vast body of historical scholarship, Casey Harison's Paris in Modern Times provides the first detailed academic history of Paris in the modern age. Chronologically surveying Paris's history from the Old Regime of the late-18th century through to the present day, this book explores the social, economic, political and cultural developments that come together to tell the story of this iconic city. Each chapter has an introduction and illuminating 'sidebars' that touch upon the ways in which Parisian history has intersected with wider changes in France and beyond. The text, which also includes a wealth of images, maps, and a further reading section, takes the opportunity to place Paris and its history in a broader French, Atlantic and global historical context in order to cover an essential aspect of what has been such an important city the world over. Paris in Modern Times is vital reading for anyone seeking to know more about the history of Paris or the history of France since the French Revolution.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.