How Paris became Paris The invention of the modern city

cole porter isn't the only American to have fallen in love with Paris in the springtime, which may explain why four books about Europe's most beguiling city have appeared all at once. By pure serendipity, their four authors have independently succeeded in producing a chronological quartet. Wittily written and impeccably researched, Joan DeJean's "How Paris Became Paris" unpacks the cherished belief that Baron Haussmann masterminded the modern Paris we know and love. In fact, as DeJean nimbly demonstrates, the city's postcard-perfect charm owes much to the vision of two savvy monarchs: Henri IV and his grandson, Louis XIV, the Sun King. By the time an admiring Peter the Great decided, in 1717, to build his own dream city, St. Petersburg, there was only one place to go to pilfer good ideas. Henri IV's greatest gifts to the medieval city he loved were a bridge and a square. The Pont Neuf was created as a social leveler, a paved strolling route with the novel features of sidewalks and stone balcons from which Parisian visitors could admire both the ancient wall-girt city and the eternal Seine. A painted fan displaying elegant strollers on the Pont Neuf became a must-have tourist souvenir. François Bernier, the most influential travel writer of his well-traveled times (the 1660s), hailed the vista from Paris's New Bridge (today the oldest in the city) as "the most magnificent view in the entire world." Nobody disagreed. Henri's second grand project was to present Paris with its first planned square. His scheme to subsidize the Place Royale as a center for silk manufacture failed. Completed, nevertheless, within a brisk 18 months, the Place des Vosges (its modern name) was constructed to a uniform design and intended as an arena for leisurely promenades. Vaulted arcades provided protection against inclement weather, while the empty central space, capable of holding 60,000 at a squeeze, provided the modestly housed citizens of the Marais with the equivalent of an immense outdoor living room. Still considered one of the glories of Paris, Henri's square of rose-red houses was copied in Madrid (the Plaza Mayor), in London's Covent Garden and, after Peter's 1717 visit, in St. Petersburg. Henri IV was murdered before he had the chance to complete his crowning gift to the city he adored: the transformation of two scrubby river islets into a single lozenge-shaped plot of land. The île Saint-Louis remains a tranquil haven in the heart of Paris. Shored up by stone piles and linked to the mainland by handsome bridges, the island featured elegant homes (almost all designed by a single inspired architect, Louis Le Vau) that were acquired by a new social group, the oppressively rich financiers who made their fortunes by bankrolling the king's battles. It was this same group that, fearful of trouble from the urban poor, prudently shifted their personal power base to an elegant gated community of residential palaces that had been strategically perched out on the edge of town, offering such upright citizens the luxury of a swift escape in times of trouble. Hubristically to be named at first the Square of Our Conquests, the financiers' grand refuge (only their own architects could afford to share it with them) is better known today as Place Vendôme. It represented the last arrogant hurrah of a reign during which King Louis transformed Paris into a lantern-lit City of Light, where visitors could stroll through a new public garden (the Tuileries), purchase the luxury goods around which the French economy had created a booming export trade and post letters at every main street, and - a novelty that delighted the sociable Madame de Sévigné - in which a respectable woman could enjoy the urban night. ALREADY DAZZLING IN 1700, Paris would seem to have reached its apotheosis by 1900, when a ruinously extravagant world's fair showed off a glittering Palace of Electricity, an extravaganza lit by 5,000 incandescent bulbs and topped by a flaming chariot. In a splendid previous work, "Dawn of the Belle Epoque," Mary McAuliffe strikingly evoked the three flourishing decades of culture that followed France's humiliation by Germany and the never-to-be-forgotten crowning, in 1871, of a German emperor at Versailles. Now, in "Twilight of the Belle Epoque," this brilliant social historian applies her novelistic approach with equal success to the early 20 th century, interweaving a multitude of stories to create - through skillfully chosen glimpses into the lives of its most talented inhabitants - an unforgettable portrait of Paris. McAuliffe's cast is large and unruly, but she choreographs their entrances and exits with the deceptively effortless panache of that prince among impresarios (and a significant contributor to her story) Serge Diaghilev. Ravel tickles the ivories for Isadora Duncan; Monet stands shoulder to shoulder with Henry James (whom he finds very kind) to observe the funeral procession of Queen Victoria in London. Back in Paris, a schoolboy Charles de Gaulle is mesmerized in 1900 by a 56-year-old Sarah Bernhardt, spryly undertaking the role of Napoleon's youthful heir in Edmond Rostand's "L'Aiglon." A courageous Marcel Proust gives a party for 60 proand anti-Dreyfusards and awaits the din of shouts and smashing china. (Nothing happens.) Dreyfus sits guard over the coffin of his fiercest defender, Émile Zola, while an anti-Semitic roofer confesses to his part in the great novelist's death by carbon monoxide poisoning. (He had deliberately blocked up the chimney of the firelit bedroom in which Zola and his wife lay sleeping.) Isadora Duncan's friend Mary Desti reveals that Isadora's celebrated barefoot dances began as an inspired escape, one intoxicating night, from performing in whisky-sodden sandals. Isadora's viciously egocentric lover, Edward Gordon Craig, tells her to call their baby "anything you damn please - Sophocles if you like," while sending her earnings off to his English mistress. And onward, seamlessly, the pageant of events flows beside the Seine. A beady-eyed Sarah Bernhardt watches a teenage Jean Cocteau strut into a costume ball dressed as the Emperor Heliogabalus. She