Paris in Modern Times: From the Old Regime to the Present Day

Drawing upon a vast body of historical scholarship, Casey Harison's Paris in Modern Times provides the first detailed academic history of Paris in the modern age. Chronologically surveying Paris's history from the Old Regime of the late-18th century through to the present day, this book explores the social, economic, political and cultural developments that come together to tell the story of this iconic city. Each chapter has an introduction and illuminating 'sidebars' that touch upon the ways in which Parisian history has intersected with wider changes in France and beyond. The text, which also includes a wealth of images, maps, and a further reading section, takes the opportunity to place Paris and its history in a broader French, Atlantic and global historical context in order to cover an essential aspect of what has been such an important city the world over. Paris in Modern Times is vital reading for anyone seeking to know more about the history of Paris or the history of France since the French Revolution.

Table of Contents:
List of Images List of Maps List of Tables Introduction - Paris, France and the World 1. Old Regime Paris: The City before 1789 2. Paris, during the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789-1815 3. Paris during the Restoration, 1815-1830 4. Paris during the July Monarchy and the Revolution of 1848 5. Paris during the Second Empire, 1852-1870 6. The Paris Commune of 1871 7. Paris from the Third Republic to the Turn-of-the-Century 8. Paris from the Belle Époque to the Great War 9. Paris from the Great War through Vichy 10. Paris: Post-war through De Gaulle 11. Paris from De Gaulle to Mitterrand 12. Paris from Mitterrand to the Present Chronology Suggested Readings Index

About the Author :
Casey Harison is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, USA. He is the author of The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2008).

Review :
Casey Harison has delivered a gift to colleagues, students, and anyone with an interest in the European city. Wielding communicative skills and perspective born of years in the classroom, Harison has written a capacious and entertaining history of Paris contextualizing the French capital in the global trends of the last three centuries ... This is emphatically a book for today's classroom. [An] excellent survey of the history of Paris. It is at once erudite, lively, and accessible and covers ground from the ancien régime of the 1760s through revolutions and world wars to the devastating fire that burned Notre-Dame Cathedral in April 2019 … Each chapter addresses the political, administrative, economic, and cultural developments of a specific era with cogent explanations that will be valuable for students, general readers, or anyone who just loves Paris. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. The research that has gone into its making is admirable, and ... ['Suggestions for Further Reading'] are both impressively up-to-date and a reminder of the dauntingly fertile field into which reflections on Paris and its histories have to be inserted. This insightful and timely book covers events that have rocked Paris, from the French Revolution to the terror attacks of 2015, and paints an absorbing picture of successive people who have contributed to the creation of the modern city. This is the kind of book instructors yearn for-a highly readable and cogent historical account of modern Paris, informed by the most recent insights and long established scholarship. Harison pulls off a difficult task with gusto, making the careening succession of French regimes since the Revolution appear straightforward, while enlivening that account with intriguing and surprising stories of streets, buildings and people. The Paris that emerges here is large, colorful and diverse, with its migrants, drifters and flâneurs, its high politics and low entertainments, its working men and women, its artists, rebels, courtesans and criminals. In tracing an expanding Paris from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, through five major revolutions, three occupations and two world wars, Harison deftly weaves together strands of social, political, economic and cultural history to give an engaging panorama of the city's past.