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  • Montmartre: A Cultural History by Nicholas Hewitt
  • Colin Jones
Montmartre: A Cultural History. By Nicholas Hewitt. (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 45.) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2017. xii + 319 pp., ill.

Nicholas Hewitt’s erudite and knowledgeable study is less a history of Montmartre than a chronologically driven exploration of how the locality has functioned from the mid-nineteenth century through to the early 1950s as a ‘site of memory’ (Pierre Nora). The early history of the village, suburb, and then urban neighbourhood is swiftly passed over, although pulling up abruptly in the middle of the twentieth century may seem arbitrary, especially as Hewitt’s brief epilogue on Montmartre and film drops us tantalizingly into the world of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (both 2001). Similarly, aspects of Montmartre’s history get short shrift: notably neglected are the religious associations of a site famous for its early links with Saint-Denis and for the later siting of the Sacré-Cœur. But then Hewitt’s story is stronger on flesh than spirit, and the reek of sex, alcohol, and riotous living prevails over the odour of sanctity. The nub of his approach is to describe how, from the Bourbon Restoration onwards, Montmartre acquired the quintessential mix of characteristics that embodied a specific, highly materialist identity: a geographical marginality that gave it the sense of a ‘frontier’ district; links to transport hubs (the boulevards and the Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord termini); a relative lightness of police surveillance, which stimulated a criminal underworld; bohemianism and political extremism (of left and right); plus cheap, abundant space for popular entertainment and leisure facilities. It was the advent of mass communications from the 1880s that settled this identity and transmitted it nationally and internationally. Although some episodes in Hewitt’s story have been well told by others, none has provided this longue durée framework. And none has explored with greater finesse the way in which Montmartre’s cultural identity was grounded in a knowing self-consciousness. Thus novels and short stories about the locality have mixed fiction with fact-based sense of place; entertainment venues package the spirit of Montmartre to a wide diversity of audiences, ranging from the bourgeois keen on slumming it, through to national and international tourists out for a good time; while the profile of the Sacré-Cœur serves, in a kind of louche counterpoint to the Eiffel Tower, as an establishment shot in films about Paris. The usual Montmartre suspects are here in force (Moulin de la Galette, Chat Noir, Folies Bergère, Moulin Rouge, Bateau-Lavoir, Lapin Agile), but they are considered not only as entertainment venues but as cultural objects that stimulated multiple representations. Although Hewitt is frequently insightful about art, music, theatre, and film, his forte is fiction and his studies of Francis Carco, Pierre Mac Orlan, Roland Dorgelès, Marcel Aymé, and Céline are probably the most striking parts of the book. It is not always an easy read— there is a plenitude of detail that will defeat all but those who already know much of the [End Page 314] story Hewitt has to recount. But, as befits the subject, for those with basic grounding there is pleasure aplenty in this subtle and highly evocative account.

Colin Jones
Queen Mary University of London
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