passes him an icy note: "If I were your mother, I'd send you to bed." Cocteau ignores it. Diaghilev urges a deflated Cocteau to become even more extraordinary: "Astound me!" Paul Poiret, hosting a Scheherazade-themed ball to show off his exquisite and expensive fashion wares, states with exquisite hypocrisy that he has never believed in "the virtue of advertisement." Count Harry Kessler, a diminutive Anglo-German Francophile, watches a dirigible float through the silent sky above Paris and compares it to an immense yellow whale. Presciently, Kessler notes "a strange feeling of a new era." It's 1907. Deftly, McAuliffe gathers together the threads of her multiple tales for the arrival of that ultimate rite: war. Here, to her readers' possible surprise, the artists and inventors emerge as heroes. Marie Curie teaches herself to drive and mend a car while she and her daughter set up X-ray units close to the combat line. Dreyfus serves with honor at the front. Cocteau, niftily kitted out by Poiret, performs his patriotic duty. Isadora, drunk, overweight and back from a disastrous show in New York, wins applause in Paris for an impassioned dance rendition of "The Marseillaise." Sarah Bernhardt, undaunted by a recently amputated leg, dazzles the troops before embarking on a 99-city tour of the United States. And Cocteau, at long last, succeeds in astounding Diaghilev in 1917 with "Parade," an avant-garde show with music by Satie and sets and costumes by Picasso. The opening night is a riotous, showstopping fiasco. Cocteau's name is made. By 1918, Parisian life has grown a lot bleaker. Thirty German planes drop 144 bombs on the city in a single terrifying night. Germany's Paris Gun, firing from 75 miles away, wipes out much of a congregation of churchgoers and continues to intimidate citizens for an agonizing further five months. Proust saunters back to his cork-lined room in a hat peppered with shrapnel. He says mice frighten him, but bombs don't. Dreyfus, after 14 months at the front, finds himself laden with tributes. The pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès, on the other hand, is forced to surrender his precious reels for their silver content. Ruined, he retires to run a toy shop in the Gare Montparnasse. Summary reduces the various elements of McAuliffe's marvelous book to a mere cocktail of events. Harder to convey is the subtlety of the mix. With uncommon skill, she blends each ingredient of an incredible époque into a vivid and hugely enjoyable narrative of extraordinary times. COCTEAU POPS UP once again in John Baxter's engaging and mildly peculiar "Paris at the End of the World," part cultural history, part family memoir. Archie Baxter, the author's Australian grandfather, arrived in the United Kingdom as a volunteer, at the end of 1916. His war was not rich in incident. Varicose veins debarred him from active duty. But in October 1917, Archie made it across the Channel to Le Havre. The fact that Archie Baxter probably never saw Paris has not discouraged an intrepid grandson from weaving a lively Parisian narrative around the conjectured exploits of his shadowy relative. We hear about the terrifying Paris Gun and visit the first night of "Parade" ("the hottest ticket in town"). We travel to Golders Green in north London and learn - via a horribly unfortunate reference to its large crematorium - "why so many people crossed the Channel to make a new home here." Archie is (conveniently) placed at a Paris restaurant, where he learns the identity of a fascinating fellow diner. ("'Is name Jean Cocteau. 'E write poésie, pièce théâtrale. ...'E talk of zer war.") Almost as mysterious as Archie's adventures is the identity of John Baxter's research adviser, a London editor who has, we are assured, served three years in prison for murdering his wife (or perhaps mistress). Baxter is thrilled by the criminal connection. "We solemnly shook hands. With that very hand. ..." Lady Macbeth drops into the story to whisper a warning in the author's ear. "Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?" Affable and disappointingly mundane, the researcher does his best to uncover Archie's secrets. None emerge. It's a very odd book. Tilar J. Mazzeo specializes in the history of luxury brands: Veuve Clicquot Champagne, Chanel No. 5 and now - in "The Hotel on Place Vendôme" - the Ritz. Once the haunt of the Dreyfusards, the Ritz became notoriously "Janus-faced" during the four unhappy years when a swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower. German grandees occupied the part of the hotel that faces the Rue Vendôme. Hermann Goering took a deluxe suite at a 90 percent discount (he sent the bill to Vichy). The Rue Cambon side of the hotel remained staunchly French, offering a refuge to members of the Resistance and even - thanks to the gallant efforts of one Ritz employee - signaling Allied planes from its kitchen windows. Mazzeo's narrative focuses on the Liberation, and on the desperate endeavors of Ernest Hemingway to ensure that he - and nobody else - got the credit for liberating Paris's most celebrated hotel. Tongue nicely in cheek, Mazzeo reports how, having greeted the manager, Hemingway dismissed his rivals (the British had already chosen it for their headquarters) with a roar of Germanic bluster. Amazingly, it worked. Hemingway - having liberated both the cellars and a grateful Simone de Beauvoir - bounced off to liberate his favorite American bookshop and then returned to enjoy the Ritz's well-stocked wine vaults. Factually, Mazzeo's history is sometimes perched upon a pair of toothpick-thin stilts. (Her source for a ramshackle account of the Duke of Windsor's fantasies about seizing the throne from his brother turns out to be a single, dubious newspaper article, published some five years ago.) Her book is, nevertheless, extremely jolly. It should provide the perfect gift for anybody flush enough - the Ritz, soon to be reopened, has remained one of Paris's most expensive hotels - to book a weekend in the "imperial suite" that was once occupied by Goering, and in which, more than 50 years later, the former Princess of Wales and Dodi al-Fayed would enjoy their suitably glamorous last supper.

