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  • Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris
  • Colin Jones
Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris. By K. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xii + 200 pp. Hb £22.95.

There is much to approve in Karen Newman's part-parallel, part-intertwined history of early modern Paris and London. She focusses on literary texts read historically as well as 'historical' texts of metropolitan provenance and orientation, which she reads with attention to their literary and rhetorical properties. Newman's thematic range is wide, and she is at her best in exploring the multifarious contexts of life in the two capitals (mapping, life both on the streets and in the salons, filth and noise, sex and death) and in highlighting echoes, traces and interpenetrative influences between the 'archival' and the 'literary'. Newman does not, however, craft her analysis of the two cities into a set of historical propositions. Her approach leaves out an awful lot (Wars of Religion, Civil War, Colbert, Christopher Wren, Oliver Cromwell, etc). Despite a strong emphasis on the notion of capital, moreover, there is no discussion of what being a capital might mean for the societies they dominated. She is also more assured on the London side than in the French capital – the compendious footnotes are rarely prolific as regards Paris, rarely straying beyond conventional and dated historical accounts. (Her French is a bit shaky too in places: a mistranslation on pp. 146-7 ends up with her claiming that the streets of Paris were viewed as literally murderous.) The larger claim that Newman's book seeks to instantiate is that the shift to urban modernity which cultural historians conventionally situate in the nineteenth and twentieth century can be backdated to the sixteenth and seventeenth. Many of the barbs that she directs against the customary ignorance shown by many analysts of modernity [End Page 82] towards anything prior to 1800 do strike home. Yet Newman's determination to locate in her period all the later lineaments of modernity becomes forced. She infers linkages between the Parisian galerie du Palais in the early seventeenth century and 21st-century shopping malls (p. 95); one would have hoped she also might have noticed differences. The assumption – here as with other features of modernity-seems to be that because two phenomena partake of an over-arching and transcendent 'cultural logic', one must lead on to the other in untroubled unilinear fashion. It sounds suspiciously like cultural whiggery at its baggiest. One starts to lose confidence, moreover, in Newman's historical judgement. She re-dates, by a full century, Daniel Roche's 'proto-consumer' revolution to her period (p. 93). Her observation, in an account of salon culture, that domestic homes in this period were 'full of chairs' (pp. 117-18) draws on the work of Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun. But this work deals almost entirely the eighteenth century; and indeed all the 'chair' examples she cites as given by the French historian post-date 1700. Such faux pas make the final chapters – in which Newman proclaims the superiority of her own methodology over the misguided archival practices of poor, benighted historians – ring rather hollow. Such comments sound altogether the wrong note, and take a good deal of enjoyment out of a book which contains many fine things.

Colin Jones
Queen Mary University of London
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