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  • Paris in Modern Times: From the Old Regime to the Present Day by Casey Harison
  • Sharon L. Fairchild
Harison, Casey, Paris in Modern Times: From the Old Regime to the Present Day. Bloomsbury, 2020. ISBN 978-1-3500-0552-5. Pp. 344.

These past few years have seen a fair amount of scholarship devoted to the urban history of Paris beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, such as the construction boom of housing projects, poor neighborhoods surrounding the city, and recreational structures. Paris in Modern Times is a textbook of Parisian history aimed at upper-division undergraduate or graduate students. It contributes to urban development studies, analyzing the less-studied circumstances of the working classes and poor in Paris, while tracing the development of modernity in the city. This book provides a survey of political events and cultural phenomena in Paris from the end of the Revolution to the early twenty-first century. With its focus exclusively on Paris, it attempts to fill a gap that Harison perceives in the field of French history. This ambitious work has a large scope. Each chapter is organized into four broad categories of politics, society, economy, and culture. They are headed by a chronology and the categories are further divided into subsections. Sidebar articles animate the narrative by treating interesting unique phenomena such as chiffonniers, bouquinistes, bridges of Paris, bread, etc. Paris has always occupied a dominant, yet problematic place in French culture and politics. Regions outside of Paris struggled with the overbearing influence of the capital, yet it was here that modernity was born. It was a center that fostered new political ideas, artistic styles, culture, and philosophy that influenced other countries. Although the text includes passages on literature, music, and art, it emphasizes social history, especially the "Other Paris" and the "Social Question," the working and lower classes. The book is well-suited to be used as a reference, due to its organization, useful chronologies, and the fact that the chapters appear to have been written independently from each other. Because of this structure, however, the narrative is at times disjointed and lacks continuity. The text bounces back and forth in time within the sections, giving rise to the repetition of events and references to individuals already discussed in other contexts. As Harison admits in the introduction, the analysis is broader than it is deep (2), which is evident as the reader would like to discover not only what events took place, but how they developed. Harison's work is laudable for its extensive coverage, detail, and commitment to the story of the "Other Paris," but suffers from a lack of editing. It is flawed by frequent typographical errors, as well as misnomers such [End Page 246] as "likelihood" instead of "livelihood" (90), "sew" instead of "sow (182), "formally" instead of "formerly" (116), and other errors. In addition, references to various images (figures) are problematic. The text (56) refers to Figure 2.5, which should be Figure 2.4. Discussing the number of foreigners in Paris (106), the text refers to an unrelated photo of a shopping arcade ten pages earlier (Figure 4.3, 97); and a photo of the Paris Hôtel de Ville (Figure 7.4) does not support the discussion of tourism. Nevertheless, this is a practical and useful work.

Sharon L. Fairchild
Texas Christian University, emerita
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