In 1323, the first book to treat Paris exclusively appeared; the number since then has grown to about 10,000, notes Higonnet, a professor of French history at Harvard who seems to have read them all before adding this original and illuminating work to their number. In constructing "a history not of factual events but of the way the city has been perceived, conceived, and dreamed," Higonnet (Sister Republics; Goodness Beyond Virtue) draws a fresh social, cultural and political portrait of Paris from the mid-18th century through the 19th century, augmented by some looks back and forward. Higonnet manages to be both intensely intellectual and deftly vivid as he escorts readers through a very wide range of reading. Organized thematically ("Capital of Revolution"; "Capital of Science"; "Capital of Sex"; "Capital of Crime"; "Capital of Art"; "Capital of the Modern Self"), the book uses three dates as focal points: "1750, when the first secularized myths of Paris appeared; 1830, the point at which they started to flower; and 1889, when they began to atrophy [and] 'phantasmagoria' comes into its own." Higonnet appears to have missed nothing that touched or was touched by Paris—Twain and James, Balzac and Zola, sansculottes and surrealists, salons and expositions. In passing, his eye takes in clothes, gastronomy, street names and panoramas. Tidbits of historical gossip color the densely imbricated text: an 18th-century architect's plan for a bordello in "the form of an enormous phallus"; Les Lesbiennes,
Baudelaire's preliminary title for Les Fleurs du mal; Marx meeting Engels for the first time at the Café de la Régence in the Palais Royal, "a mecca for the city's chess players." Higonnet, in a remarkably readable translation, achieves a seamless synthesis between the myth and the history of modern Paris. (Oct.)
