The unruly city Paris, London and New York in the age of revolution

Michael Rapport

Sound recording - 2017

Historian Mike Rapport offers a vivid history of three intertwined cities toward the end of the eighteenth century--Paris, London, and New York--all in the midst of political chaos and revolution. From the British occupation of New York during the Revolutionary War, to agitation for democracy in London and popular uprisings, and ultimately regicide in Paris, Rapport explores the relationship between city and revolution, asking why some cities engender upheaval and some suppress it.

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

COMPACT DISC/944.04/Rapport
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor COMPACT DISC/944.04/Rapport Checked In
Subjects
Published
[Ashland, OR] : Blackstone Publishing [2017]
[New York, NY] : [2017]
[New York, NY] : [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Michael Rapport (author)
Other Authors
Neil Dickson (narrator)
Edition
Unabridged
Physical Description
12 audio discs (15.5 hr.) : CD audio, digital ; 4 3/4 in
ISBN
9781478948971
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE POLITICAL EDIFICE that's threatening to collapse around us as illiberal populisms flare in the United States and Western Europe was erected in the last few decades of the 18th century. The American and French revolutions both sprang from a diffusion of forces that had been building in Europe for a century and a half. The ideas at their core are the stuffof libraries full of books and dissertations, but they can be reduced to one grand, clean, simple conviction: that the individual human being has primacy. Americans who are aware of the intellectual links between the founding of their country and that of the French republic may not realize that Britain's modern political roots are joined to both. The connection is obscured because the American Revolution is so often cast as a face-offbetween Enlightenment values and British imperialism. While it's true that the British didn't revolt against their king, Britain was as vigorous as France in developing, parsing and debating the notions that formed the Enlightenment, notions that fans of liberal democracy cling to today with rare feeling. Why the British didn't revolt and why both their American colonists and their French rivals did is one question at the heart of Mike Rapport's fine study. Another of his concerns is the difference in intensity between the American and French revolutions: Why was one, for all its violence, largely political, while the other was an attack not only on the monarchy but on the Roman Catholic Church and, seemingly, every form of hierarchy? To put it in more general terms: What forces account for differing degrees of upheaval when societies are in crisis? While "The Unruly City" stays rooted in the 18th century, the issues it raises are given extra urgency by today's political climate. Three societies grappling with the titanic force of incipient democracy is a lot for one book to manage. Rapport, a historian who teaches at the University of Glasgow, narrows the task by focusing on three cities: New York, London and Paris. While his argument can feel a bit academic at times, as when he woodenly observes that political struggle always occurs in "a location, a geographical space, an environment," for the most part his urban focus yields a refreshingly vibrant narrative. At times, his political study could almost double as a travelogue. What was it about New York that made revolution play out there the way it did? The fact that Manhattan is an island gave the city a special dynamic. Beyond that, the American colonies' inheritance of a set of rights and freedoms from Britain, which stemmed from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of an English Bill of Rights, meant that New York had a built-in basis for principled resistance. As Britain suffered under the financial burdens stemming from the Seven Years' War (or, as the North American theater became known, the French and Indian War), it taxed its colonies without giving them a say, and New York's longstanding elected assembly became a focal point of resistance. Coffeehouses and taverns, which had long been venues for discussing the events of the day, now became political hubs. Since the colonies had inherited England's tradition of open-air political gatherings, it was only natural that Gen. George Washington would order the Declaration of Independence to be read out to his troops on "the Common," at what is now City Hall Park. When the British Army stormed Long Island and then Manhattan, the whole city - from the Gowanus Pass to Kips Bay - became a landscape of revolution. Rapport anchors his prose with compact sense-of-place notes as he follows the action: "The Americans managed to drive the British back to a buckwheat field, now the site of Columbia University." Paris was a different sort of place, with a wholly different political background. The French monarchy was near absolute; before 1789, there had been few concessions to the growing clamor for democracy. Without a tradition of public political protest, when the forces of revolutionary change struck people "took over and adapted the buildings of the old order - especially churches, convents, monasteries, aristocratic townhouses, royal places - that were not remotely constructed for the purposes intended by the revolutionaries." One particular locale, to which Rapport pays fascinating attention, was the Palais- Royal. This vast complex of buildings, arcades and gardens on the Right Bank was originally built by Cardinal Richelieu in the 1620s. In 1780, its owner, the duc d'Orléans, cousin to the king, decided to make some money by turning it into a kind of shopping mall. With boutiques and cafes and elegant spaces to stroll and linger, it became a new kind of urban space, a place to be for all levels of society. Thus when events built rapidly toward a crisis, the Palais-Royal became "the central gathering place of Parisians hungry for news, opinion and recreation." When the mass outbreak came, however, it was centered on the place Parisians identified with monarchic abuse of power: the prison fortress of the Bastille. Here, too, Rapport gives not just political but geographic perspective: The Bastille overlooked the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the cramped district of Paris that was packed with the homes and work spaces of artisans and shopkeepers, groups that were among the economically oppressed. London was, yet again, geographically and historically distinct. The Enlightenment ideas held at bay for decades by the French monarchy had made inroads in England, and in particular its capital. Londoners had over the course of the 18th century used their economic might as a lever to force the king to grant them special rights and freedoms. The city's relative autonomy was such that, technically, the king needed permission to enter its precincts. Most important, as Rapport explains, "the city had its own political system, which made it virtually self-governing." And yet the individual freedoms that had been promised in 1688 were never fully realized, in part because the aristocracy colluded with the monarchy to hold onto power. One of the leaders of the English protest against absolutism in the 1760s - which took place in London at the same time that resistance was building in the American colonies - was John Wilkes, a radical Whig member of Parliament and shameless self-promoter who nonetheless gave voice to the unrest many Britons felt. Wilkes was lauded in America (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., is named after him and a fellow Whig, Isaac Barré) and rose to become Lord Mayor of London in 1774. The popular unrest in London climaxed in the Gordon Riots of 1780. But these disturbances didn't lead to revolution. The American colonists rose up not only against their British overlords but against their own elites; those elites were then forced to choose between revolution and loyalty to Britain. In London, however, Rapport writes, "the broader metropolitan movement in support of Wilkes did not seek to attack the privileges of the city," but rather joined the elites in forcing a degree of reform, so that "Londoners were able to make their protests without challenging the wider structures of politics." The central realization leftby Rapport's book is that the democratic structures that have supported us for so long came about as a result of a series of convulsions of the established order. That violence was not inevitable in all cases is reason for comfort. But it makes you wonder whether we may somehow be coming full circle. 0 RUSSELL SHORTO'S new book, "Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom," will be published in November. The democratic structures that support us today came about as violent convulsions of the established order.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]