19th Century Paris Research Articles

Neo-impressionism and the dream of realities: painting, poetry, music

A beautifully illustrated investigation of Neo-Impressionism in late 19th-century Paris and Brussels This stunning catalogue explores the creative exchange between Neo-Impressionist painters and Symbolist writers and composers in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Symbolism, with its emphasis on subjectivity, dream worlds, and spirituality, has often been considered at odds with Neo-Impressionism's approach to portraying color and light. This book repositions the relationship between these movements and looks at how Neo-Impressionist artists such as Maximilien Luce, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henry van de Velde created evocative landscape and figural scenes by depicting emptiness, contemplative moods, Arcadia, and other themes. Beautifully illustrated with 130 color images, this book reveals the vibrancy and depth of the Neo-Impressionist movement in Paris and Brussels in the late 19th century.

A Paper City: On History, Maps, and Map Collections in 18th and 19th Century Paris

ABSTRACTThis essay considers how maps became implicated in historical inquiry, with particular reference to the city of Paris. Three interrelated episodes are discussed, from the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, each associated with specific mapmakers and collectors whose activities shaped the early development of map history. These episodes reveal how maps were historicized in different ways in this period, initially as images created in the present to reveal the past and eventually as objects of historical interest in their own right. It is further argued that this intellectual shift was associated with a growing awareness, especially among state officials, that the study and collection of historic maps had important geopolitical implications. In tracing this story across three episodes in a single urban setting, the essay seeks to make larger observations about the relationship between the map as a visual representation, the map collection as an urban ‘assemblage’ of geographical information, and the city as a physical environment.

LB0001 The Emergence of Seropositive Rheumatoid Arthritis: Why 19Th Century Paris?

BackgroundRheumatoid arthritis (RA) was first described by Landré-Beauvais in Paris in 1800. Fifty years later 5% of all long-terms patients treated at the celebrated Paris teaching hospital Pitie-Salpetriere are documented...

Sounds and Charrière: The rest of the story

Parisian cutler Joseph-Frédéric-Benoît Charrière (1803–1876) contributed greatly to surgical disciplines with innovative tools, but his legacy is the gauge system he developed in 1842 that is still used for catheters, probes, and dilators. Sounding devices have been documented in the surgical armamentarium since 3000 BC, with practitioners such as Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus, and Al-Zahrawi espousing theories on sounding and the related topics of stones and urinary obstruction. The medical revolution in 19th-century Paris propelled technology and one of the most influential men involved was Charrière, who pioneered diverse technical processes in the manufacturing of surgical instruments, led one of the largest instrument manufacturing companies, and improved on tools introduced by predecessors including his mentor Guillaume Dupuytren. Most importantly he created the catheter scale that, despite not being favored in its country of origin, became an international standard and is known today as the French system. The classification of sounds, catheters, and bougies has undergone many variations throughout the years, but the French scale still holds in current medical practice as an accurate and nearly universal sizing tool.

Benjamin, Adorno and modern-day flânerie

The flâneur has remained little more than a hazy, nostalgic figure since first described in detail by Baudelaire in 19th-century Paris. Here, the work of Walter Benjamin, who did more than any other to advance the notion of flânerie post-Baudelaire, is considered alongside that of his friend and critic Theodor Adorno, in an attempt to conceive of a modern-day version of the type. The many critical exchanges between Adorno and Benjamin are envisioned as a moving dialectic: a constant interplay between anticipation and suspicion. What results is a concept of flânerie that mingles a tentatively optimistic Benjamin with a perpetually sceptical Adorno, in order to conjure up an image of the individual strolling and wandering about the margins of contemporary urbanity, balanced on the cusp of hope and hopelessness.

