The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944 by James Cannon

Abstract

determines the five that follow, starts with Charles Garnier’s plans for Paris’s new opera house and its grandiose staircase (1875), moves to a discussion of an advertisement for a new garment fabric called “Le Nouvel-Opéra” in Le Monde Illustré (1875), next addresses Félicien Rops’s watercolor L’attrapade (1877), then traces the emergence of the new fashion trend of the bustle before finally reading Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) as the “conjunction” of all of these “highly charged occurrences of fashion” (43) that seem to anticipate the ruins left in the wake of the Commune. Remaining in command of her material at every turn, Brevik-Zender effectively contributes a new line of inquiry to well-explored terrain by reading late-nineteenth-century French authors through critical constructs formulated by Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Habermas, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Michel de Certeau instead of from the familiar vantage points of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, or Walter Benjamin (although, in her introduction, she belabors the issue of originality by insisting almost anxiously on her approach’s“innovation”). Though she sometimes makes awkward stretches to reinforce the general framework of her analysis of cultural subversions as a textual réseau of fashion moments in fiction— a more skeptical reader might justifiably retort that a staircase is just a staircase—she acknowledges taking these liberties for the sake of positing fashion as a legitimate critique as opposed to a mere extension of the modern city. In her impressively strong epilogue, she makes the alluring suggestion that her critical conjoining of fashion and space could well indeed be extended to a far-reaching, transnational scope. University of Delaware Karen F. Quandt Cannon, James. The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4724-2831-8. Pp. 248. $108. In ancient cities modern society grows around and encroaches on the structures created by previous civilizations. Oftentimes these remnants of earlier cultures, no longer functional or necessary, are destroyed or left in ruins, and their history is lost. This book offers an in-depth analysis of such a phenomenon in Paris—the extraordinary space around the periphery of the city known as the zone. Prior to this work, no comprehensive academic study of the zone has been produced, a void that this book fills substantially. The definition of what constituted the zone in Paris is complicated and varied. Cannon defines it as the zone non aedificandi (non-building zone) that encircled Paris and comprised part of a state-controlled system of defenses built around the city from 1840 to 1845. This region, whose administrative status was not always clear, morphed over the years as it was inhabited by a largely impoverished population or was used for various unofficial purposes, managed by the French State and later by the City of Paris. Cannon’s study deals with the social and urban history of the zone, but more importantly, examines how it was represented in literature, art, journalism, cinema, photography, film, and popular music. Cannon’s aim is to trace 238 FRENCH REVIEW 89.3 Reviews 239 the evolution of the zone as a metaphor in these works. Forty-seven spectacular color plates complement Cannon’s findings and bring his interpretations to life. One of the most outstanding features of the book, are high-quality plates of historic maps of Paris showing its fortifications and suburbs, reproductions of paintings and engravings, lithographs, sketches from contemporary newspapers, and photographs. Each chapter describes the political and cultural history of a particular period, from the zone’s initial construction before 1870 through its destruction between 1940 and 1944. From each era, Cannon identifies a broad variety of artistic representations of the zone revealing how perceptions of it were both negative and positive throughout history. The period from 1870 to 1889 was a time in which complex perceptions of the zone reflected changes in society and the growth of modernity. After the Franco-Prussian war, differing representations of the zone reflected the political and social divisions that came with the Third Republic and were deepened by the Paris Commune. In the 1890–1918 era, conservative-leaning artists and writers emphasized the criminal elements...