Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (review)

The nineteenth-century city is often thought the culmination of urbanization. Not only were new technologies applied to sanitation, public transport, and communication, but the city became an object of deliberate planning instead of a hodgepodge of individual edifices. The early modern city, organic in its growth and frequently its odors, tends consequently to be considered a "failure," with the appearance of numerous problems including overcrowding and insalubrious conditions that would continue for centuries. Karen Newman rejects a sharp break between the nineteenth and previous centuries, arguing that the breakthroughs of the sixteenth century, such as the expansion of the printing press, voyages, scientific discoveries, and new forms of production and consumption, are distinctly "modern" and inform the shape that London and Paris would take under Victoria and Napoleon III.

Before Balzac's Scènes de la vie parisienne and Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, a growing literature of guidebooks, popular street ballads, feuilles volantes, pamphlets, almanacs, newssheets, and city comedies attempted to give a focused identity to Paris, like London, as a distinct configuration of space (a concept that did not exist before the early modern period) in which social classes were in constant danger of mixing. Innovations such as the permanent installation of the Foire St. Germain and the spacious Pont Neuf, unencumbered by the crowded structures atop London Bridge that made it a safe haven for cutthroats, fostered a promiscuity between elite and plebian that the private coach, another novelty, would try to circumvent. At the same time that the public space in Paris was being created – a space in which these publications that sought to define the urban landscape would themselves be hawked, like the present-day stalls of the bouquinistes – the division between public and private was being reinforced, accentuated by the need to avoid the ever-present boue and crotte. This increasing awareness of space underlies the avidity with which romances, such as Scudéry's, were devoured, particularly by women readers who were deprived of the opportunity to travel outside the city by their gender.

Newman's well-documented study is a work of synthesis, bringing together secondary historical sources and focused readings of popular or literary texts (such as the little-read comedies of Pierre Corneille) and arguing for a New Historicist reading strategy that itself blends high and low culture, fact and fictional representation. While not at first glance strongly relevant to nineteenth-century studies, Newman's book makes us aware that the gap between the archaism of Balzac's Paris and the bustling modernity of Zola's Second Empire capital is narrower than it may appear.