"Armchair historians in particular will appreciate McAuliffe's readable
yet detailed history supplemented with illustrations and bibliography."
Booklist, Starred Review Acclaimed historian Mary McAuliffe vividly
recaptures the Paris of Napoleon III, Claude Monet, and Victor Hugo as
Georges Haussmann tore down and rebuilt Paris into the beautiful City of
Light we know today. Paris, City of Dreams traces the transformation of
the City of Light during Napoleon III's Second Empire into the beloved
city of today. Together, Napoleon III and his right-hand man, Georges
Haussmann, completely rebuilt Paris in less than two decades--a
breathtaking achievement made possible not only by the emperor's vision
and Haussmann's determination but by the regime's unrelenting
authoritarianism, augmented by the booming economy that Napoleon
fostered. Yet a number of Parisians refused to comply with the
restrictions that censorship and entrenched institutional taste imposed.
Mary McAuliffe follows the lives of artists such as Edouard Manet,
Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet, as well as writers such as Emile Zola,
Gustave Flaubert, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, while from exile,
Victor Hugo continued to fire literary broadsides at the emperor he
detested. McAuliffe brings to life a pivotal era encompassing not only
the physical restructuring of Paris but also the innovative forms of
banking and money-lending that financed industrialization as well as the
city's transformation. This in turn created new wealth and lavish
excess, even while producing extreme poverty. More deeply, change was
occurring in the way people looked at and understood the world around
them, given the new ease of transportation and communication, the
popularization of photography, and the emergence of what would soon be
known as Impressionism in art and Naturalism and Realism in
literature--artistic yearnings that would flower in the Belle Epoque.
Napoleon III, whose reign abruptly ended after he led France into a
devastating war against Germany, has been forgotten. But the Paris that
he created has endured, brought to vivid life through McAuliffe's rich
illustrations and evocative narrative.
