The Life of the City: Space, Humour, and the Experience of Truth in Fin-de-siècle Montmartre par by Julian Brigstocke (review)

as it sprung “from the medieval mason’s mind” (255). While there is room for debate in certain instances of Bressani’s application of psychoanalysis, he nevertheless makes a compelling case that the deaths of Viollet-Le-Duc’s parents and the strict tutorship of his uncle Étienne Délecluze (the staunchly neo-classic critic of the Journal des débats) at least in part explain the architect’s restless pursuit of restorative or healing projects. As the closing chapters of Bressani’s engaging monograph suggest however, even Gothic art and architecture were not enough to make up for the humiliating loss and ruin left in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war. Transcending history by turning to geology and the sublime energy evoked by mountain formations, Viollet-le-Duc, even at the end of his life and career, continued to harbor an insatiable vitalism that now aimed to reconcile natural creation with technology. And therein lies Bressani’s crucial take-away point: if Viollet-le-Duc’s legacy conjures a quaint neo-Gothic sensibility, an extensive archeology of his writings and projects unearths a surprising trove of progressive, unsettling designs for churches, civic buildings, and even anatomical machines that all rely on the “prosthetics” of iron beams and artificial mechanisms. Thus,Viollet-le-Duc pointed the way to postmodernism’s preoccupation with how the creative act can compete with relentless and global dynamics of rapid change and violent, mass-scale destruction. It is only a shame that Bressani decides to end with someone else’s words instead of his own. While his reference to Hal Foster’s “Prosthetic Gods”in light of Viollet-le-Duc’s disconcerting drawings is evocative, it is Bressani who has utter command of the formidable architect from start to finish. Indeed, he leaves no stone unturned. University of Delaware Karen F. Quandt Brigstocke, Julian. The Life of the City: Space, Humour, and the Experience of Truth in Fin-de-siècle Montmartre. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4094- 4896-9. Pp. 230. £65. Montmartre. This magical name conjures up steep, winding streets, vineyards, windmills, breathtaking views of Paris, cabarets, and la vie bohème during the fin de siècle (1880–1914), but also the Paris Commune in 1871 and its bloody aftermath when government troops executed thousands of communards. The construction of the Sacré-Coeur basilica atop Montmartre by the new republican regime in the name of national reconciliation was intended to expiate the sins of the rebellious city, stand as a symbol of the return to moral order, and reconnect Montmartre with its timehonored royal and Catholic roots (it was here that St. Denis, the patron of France, was martyred). However, the famous basilica with its gaudy Roman-Byzantine dome did little to reduce tensions in the tumultuous first decade of the Third Republic, when Left and Right struggled to find a modus vivendi, though it certainly contributed to the allure of la butte, which went from a sleepy village on a hill in northern Paris, seemingly 242 FRENCH REVIEW 89.2 Reviews 243 immune to gentrification intra muros, to a bastion of an alternative lifestyle, at once accommodating toward Parisian bourgeois looking for an evening of fun and keeping alive a spirit of rebellion against authority. Before crass commercialism won out, the Montmartre avant-garde aspired to a new authority based on“Equality, Imagination, and Pleasure,”i.e.,“anarchist ideals of local autonomy,self-determination,and equality” (x), a new ethos based on artists’ “affective experience,” not “tradition or scientific expertise” (xi). The famous Chat Noir cabaret had a sign at the entrance showing a black cat with the exhortation: “Passerby. Halt! Be modern” (29), a bold invitation to revolt. In his insightful analysis of Poe, Baudelaire, and Manet, the author shows how the enigmatic black cat became“the quasi-mystical signifier of unrepresentable forms of life, experience and truth beyond the boundaries of the human subject” (29). The Chat Noir published L’Anti-Concierge and was home to avant-garde groups with fanciful names, such as the Hydropathes and the Incohérents, as well as a motley crew of wannabe artists who cultivated a carnivalesque humor (23), aka“fumisme...