History / Europe / France

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Sun-Young Park reveals how anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

This book examines the strange marriage of convenience, from 1899 to 1939, between the French Catholic church and the ultra-rightist, chauvinist, monarchist, and anti-Semitic organization called the Acton Francaise.