Subject: History / Europe / France

Subject: History / Europe / France

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Paris After Haussmann

|9780822967934|Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914|Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage. Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Peter Soppelsa calls “secondary Haussmannization,” Parisians inverted them—revealed their hidden components to scrutinize their workings and costs…

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Paris After Haussmann

|9780822948827|Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914|Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage. Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Peter Soppelsa calls “secondary Haussmannization,” Parisians inverted them—revealed their hidden components to scrutinize their workings and costs…

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Ambivalent Alliance

|9780822985631|The Catholic Church and the Action Française, 1899-1939| Ambivalent Alliance convincingly defends several provocative insights into a key period in the history of French Catholicism. It investigates the strange marriage of convenience, from 1899 to 1939, between the French church and the ultra-rightist, chauvinist, monarchist, and anti-Semitic organization called the Acton Française, and raises many disturbing questions. Why did an increasingly international church find a narrowly patriotic group so appealing? How could it endorse a movement founded by an agnostic whose philosophy sanctioned violence and the persecution of Jews and othe “undesirables”? The twentieth-century French church was still feeling the…

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Ideals of the Body

|9780822945284|Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris|Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical…

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