City of Light, City of Shadows
Paris in the Belle Époque
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
City of Light, City of Shadows
Buy Now for $26.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Paul Daintry
-
By:
-
Mike Rapport
About this listen
But as Mike Rapport reveals in this authoritative and beautifully written new history, City of Light, City of Shadows, beneath the elegant veneer Paris was at war with itself. For the Belle Époque was also an era of social and religious unrest, arguments over women's emancipation and violent clashes over what it meant to be French.
Paris pulsated with pleasure, anxieties and tension stemming from the giddying speed of modernity: blazing electric lights illuminating the night, the first cars speeding down the boulevards, as well as the first Métro trains and aeroplane flights. At the same time reactionary forces reasserted themselves through the new mass media-mostly dramatically in the infamous Dreyfus affair, which exposed the dark heart of French antisemitism.
Told through the eyes of the greatest personalities of the age-novelist Émile Zola, feminist activist Marguerite Durand, Vietnamese diplomat Nguyễn Trọng Hợp 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.©2024 Mike Rapport (P)2024 Hachette Audio UK
Critic Reviews
'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' (Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters)
'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' (Julian Jackson, author of A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle)