Paris, Capital of Modernity

Collecting David Harvey's finest work on Paris during the second empire, Paris, Capital of Modernity offers brilliant insights ranging from the birth of consumerist spectacle on the Parisian boulevards, the creative visions of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, and the reactionary cultural politics of the bombastic Sacre Couer. The book is heavily illustrated and includes a number drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier, one of the greatest political caricaturists of the nineteenth century.

Introduction: Modernity as Break
Part One: Representations: Paris 1830-1848
1. The Myths of Modernity: Balzac's Paris
2. Dreaming the Body Politic: Revolutionary Politics and Utopian Schemes, 1830-1848
Part Two: Materializations: Paris 1848-1870
Prologue
3. The Production of Space
4. Money, Credit and Finance
5. Rent and the Propertied Interest
6. The State
7. Abstract and Concrete Labor
8. The Buying and Selling of Labor Power
9. The Reproduction of Labor Power
10. Consumerism, Spectacle and Leisure
11. Community and Class
12. National Relations
13. Science and Sentiment, Modernity and Tradition
14. Rhetoric and Representation
15. The Geopolitics of Urban Transformation
Coda: The Building of the Basilica of Sacre Coeur
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits and Acknowledgements
Index

David Harvey is one of the world's leading critical intellectuals. He is the author of 10 books, many of which are classics. He now teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and the London School of Economics, after many years teaching at Johns Hopkins and Oxford.