City of Light, Shadows

For readers of Graham Robb and Simon Schama, this elegantly written, vivid chronicle of Paris during the Belle Époque brings to life some of best-known characters and buildings of the era, and shows how closely the fears and anxieties of the 19th century mirror our own today. Mike Rapport is a historian with the rare ability to engage his reader both on the level of local detail and of sweeping narrative. City of Light, City of Shadows had me spellbound - Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and Art MonstersA fascinating, multi-layered panorama of the evolution of the French capital at a key period in its history - Jonathan Fenby, author of The History of Modern France Paris in the Belle Époque is remembered as a golden age of cultural flourishing and political progress. The period between the revolutionary 1870s and the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the modern French capital take shape: by day Parisians could admire the rising Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur Basilica, while at night they roamed the Bohemian world of the Moulin Rouge. But as Mike Rapport reveals in this authoritative and beautifully written new history, City of Light, City of Shadows, beneath the elegant veneer Paris was at war with itself. For the Belle Époque was also an era of social and religious unrest, arguments over women's emancipation and violent clashes over what it meant to be French.Paris pulsated with pleasure, anxieties and tension stemming from the giddying speed of modernity: blazing electric lights illuminating the night, the first cars speeding down the boulevards, as well as the first Métro trains and aeroplane flights. At the same time reactionary forces reasserted themselves through the new mass media-mostly dramatically in the infamous Dreyfus affair, which exposed the dark heart of French antisemitism. Told through the eyes of the greatest personalities of the age-novelist Émile Zola, feminist activist Marguerite Durand, Vietnamese diplomat Nguyễn Trọng Hợp and socialist politician Jean Jaurès-the book weaves together stories of splendour and suffering, delight and agony, offering a brilliant account of the shadows cast across the City of Light.