Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars by Brooke L. Blower, and: Whose Spain? Negotiating “Spanish Music” in Paris, 1908–1929 by Samuel Llano, and: Twilight of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends through the Great War by Mary McAuliffe (review)

As hard as it may be to imagine the high moments of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Parisian revolution—the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on the place de la Concorde in 1793, Lamar-tine haranguing the crowd at the Hotel de Ville in 1848, the crash of the Vendome Column in 1871—the Parisian riots of May 29, 1913, remain in many ways more mysterious still. It is almost impossible to imagine the cultural self-assurance and quixotic nostalgia that would have allowed Parisian cultural elites to scream “Ta gueule!” and “Taisezvous!” almost as soon as the conductor entered the orchestra pit of the newly minted Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to conduct the opening night of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. That night, we are told, everything changed.

But is it possible that such a benign and anecdotal cultural event is worthy of such extraordinary proclamations? No doubt some of our cultural histories of the period have overstated its importance. And yet, as the books discussed here suggest, this event and other quotidian cultural events like it in Paris during the early decades of the twentieth century should not be set aside entirely, for they may be particularly telling about the cultural politics of Paris and their unquestionable place in the national, European, imperial, and world flows of people, ideas, trends, and objects that had gained extraordinary steam by the second decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, the city of Paris did not sit neatly in its French box in these tumultuous years: far from a neatly yoked Russian doll, quietly nesting inside the larger scales of the nation, Europe, and empire, Paris was something more like the young Lydia Sokolova who danced in every direction on stage in spite of the audience’s cries on the night of May 29, 1913. Paris vibrated as it sat at the intersection of the multiple scales of the competing nations and empires structuring political and cultural life across the globe.

Less a place than a process, Paris therefore unfolded in the white heat of the cultural politics embedded in the “twilight of the belle époque,” the World Wars, the Roaring Twenties, the economic collapse of the 1930s, and the rise of unprecedented mass ideologies. Within this process, the civilizational appeal of Paris lost none of its superb. To the contrary, it made the city a jewel in the crown of every European belligerent, ideologue, aspiring artist, or cultural critic from around the world. In this cacophonous context, far more than a mere French capital, the city secured its position as the arbiter of a new international “modern” taste. It also became a key site for defining the contours of nationalism of other nations like Spain and the United States and finally provided a stage for the ideological agonism tearing at the world in the first half of the twentieth century amidst the explosion of a new cultural politics of the right. The three books discussed here bring forward these central features of cultural politics in the first decades of the twentieth century by walking us through the streets of the global metropolis that was Paris.

Arbiter of International Taste

The list is long, very long: Setting aside the French, of course, an arbitrary and...