Abstract
Both Gambetta and Léon had come to the capital in their youth in pursuit of personal advancement. Paris was the city of opportunity, unrivalled by any provincial centre. Thanks to the massive programme of urban renewal commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III in 1852 and overseen by the Prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Paris had gradually been transformed into an impressive imperial capital. By 1870, it offered all the amenities that modern technology could provide. Gone were most of the narrow, dark lanes and ramshackle buildings of the medieval city. Gone, too, were the leather works and slaughterhouses that assailed the senses. Paris became the modern city familiar to today’s tourists, with its grand boulevards and sidewalks, its low-rise apartment blocks, its department stores, and its array of parks and gardens.2 It was the centre of intellectual and cultural life, the home of the leading institutions of education, the law and government. For a courtesan like Léon, or an aspiring lawyer like Gambetta, there was no better place to be.
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Notes
David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995); David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York; London: Routledge, 2003), 125–40; Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (London: Penguin, 2004), 345–52; David H. Pinkney, NapoLéon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).
Julia Csergo, ‘Extension et mutation du loisir citadin: Paris XIXe siècle-début XXe siècle’, in L’Avènement des Loisirs 1850–1960, ed. Alain Corbin (Paris: Aubier, 1995), 125–6, 132–8; Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
On the evolution of promenading, see Laurent Turcot, Le Promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Cf. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1859–60). Walter Benjamin’s studies of Baudelaire’s work, and his own extensive writings on the modern city, are generally credited with initiating the burgeoning interest in the study of flânerie. Cf. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
On gender and flânerie, see Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society 2 (1985): 37–48; Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Post-Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Schwartz argues that Benjamin’s flaneûr was an urban type, not a gendered individual (‘Walter Benjamin for Historians’, ‘¶28–9).
Gambetta to Léon, 3 Nov. 1877, 77.53/70. Cf. Judith G. Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades 1750–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 76–81, 132–3. There is some debate over when ready-made clothing for women became commonplace. Michael Miller suggests the 1880s (The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], 50). Philippe Perrot links it to the rise of the department store from the 1860s (Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Richard Bienvenu [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 54–8).
Juliette Adam, Mes Sentiments et Nos Idées avant 1870, 6th edn (Paris: Lemerre, 1905), 309–14.
See Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 221–4; Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
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© 2012 Susan K. Foley and Charles Sowerwine
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Foley, S.K., Sowerwine, C. (2012). ‘We’ll go and laugh at the Palais-Royal’. In: A Political Romance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230369481_6
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