#paris between empires

[pilferingapples]

Over the year 1826, 9,212,802 letters were deivered in Paris. With only 3.2 percent of the population of France, the city received 27 per cent of its letters...By the system local to Paris known as the 'petite poste', much used in love affairs, you could receive letters on the same day, only a few hours after they had been posted.   There were 200 postboxes throughout the city and seven distributions a day. The Marquis de Custine...claimed that fashionable people wrote twenty letters or notes every hour.  Women in particular made letter writing a vocation...

Paris Between Empires, Philip Mansel

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Reference Book Review: Paris Between Empires , Philip Mansel

(Not quite finished with this one yet, but the structure of it-- sections broken into overviews of a few years-- means that I’m sure I’m moving out of the most immediately relevant time period , so I feel safe making notes here.)

This is so far the only  book in English I’ve found that does what it does-- gives a quick overview of the broad cultural and social trends in Paris in the time between Napoleons. So I’m glad it’s pretty good! Every section covers a brief span of years, and further divided into specific focus for those years,so it’s easy to go looking for what Mansel’s got on the most relevant time (for fic or other purposes). 

As is kinda inevitable for a Survey History book like this, there’s not really time to get really in-depth about any particular topic, and a lot has to be skimmed or skipped completely:

- the focus overall is on High Society and government; there’s much less on the life of the streets or the lower /working classes, and the various revolutions and social movements are pretty much all covered from the POV of the ruling elite. That kind of limits its immediate usefulness for my particular fields of interest, but it’s still good background info!

- there’s a lot of focus and documentation from the women of high society in particular--the people running salons and making unofficial diplomatic and social connections-- which is really nice to find!   (Delphine Gay/Girardin shows up a lot, which particularly delighted me.) 

-also a lot of good info on how Paris dealt with and was viewed by other European countries and capitals; I do feel like I have a much better understanding of what made it a Cultural Capital, even while it was Kinda Perpetually On Fire, politically.

-There is some untranslated quoting of French, but it’s pretty minimal; nothing that can’t be easily translated even with just G Translate, and that not too often. 

- the general tone of the book is geared towards a popular rather than an academic audience--it’s a pretty easy read and moves too quickly for any particular passage to get boring.  As said, though, that also means it can’t cover anything in very much depth, or offer too much analysis, but it does  offer a really kickass bibliography for further research. 

I’m really glad I read it! Recommended to anyone with a general interest in the subject. 

[pilferingapples]

Attractions of another kind were also available in Paris.  Homosexuality, a crime in every other country, for which men could still be executed ni England, had been decriminalised in France since 1790.  Paris was its centre.  The former Director Barras , Bonaparte's one-time patron who had been expelled from office by the coup d'etat of Brumaire 1799, according to a police report received few visitors in private carriages in the evenings by many soldiers en fiacre (the cheap one-horse vehicle used by people who could not afford carriages) .  The politician Fiévée lived en ménage with the dramatist Théodore Leclerq.  After a play-reading  in their apartment, one guest commented: “Oh, Fiévée has found a way to render all that almost respectable!" There was also, under the bridges, la sodome des quais.

-Paris Between Empires, Philip Mansel, Ch. 2: Paris Takes Europe

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Paris Between Empires: Cafés

Paris was a city of cafés as well as restaurants.  There were between three and four thousand cafés in the city, of which perhaps half were considered respectable. The following description of a Paris café is from an oft-reprinted guidebook, Galignani's Paris Guide, shows that cafés provided, in addition to refreshments, freedom from solitude: 

"Strangers converse with each other sans cérémonie; some play at dominoes, others read the newspapers and periodical publications which are chained or locked to boards adapted for that purpose; others again sip their coffee, drink their sugar and water or enjoy their glass of lemonade or liquer with haply now and then a glance at the goddess of the scene (in vulgar English, the Bar Maid) who is generally chosen for that distinguished post for her charms and graces...everyone who enters is greeted by her with a 'witching smile' of welcome."

