City of Light, City of Shadows
On sale
15th May 2025
Price: £12.99
Genre
Humanities / History / Regional & National History / European History
Paris in the Belle Époque is remembered as a golden age of cultural flourishing and political progress. The time 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 beneath its elegant veneer Paris was at war with itself. The Belle Époque was also an era of social and religious unrest, women’s emancipation and violent clashes over what it meant to be French.
Paris pulsated with the pleasures and anxieties of modernity: blazing electric lights illuminating the night, the first cars speeding down the boulevards, as well as the first Métro trains and plane flights. At the same time reactionary forces reasserted themselves-mostly dramatically in the infamous Dreyfus affair.
Told through the eyes of the greatest personalities of the age-novelist Émile Zola, feminist activist Marguerite Durand, Vietnamese diplomat Nguy?n Tr?ng H?p 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.
But as Mike Rapport reveals in this authoritative and beautifully written new history beneath its elegant veneer Paris was at war with itself. The Belle Époque was also an era of social and religious unrest, women’s emancipation and violent clashes over what it meant to be French.
Paris pulsated with the pleasures and anxieties of modernity: blazing electric lights illuminating the night, the first cars speeding down the boulevards, as well as the first Métro trains and plane flights. At the same time reactionary forces reasserted themselves-mostly dramatically in the infamous Dreyfus affair.
Told through the eyes of the greatest personalities of the age-novelist Émile Zola, feminist activist Marguerite Durand, Vietnamese diplomat Nguy?n Tr?ng H?p 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.
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Reviews
An authoritative work... A strikingly rendered portrait of the era's fervent belief in progress
A fascinating, multi-layered panorama of the evolution of the French capital at a key period in its history
As Mike Rapport makes clear in his splendid new book, the Belle Epoque was... a time of instability, upheaval and bitter division, in Paris and throughout France.
Historian Michael Rapport's fascinating new book looks at the city of light in the so-called Belle Epoque through the eyes of everyone from realist novelist Emile Zola to feminist and actress Marguerite Durand, showing the glittering triumphs of the age as well as the dark scandals.
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
In this book which fizzes with all the energy of Belle Epoque Paris, Rapport conveys superbly the conflicts, tension and anxieties undelay the glittering spectacle of Parisian modernity. His narrative is brilliantly anchored in the spaces and places of the city. For lovers of Paris the book should become an indispensable accompaniment to any future visit to the city