The Ghost-Image on Metropolitan Borders—In Terms of Phantom of the Opera and 19th-Century Metropolis Paris

This paper reviews Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in the context of the social and cultural changes of the metropolis Paris at the end of the 19th century. The Phantom of the Opera, a success in the literary world and widely proliferated in its musical and film renditions afterward, is considered and interpreted mainly in the literary and artistic tradition. In this paper, however, this work will be considered from an urban sociological perspective, especially from that of Walter Benjamin, who developed the theory of the urban culture, focusing on the dreaming collectives at the end of the 19th century. Leroux’s novel can be regarded as an exemplary social form of the collective dreams of the period expressed in arts, architectures, popular stories and films and other popular arts. Given the premise that the dream images in the novel, so-called kitsch, reflect the fears and desires of the bourgeois middle class that were pathologized in the figure of the ghost, this paper reveals the cultural, social and transnational implications of the Ghost-Image in relation to the rapidly changing borders of the 19th century metropolis.

Erotic places? Bath houses and music-halls in the late 19th-Century Paris

Dans le Paris du second XIXe siecle, les etablissements de bains publics et les salles de cafes-concerts sont signales comme des aires privilegiees de debauche, de prostitution et d’outrage public a la pudeur. S’ils sont des cadres averes de rencontres homosexuelles et de racolage, ces territoires font l’objet de representations tres diverses chez les observateurs du temps. Independamment meme de la rencontre et du commerce des sexes qu’ils favorisent, ces espaces ou le devoilement de nudites, plus ou moins avancees, invite a l’exhibitionnisme et au voyeurisme contribuent a plus d’un titre a l’edification de la reputation de Paris comme « capitale des plaisirs ». Cet article vise donc a apprehender les pratiques qui avaient cours dans ces etablissements et a confronter les differentes representations qu’ils ont suscitees, afin de saisir leur dynamique d’ « erotisation » ainsi que les ressorts de l’imaginaire du lieu erotique et la gamme des motifs qui fondent les discours sur l’eros parisien a la fin du XIXe siecle.

Gustave Caillebotte: an Impressionist and photography

Gustave Caillebotte not only depicted the 19th-century Paris of Haussmann, but also painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits and interiors. Today, he has taken his place as one of the most outstanding French Impressionists. His avant-garde approach to perspective and composition anticipated pictorial forms of 20th-century photography.

The persistence of bohemia

This paper is a reflection on bohemia, both as a historical and a contemporary phenomenon. It explores bohemia as an expression of and a response to the contradictions of both 19th-century bourgeois society and present-day neo-liberal society. It begins with an examination of the origins of bohemia in 19th-century Paris and follows its expansion and popularisation through the 20th century. The paper then focuses on Berlin as a paradigmatic example of present-day bohemia in its globalised and industrialised form; Berlin is significant in this context for two reasons: first, because it has become a global destination for followers of a bohemian lifestyle as described below, and second, because the concept of bohemia has been incorporated into property speculation and economic development policy discourses. Drawing on Barthes' definition of myth as an imaginary solution to unresolvable contradictions, Elizabeth Wilson characterises bohemia as a ‘cultural myth about art in modernity, a myth which seeks to reconcile art to industrial capitalism, to create for it a role in consumer society’ (Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, 3. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). The author is in agreement with Wilson, but would add that for contemporary bohemia, there is a further contradiction to be resolved: between the desire for a personally meaningful, exciting and glamorous lifestyle and the lucrative nature of this lifestyle for post-industrial capitalism. The author originally came from an arts practice background, then entered academic research as a way of trying to understand the incorporation of culture into capitalism. This text forms part of this investigation.