Within a century after the medieval period, Paris had moved beyond the old model of a scattering of village dwellings behind fortified walls to become a well-planned urban space of public parks, boulevards, street grids, street lighting, public transportation, and modern bridges. As early as the 1600s, Henry IV and his successors Louis XIII and Louis XIV set in motion the design for a city that would incorporate the arts, entertainment, commerce, and government in the capital city, facilitating the whole life of Paris citizens. With public spaces that encouraged social interchange, with both the high-born and the low-born circulating together, picking up on gossip, new ideas, and fashion trends, Paris became one of Europe's first great walking cities. French literary and cultural scholar DeJean details the planning behind the Pont Neuf, the Louvre, and other iconic sights as she offers a historical perspective on the forces that created Paris and led the way to a new conception of urban living. Maps and drawings add to the appeal of this engaging history of the growth of Paris into a modern city.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

Although 19th-century Baron Haussmann often receives credit for Paris's iconic features, this witty and engaging work shows that it was the 17th-century Bourbon monarchs who first transformed Paris into the prototype of the modern city that would inspire the world. Penn professor DeJean (The Essence of Style) notes that Henri IV (1553-1610) was the first to consider the practical value of public works and how they could improve people's lives. Besides centralizing France's administrative functions, Henri IV built the first bridge to cross the Seine in a single span (the Pont Neuf) and the first urban public square (the Place Royale, now the Place des Vosges). Louis XIV took his grandfather's plans even further by tearing down the city's fortifications, replacing them with tree-lined boulevards around the city's perimeter, and instituting a "grand design" that would influence Haussmann 250 years later. A charismatic and knowledgeable narrator, DeJean shows how an open city where men and women from all stations could congregate fueled the rise of the self-made man, the financier, the real estate developer, the artisan, the merchant, the Parisienne, and the coquette. With panache and examples from primary sources, guidebooks, maps, and paintings, she illustrates how Paris changed people's conception of a city's potential. B&w illus., 8-page color insert. Agent: Alice Martell, the Martell Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Illuminating portrait of the first modern city, 17th-century Paris, which could "hold a visitor's attention with quite different splendors." DeJean (Romance Languages/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual--and the Modern Home Began, 2009, etc.) focuses on two kings, Henry IV and his grandson, Louis XIV, who lived 250 years before Baron Haussmann, the great public works leader who massively renovated Paris during the mid-1800s. When the author examines how the Pont Neuf, completed in 1607, was the key to the birth of the city, readers will immediately understand why it was designed and constructed there. Crossing the Seine at the le de la Cit, it included the first sidewalks anywhere, and it was the first bridge in Paris to offer a gathering place with a view of the river. Suddenly, ladies and gentlemen were out promenading, seeing and being seen. Adding Place des Vosges (originally a silk factory) and the mansions on le Saint-Louis gave the population the first true neighborhoods. People-watching on the streets raised awareness of fashion and introduced various forms of communication, as well as the first forms of advertising. Pedestrians began to shop using the first shopping guide, printed in 1690. Of course, thievery rose with the presence of the elite, so the first street lighting was installed. Since there was light, the shops stayed open well into the evenings--hence, the "city of light." Both Henry and Louis built central Paris in just over 100 years, and we can still walk and explore what they left for us. "Paris caused urban planners to invent what a city should be," writes the author, "and it caused visitors to dream of what a city might be." Dejean obviously knows and loves Paris, and she provides coherent history that effectively explains the evolution of a city built by a few prescient men.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.