@viventlespeuples replied to your quote: No sooner, however,had the bourgeoisie secured its...
What is this book? Tell me more.
The Flâneur and His City: Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 1815-1851, by Richard D. E. Burton!
It’s a fantastic little book (and I mean little-- it’s about 70 pages plus a bibliography)! It’s about-well :
The book provides a ''flâneur''s eye view' of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century: dress, cafés and restaurants, but also shops and passages, the omnibus, 'bals publics' and carnival. The author provides general conclusions about the private and public spheres in 'le vieux Paris'. Like the 'flâneur', the author concentrates less on factual information for its own sake - which may be found in the secondary works cited in the text and footnotes - than on the 'semiological' or anthropological significance of the cultural forms in question. Links are drawn between cultural institutions and class relations in pre-1850 Paris, with particular emphasis on cultural inequality, on the persistence of cross-class contacts, and the growing differences between classes as reflected in behaviour and attitudes.
It has a quick chapter on each of the bolded topics, along with prostitutes, the concept of the Flâneur itself, and the evolution of the concepts of public and private life in Paris. I’ve been looking through it tonight and it is a gold mine for canon-era context; lots of contemporary quotes, lots of little details about things like how shops were arranged and class-signaling and the effect and attitudes of the changing governments on the street culture of Paris-- just so much good stuff, and since it’s a brief book it’s all right there to find without a lot of digging.
One caveat: those contemporary source quotes are all in French, and there’s no translation. They probably make up at least a third of the book, too. I’m able to get through them, more or less quickly, with my very intermediate levels of French, so someone with more fluency would be fine, but someone with no French experience at all will find it very hard going. But with that one warning, I’d rec it very strongly for anyone wanting to do some Les Mis history nerding!