When Music Makes History

Paul du Quenoy, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia. 290 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0271034676. $65.00. Olga Haldey, Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater. 416 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0253354686. $44.95. James Loeffler, Use Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire. 288 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0300137132. $55.00. Lynn M. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life. 368 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0199735266. $45.00. The question I want to pose here is one that has been addressed increasingly by music scholars, most recently Lynn Sargeant: how do we integrate Russian music and musical life, so often overlooked by historians, into the historical narratives of Europe, the fin de siecle, and late imperial Russia? Students of the 19th- and 20th-century tsarist empire acknowledge the centrality of literary forms while paying Par less attention to aural and visual cultures (5-6, 7). The reasons for the omissions are many, but the most obvious seems to be lack of musical expertise among historians and the assumption that such topics are better left to those formally trained in musical analysis, performance, and art history. Certainly one can make a case for such a division of labor. Musically inclined literature scholars and musicologists--among them Rosamund Bartlett, Julie Buckler, Boris Gasparov, Simon Morrison, and the prolific and highly influential Richard Taruskin--already offer us much more than just musical interpretation. (1) They present readers with complex social and intellectual worlds, critical reactions, and insights into performance, relating musical practice to political events such as the revolution of 1905 and the larger story of Russian politics and society. Nonetheless, their focus on well-known compositions, composers, virtuosos, and published criticism leave unexamined political and social fields crucial for historians. Why, after all, have the weighty contributions of these scholars not been engaged or taken up in significant ways by broad social and political histories of the Russian Empire? Despite the heroic efforts of historicist music and literature scholars, as well as historians of theater cultures such as Murray Frame and Richard Stites, music often has remained outside, or beside, history. (2) Two recent books, Lynn M. Sargeant's Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life and James Loeffler's The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire give an impression of music making and its relation to cultural politics and everyday life different from most of those mentioned above. Although the stories told by Loeffler, who writes at length about the Society for Jewish Folk Music, and Sargeant, who focuses almost exclusively on the Russian Musical Society (RMO), diverge at key moments, I find it fitting to treat them here together: both address music history as history, bringing musical life to questions about civil society, national identity, and spirituality: They take so-called fine art out of the arguably narrow context of debates about aesthetics and locate it in developments such as professionalization, the commercialization of entertainment, and the struggle for Jewish emancipation. Both authors discuss changing modes of viewing and listening--as William Weber and James Johnson have done for 19th-century London, Vienna, and Paris--and suggest a distinctly Russian version of the bourgeoisification of culture. The approaches of the two scholars differ in some respects, however: Sargeant is a social and cultural historian of imperial Russia, more allied in argument and method with Weber and Johnson, and interested in the ways music is used to elaborate class identity. …

« La France de Chypre » de Louis de Mas Latrie

In publishing his monograph on the France de Chypre (1931), Iorga presented it as the achievement of a lifetime’s reflection on a topic discovered as a young student in the late 19th century Paris while studying the crusades. Using the key provided by the author himself, we will follow the intellectual quest which prompted him to entirely revisit the historical role of Latin presence in the Eastern Mediterranean during later crusades. We will contextualize firstly the French intellectual milieu where he was formed and which ignited Iorga’s interest on Cyprus. An analysis and an evaluation of the content of his book will afterwards be attempted. We endeavour finally to locate this book within the framework of his wider ambition to achieve a synthesis of world history. Looked at as mere curiosity in his time, yet consonant with present-day conception, Iorga argued than any subject of local history can only receive its full meaning when considered within the mainstream of global history.

The epileptic singers of belle époque Paris

In late 19th century Paris, people with epilepsy were treated alongside those with hysteria in the now famous Salpêtrière Hospital, where both conditions were deemed to have a neurological basis....

