Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris by Sun-Young Park (review)

In Ideals of the Body, Sun-Young Park takes the reader to unfamiliar corners of Restoration and July Monarchy Paris in an effort to do a number of things: trace the early history of hygiene reform, with an emphasis on individual bodily health; demonstrate the significance of "threshold spaces," at the boundaries of public and private, in the advent of modernity; and place gendered interactions with space at the heart of urban history. At the same time, she wants to contribute to a strand of urban history that stresses the importance of changes to the urban fabric before Haussmannization. This is an ambitious agenda; that this stimulating and thoughtful book does not entirely pull it off in no way detracts from its considerable achievement.

Ideals of the Body is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Each of the five chapters presents a different type of institutional space concerned with promoting physical well-being: the first three deal with mostly enclosed, semi-private spaces, military gymnasia and boys' and girls' schools, the final two with mostly public settings, leisure gardens (early amusement parks) and sporting facilities. Each chapter follows the same internal structure: a section on medical and pedagogical treatises on the categories of people or conditions requiring treatment, then the main sections analyzing the material and spatial manifestations of the institution, and a brief concluding section on its political valences and the types of controversy or debate they provoked. Park chooses to name each chapter after the social type on whom each institution focuses—the soldier, the schoolboy and schoolgirl, the lionne or woman about town, and the sportsman—but these are largely discursive constructs whose connection to the spaces at issue are sometimes (as with the lionne and leisure gardens) a matter of speculation.

Every chapter in effect takes on the role of a micro-history, linked components of a larger narrative in which healthy exercise and the disciplining of individual bodies, both male and female, help to achieve national regeneration. Originating in the Enlightenment, this narrative took on particular urgency after Waterloo, an era of pervasive anxiety about France's ability to defend itself. Park begins with military training, and specifically the figure of Francisco Amoros, a Spanish officer and pedagogue exiled to France in 1813 for having taken the French side during the Peninsular War. Gymnastics, what Amoros called "the rational science of our movements," at the time included a wide range of physical exercises including military training, climbing, and wrestling, and Amoros brought with him a set of theories and practical techniques for strengthening bodies that found eager adopters in France after 1815. Although Amoros advocated and was given space for extensive facilities, notably a Normal Gymnasium near the Ecole Militaire with distinct areas for soldiers and students, his techniques could be emulated in a fairly simple, sixteen-foot high structural frame known as a portique to which ropes, swings, and other apparatuses were attached. The possibility of decentralizing physical education by installing such frames in schools ensured that Amoros's methods would have a long posterity, even after their democratic undergirding set off a reaction against them, leading to the closing of the Normal Gymnasium in the 1830s.

A similar dialectic structures the institutionalization of exercise and physical education in subsequent chapters, but Park's attention to the diversity of spaces, materials, and situations enlivens her story and for the most part avoids repetitiveness. She shows, for example, that private schools or pensions for boys offered more of a testing ground for the innovative integration of indoor and outdoor exercise spaces than did public lycées (known as royal colleges in her period), which for the most part occupied dilapidated existing spaces requiring more renovation than their budgets allowed. Girls' schools proved even more innovative than those for boys, drawing as they did on the precedent of orthopedic gyms that sought to provide holistic physical training on...