Paris in Modern Times

Reviews / Votes

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. * Journal of Modern History * [An] excellent survey of the history of Paris. It is at once erudite, lively, and accessible and covers ground from the ancien regime 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. * CHOICE * 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. * Journal of European Studies * 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. * Marisa Linton, Associate Professor of History, Kingston University, UK * 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 flaneurs, 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. * Ian Coller, Associate Professor of History, University of California Irvine, USA *