1042 SOUNDS AND CHARRIÈRE THE REST OF THE STORY

You have accessJournal of UrologyMale Voiding Dysfunction (BPH & Incontinence) & Infection1 Apr 20121042 SOUNDS AND CHARRIÈRE THE REST OF THE STORY Diana K. Bowen, David A. Bloom, Julian Wan, and Richard P. Lyon Diana K. BowenDiana K. Bowen Chicago, IL More articles by this author , David A. BloomDavid A. Bloom Ann Arbor, MI More articles by this author , Julian WanJulian Wan Ann Arbor, MI More articles by this author , and Richard P. LyonRichard P. Lyon Ann Arbor, MI More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2012.02.1147AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES Parisian cutler Joseph-Frédéric-Benoı̂t Charrière (1803-1876) contributed greatly to surgical disciplines with innovative tools, but his legacy is the gauge system he developed in 1842 that is still used for catheters, probes, and dilators. METHODS Historical documents, scientific publications, personal interviews, editorials, and texts were reviewed. RESULTS Sounding devices have been documented in the surgical armamentarium since 3000 BC, with practitioners Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus, and Al-Zahrawi espousing theories on sounding and the related topics of stones and urinary obstruction. The medical revolution in 19th century Paris propelled technology and one of the most influential men involved was Charrière, who pioneered diverse technical processes in the manufacturing of surgical instruments, led one of the largest instrument manufacturing companies, and improved upon tools introduced by predecessors including his mentor Guillaume Dupuytren. Most importantly he created the catheter scale that despite not being favored in its country of origin became an international standard and is known today as the French system. CONCLUSIONS The classification of sounds, catheters, and bougies has undergone many variations throughout the years, but the French scale still holds in current medical practice as an accurate and nearly universal sizing tool. © 2012 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 187Issue 4SApril 2012Page: e423 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2012 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Diana K. Bowen Chicago, IL More articles by this author David A. Bloom Ann Arbor, MI More articles by this author Julian Wan Ann Arbor, MI More articles by this author Richard P. Lyon Ann Arbor, MI More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Evolution of Hysteria

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book CaseFull AccessEvolution of HysteriaHelen M. Farrell, M.D.Helen M. FarrellSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:2 Mar 2012https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.47.5.psychnews_47_5_27-eAbstract Hysteria, once believed to be a disease of women and triggered by puberty, is the subject of Asti Hustvedt’s book Medical Muses. In 19th-century Paris, Jean Martin Charcot insisted that hysteria was a distinctive disease that caused real physical pain, thus making it a disorder of the nervous system, not the womb.Charcot’s emphasis on clinical observation led to his most important medical discoveries at the Salpetriere. During his tenure at this “insane asylum,” he kept extensive dossiers for each patient that included histories, copious clinical notes, drawings, and handwriting samples. Hysteria for Charcot was like “a sphinx that defies anatomy,” and he focused on visually documenting the disease rather than on curing it.Art became a method to immobilize the tumultuous fits of Charcot’s patients. Hysterical symptoms were reproduced at the Salpetriere in a number of ways—as staged reenactments, sketches, wax and plaster casts, and photographs. Blanche, Genevieve, and Augustine were his stars.In the 1870s Charcot diagnosed these three women with hysteria. Hustvedt’s detailed descriptions of them allow modern psychiatrists to delve into the women’s pathology and speculate about their actual diagnosis. “Bizarre mood swings in which she would laugh one minute and cry the next,” for example, suggests a patient with an affective disorder. Others, who were possessed “demonically,” most likely experienced a psychotic illness. One of Charcot’s muses, who would “mortify her flesh by cutting her arms and amputating her nipple,” was likely suffering from borderline personality disorder.Hustvedt’s book is well-researched and incorporates provocative sketches and photographs of patients with fascinating historical vignettes. Medical Muses provides a snapshot into the rich and controversial history of psychiatry that is sure to leave readers thankful for modern practices.Helen M. Farrell, M.D., is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a staff psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.Helen M. Farrell, M.D., is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a staff psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. ISSUES NewArchived

Benjamin’s Arcades Project today: From the European metropolis to the global city

This essay reads Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40) as an analysis of 19th-century Paris that anticipates non-western and global urban space in the postmodern age of a late capitalist consumer society. In Benjamin’s analysis, the French capital cites images of colonial or non-western cultures for the formation of its European identity. Conversely, the accelerating hybridization and virtualization of today’s global cities, here exemplified by Hong Kong, appropriate images from Europe, fusing these by borrowing from their own history in order to fashion their own metropolitan diversity. As a result, Benjamin’s Europe-centred text can be re-employed as a framework for analysing representations of non-western cities; correspondingly, focusing on a (western) description of a city like Hong Kong allows Benjamin’s reconstruction of 19th-century Paris to appear as a foundational space of today’s transnational capitalism.

