Kory Olson - Böcker

This handbook assembles a vibrant collection of original scholarship highlighting new and exciting research themes on Paris in the Modern Era. It provides an innovative selection and use of primary sources, broadens the notion of “archive,” and includes diverse voices and multiple perspectives.The contributors, representing a range of academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, connect specific topics to larger historical questions and extend consideration of Paris beyond the city’s historical limit to the outskirts of the metropolis in the Île-de-France region. The first section includes overview chapters tracing structural evolutions and broad movements as understood through recent historiography. The second section presents essays that take a narrower focus on case studies and key moments of reflection and debate, change and commemoration through specific sites, social phenomena, cultural objects, movements, and representations of Paris in the arts. The authors explore how Paris has been imagined, constructed, and mythologized from the outside – by tourists, immigrants, and those separate from the circles of power, as well as from within – by political, administrative, and cultural institutions.Geared towards advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and postgraduate researchers, this handbook contributes to readers’ understanding of France’s place in the world and French society, culture, and policy by telling the story of modern Paris in all its complexity.

Through official maps, this book looks at how government presentations of Paris and environs change over the course of the Third Republic (1889-1934). Governmental policies, such as the creation of a mandatory national uniform educational system that will eventually include geography, combined with technological advances in the printing industry, to alter the look, exposure, reception, and distribution of government maps. The government initially seemed to privilege an exclusively positive view of the capital city and limited its presentation of it to land inside the walled fortifications. However, as the Republic progressed and Paris grew, technology altered how Parisians used and understood their urban space. Rail and automobiles made moving about the city and environs easier while increased industrialization moved factories and their workers further out into the Seine Department. During this time, maps transitioned from reflecting the past to documenting the present. With the advent of French urbanism after World War I, official mapped views of greater Paris abandoned privileging past achievements and began to mirror actual residential and industrial development as it pushed further out from the city centre. Finally, the government needed to plan for the future of greater Paris and official maps begin to show how the government viewed the direction of its capital city.