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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 637-638



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Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945. By Richard D.E. Burton (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001) 416pp. $36.50

The first thing that one notices about Blood in the City is its richness, which, only on occasion, bleeds into baroque excess. Historians of Paris will revel in this book because its lush detail fills out the literary associations that the city of Paris elicits like no other. Historiographically, the significance of Burton's book is that it reaches out to historians, art historians, and urban geographers by using place, in this case the city of Paris, as the common terrain upon which to bring to bear the specific insights of literature and literary analysis.

Blood is a recurring motif in Parisian history, and Burton makes it the organizing theme of this book. Burton explores the sacrificial, expiatory, and purgative power of blood, notably by organizing the political and literary reflections of prominent Parisians. From the first victims of the revolutionary crowd in 1789—notably, royal officials—to the purges of the liberation, which diminished the guilt of the many by punishing the egregious guilt of the few, political violence both cleansed and congealed the French body politic. Burton draws upon the organizing model of Pierre Nora's Lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1984) and the ideas of Bataille and Girard, among many others, to work out the anthropological and literary dynamics of the city.1 His analysis moves from site to site and from episode to episode in order to explore the synchronic and diachronic meanings that they evoke.

On the whole, Burton's approach works splendidly. In fact, Blood in the City does double duty as a kind of Guide Littéraire to Paris for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anyone teaching, say, an interdisciplinary or cultural studies course on the city of Paris will want to keep a copy of Blood in the City nearby. Portions of Burton's book read like reverse archaeology. In his chapter on the Place de la Concorde, for example, the author explores some of the deeper historical layers (like the execution of Louis XVI or proposed expiatory monuments) first, while those closest to the surface (the riots of February 1934) are unearthed last. This method allows him to pursue the thematic and ritualistic unities (or discordances) that certain sites evoke; he also explores how meanings embedded in a site inflect the meaning of subsequent events. In lengthy concluding chapters, Burton refers back to these unearthings and makes thematic linkages to other sites.

Burton's unrelenting pursuit of associations in his material can be a limitation. the erudition on display is always impressive, and when it leads to new insights, it can be positively thrilling, but some digressions bring to mind a game of seven degrees of separation, especially when theconnections feel contrived, extravagant, or peripheral to the book's titular object. As a case in point, a discussion of Victor Hugo's [End Page 637] Quatrevingttreize (Paris, 1874) leads, by way of the Vendée and Auvers-sur-Oise, to Arles, the corrida, and, at long last, the ear of Vincent Van Gogh (324). Less is more, surely, except when the desire to make connections over space and time reduces subtlety, as when huge and complex historical topics—the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, the deportations of French Jews from occupied France—are packed into a single dependent clause as if the association were obvious or enriched by glib juxtaposition (230).

Interdisciplinary work exposes scholars to greater risk. Some historians will bridle at Burton's heavy reliance upon anthropology for thematic motifs or analytic insight. Emphasis upon ritual and ritualized meanings tends to drain human events of personality and change, in short, of history. Likewise, a scholar's inevitable dependence on secondary sources for knowledge can leave him at a loss about which secondary sources to consult. Burton's claim that the victims of the repression of the Vendée counterrevolution are "conservatively...

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