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  • Ambitions Tamed: Urban Expansion in Pre-revolutionary Lyon by Pierre Claude Reynard
  • William Doyle (bio)
Pierre Claude Reynard. Ambitions Tamed: Urban Expansion in Pre-revolutionary Lyon. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2009. xxxii, 264. $85.00

The title of this excellent book is slightly misleading. It is not a general survey of the eighteenth-century growth of France’s second city. It is a detailed and analytical account of the career of Jean-Antoine Morand (1727–94), a self-made artistic designer and architect who became one of the most prominent property developers in Lyon between 1744 and the Revolution. Based, however, upon extensive research in the archives of Lyon and its region, it offers an illuminating way into understanding the ways in which this very distinctive city began to outgrow the geographical constraints imposed by the confluence of the two great rivers on which it stands. For centuries the fast-flowing Rhône only had one bridge. The great achievement of Morand’s career was to give it another. His hope was that it would open access from the crowded peninsular city centre to the open country of the Brotteaux eastward and allow the development there of a whole new open and airy suburb. Morand never saw these dreams come to fruition. Only a few people followed his example in moving to live across the bridge, and the area became mainly a pleasure-ground until the mitraillade executions of 1793 gave the Brotteaux a more enduringly sinister reputation. Morand himself was executed during the Terror, caught up in Lyon’s resistance to the Jacobin Convention as he tried to protect his precious bridge during the siege of the city. It took the best part of another century before Lyon began a sustained expansion east of the Rhône.

Much of the book is taken up with analysis of how Morand’s business worked. He owed his early rise to the patronage of the architect Soufflot, but patronage of all sorts was a constant key to his success long after Soufflot had left for Paris. Morand kept well in with the archbishop, with leading magistrates, and with the intendants – one of whom, to his great advantage, went on to be an influential minister at Versailles wielding the final say on many projects, including the bridge. Morand spent many days on the road to and from Paris to maintain his court contacts. Such support was all the more necessary given the range of opposition he regularly encountered from local institutions and vested interests, not to mention rival entrepreneurs. He had a particularly prickly relationship with the famous Hôtel Dieu, the great hospital which looked across the river to the Brotteaux and owned much land and seigniorial rights there – not to [End Page 494] mention a ferry monopoly threatened by the construction of a bridge. Finance was also a constant concern: the assured income which bridge tolls eventually provided was never enough to underpin all Morand’s multifarious schemes. But he was lucky in his choice of a wife, Antoinette Levet, who ran the business single-handed during his frequent absences and was resourceful in maintaining cash flow.

All this makes for a very illuminating case study of how a business needed to operate in the labyrinthine environment of an Ancien Régime city. The well-written text is supported by a very helpful series of maps, tables, appendices, glossaries, and supplementary text boxes. But the misspelling of ‘wary’ as ‘weary’ at several points in the book sometimes makes Morand and his wife seem less energetic than they were.

William Doyle

Department of History, University of Bristol

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