Cafés were patronized by people of every class.  The former governor of Moscow, Count Rostopchine, spoke to strangers in cafés in the Palais Royal about their families, the future of Haiti or the retreat from Moscow.  He heard many witty remarks, so he said, but no swearing. 

... The poor patronised those cafés outside the barriers known as gougettes or guignettes, often with dance halls attached, which in Balzac's phrase, circled the city like a wall of mud: the most famous included the Jardin de la Gaieté at the Barrière du Maine or the Ile d'Amour at Belleville.  Their prices were cheaper as goods consumed there did not pay Paris customs dues, and they would often be patronised by people from a particular trade or province, for example soldiers or Auvergnats.  Having been paid on Saturday, their clients danced, ate and drank, often throughout the day on Sunday and Monday: some establishments had rooms for six or seven hundred customers at a time.   On those days such cafés functioned as  'the parliament os the poor', where they could sing songs of love and war, celebrate French victories, forget the miseries of their daily life-- and, occasionally, as in July 1830, plan action to improve it. 

Other cafés were the preserve of students, such as the Le Père Bonvin, a mile beyond the Barrière de Montparnasse, in countryside dotted with chalk pits, wooden shanty towns and grazing land. 

Paris Between Empires 1814-1852, Philip Mansel, Ch.2: Paris Takes Europe 

more from the 1814-1815 period! 

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Paris Between Empires: restaurants

Restaurants, which had first appeared (in Paris) in the 1770s, had become  more numerous and lavish since the Revolution...The  most expensive restaurant in Paris in 1814 was Véry Frères, in the Palais Royal(founded as Les Quatre Nations in 1788). Its brilliantly lit salons, granite tables, gilt bronze candelabra and mirror-lined walls provided almost as dishes such as caille à la financiére (three francs) or filet mignon en chvreuuil (one franc ten sous).  On his first evening in Paris, on March 31 1814, Baron Lowenstern enjoyed 'the best dinner possible', oysters, fish, champagne and Clos Vougeot, at the Rocher de Cancale in the rue Mandar: another restaurant in the Palais Royal, Trois FrèresProvencaux, was famous from the Tagus to the Neva for poulet à la Marengo (one franc fifteen sous) , fricassée de poulet à la Austerlitz aux truffes (four francs ten sous) , and blanquette de ceau de Pontoise (one franc) . 

There were some 3,000 restaurants of all kinds in Paris. Less wealthy visitors found that they could enjoy an excellent dinner with soup, fish, two dishes of meat, dessert, and a bottle of wine in a Palais Royal restaurant like Le Caveau--which also dated from before the Revolution--for two to three francs (about five shillings) a head....Such a dinner in London was four times more expensive, and by no means so good. 

-Paris Between Empires, Philp Mansel, Ch. 2: Paris Takes Europe

The above section is about Paris around 1814-March 1815  -Paris for Fantine and the grisettes (Gillenormand too, but we’ll get to that later; and the Pontmercys would probably not have been in Paris here? though I’m not sure just where they would have been. That’s a more Napoleonic Scholarship question!) .

Y’all I am gonna be posting so much from this book, it’s a goldmine for little details about Paris life in canon era, I wish I could just copy  It starts with 1814 and runs right through to 1852, with the bulk of chapters (10 out 13) about Paris right smack on the canon years. I will definitely be posting a lot of notes from this book, and I highly recommend picking up a copy for yourself if you like reading about canon era history at all!

[pilferingapples]

In the early nineteenth century the opera and the theatre were not only places of entertainment;  they were also arenas for the élite and,  in cheaper seats in the 'gods', the people to meet, to hear news and to display their clothes, their status and their politics.  Many Parisians lived for and in the theatre, going two or three times a week, transfixed by the actors'performances and personalities.  The public was both emotionally closer to the actors...and physically closer to the stage,  than today. Moreover the theatre had a political role.  In a period of strict newspaper censorship,  it was the principle forum for comment on public events...

Philip Mansel, Paris Between Empires, 1814-1852