Paris: Capital of the World (review)

I think it was James M. Barrie, Peter Pan’s creator, who defended George Bernard Shaw against a critic who accused him of being scattered-brained: ‘At least he has brains to scatter.’ The quip may serve as a commentary on Patrice Higonnet’s lavishly produced, erudite, witty, and smart book.

All books about Paris are necessarily idiosyncratic. The city is so big, so diverse, its history so long, dense, and rich, the literature on Paris so daunting, that one must pick and choose carefully. Higonnet’s Paris is a cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth century, with significant glances backward and forward. He sees Paris with a baroque sensibility, celebrating the marvelous complexity of the place. He has read both broadly and deeply and Paris is punctuated with tid-bits that even the most devoted lover of the city will find unfamiliar. I choose almost at random a couple such. The fashionable English gardens of the Parc Monceau, we learn, were a burial ground for dozens of Communards. (p. 82). The Académie was granted a home in the royal apartments of the Louvre in 1699, “though they had to share it with the skeleton of an elephant dissected by Claude Perrault.” (p. 131)

There is also much that soars above these asides. Higonnet’s treatment of opera in Paris as a faithful reflection of the society that enjoyed it is not new, but is brilliantly done. There is a chapter on Paris as the “Capital of Science,” which it truly was for a time. But by the second half of the 19th century Parisian science, “though republican in principle, became...masculinist, dependent on patronage, and often unoriginal.” A contrary myth, in Higonnet’s vocabulary, then emerged. The most famous French scientist of the century, Louis Pasteur, presented himself as a solitary genius, suppressing the contributions of young colleagues. (p. 146–7)

Paris was also the undisputed capital of the production and sale of art until the Occupation. The “great moments in Parisian painting coincided...with the great moments of Paris as capital of modernity: its genesis (David and the Revolution) and its blossoming (the Impressionists and the Haussmannization of Paris).” But “when Paris gradually ceased to be the capital of change, innovation, and modernity, art migrated across the Atlantic.” (p. 423) As always the state was instrumental. Higonnet traces the history of the Salon from beginning to end and notes along the way Napoleon’s careful cultivation of artists. “Many were decorated”, he writes, and “without notable exception,” they “came through when he needed them: the Salon of 1808 alone features twenty-seven portraits of the emperor.” (p. 410)

His chapters on the Surrealists, on sex, on crime, on pleasure are all rich in detail bedecked with all the most recent flowers of cutting-edge historical scholarship. Higonnet is also a skilled literary critic. “Three Literary Visions” (chapter 11) is a sensitive appreciation of Balzac, Baudelaire, and Zola. Henry James’s The Ambassadors is also lovingly presented:

But his renewal (he writes of Chad) like Haussmann’s urban renewal, is in some respects troubling. His behavior has become theatrical and superficial. The young man wears a mask: “It’s like the new edition of an old book that one has been fond of—revised and amended, brought up to date, but not quite the thing one knew and loves.” Like Haussmann’s Paris, in other words.

(p. 334)

Higonnet uses several sophisticated conceits to organize his material. One is Haussmann’s transformation of Paris into the quintessentially modern city (a reputation it had at the time). Another is myth and phastasmagoria. His treatment of Haussmann is conventional, although he does not cite the Prefect’s Mémoires nor any of the recent literature on the man and his work. He has very little to say about architecture, the economics or politics of the urban renewal projects, about how Paris was (or is) governed, or about Haussmann’s career. He does, however, correctly note that Walter Benjamin...