Getting Together and Falling Apart: Applauding audiences

Looking at recent and historic audiences, this article investigates the possibilities of participation in theatres which are provided by the synchronizing potential of applause. Applause is a negotiation of acknowledging and estimating a performance (in the sense of its success), and it is being produced by and authenticated through gestures. It is aimed at an object, an accomplishment, a performance, and at the same time at all the others who constitute an audience in that very moment of acclamation or disapproval. The article asks about the individual and/or collective quality of this action, being an expression of enthusiasm and a way of collective recognition with a collectivizing effect, especially effective in an organized form of clapping in 19th century Paris: the claque. Doing so, it becomes clear in how far the work spectators and listeners do is being subjected to a similar process of differentiation and refinement as the one the performers go through. Proposing to investigate a historically established, rather non emphatic concept of participation allows to put under scrutiny the ways in which participation is informed by synchronization and rhythmic differentiation. The idea of action (within the audience) at the intersection of moving and being moved is of central interest for this article's argument. Taking a closer look at the dynamics of (historical) audiences reveals the manifold options beyond passivity or activity which turns this odd singular into some sort of plurality, a collective divided many times in itself, constituting engagement with a performance between affirmation and difference, pleasure and critique. Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide whether ‘progressive’, participatory performances are in fact enabling, while ‘conventional’ performances have the effect of something like a sedative.

(Re-)Reading Shanghai’s Futures in Ruins: Through the Legend of an (Extra-)Ordinary Woman in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

This essay is an allegorical reading of Shanghai futures through a fictive woman, Wang Qiyao, in Wang Anyi’s novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (1996). The novel is about her life in China from the 1940s to the 1980s. Using Benjamin’s critique of 19th century Paris in relation to Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s (“the Paris of the Orient”) the essay examines questions of phantasmagoria, nostalgia, memory and awakening and relates these to the possible Shanghai futures to come.

Zeyneb Hanoum: Turkish Traveling Pioneer in 19th Century Paris

Zeyneb Hanoum: Turkish Traveling Pioneer in 19th Century Paris

Reading Manhattan, Reading American Masculinity

This article reintroduces the flâneur, traditionally a figure associated with 19th century Paris, as a methodological tool for investigating literary representations of 21st century American masculinity. Contemporary research on the flâneur has either propagated the disintegrative effect of the modern metropolis on his masculine identity or dismissed the flâneur as a postmodern trope bereft of any specific signified. Conversely, this article will argue, with close readings of E.B. White’s Here is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, that the flâneur returns as the definitive figure of the postmodern age. The flâneur, in making visible the discourses of power that shape masculinity, becomes a counter-hegemonic figure, a self-reflexive analytical agent of subjectivity and masculinity.

Modern Transitions in 19th Century Paris: Baudelaire and Renoir

Modern Transitions in 19th Century Paris: Baudelaire and Renoir 1 Karen Turman University of California, Santa Barbara Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville change plus vite, helas! que le cœur d’un mortel) 2 Charles Baudelaire “Le Cygne” Charles Baudelaire constructed his poetry through the eye of an observer on the streets of Paris during the mid-19th century, seeking the inherent beauty amongst the transitional urban spaces. The industrialization of urban Paris served as the theater for Baude- laire’s enchanting and controversial verse, redefining poetry in a modern context. Baudelaire depicted images of contemporary Pa- risian life with a sense of urgency and constant renewal, striving to communicate a feeling of change and ephemerality. This subject would later be treated by the Impressionist painters who would em- ploy the same concepts underlining transitional and modern urban spaces in the fixed media of painting. In this paper I compare the poem, “A une passante” from Baudelaire’s “Tableaux parisiens” from Les fleurs du mal (1857) with Les parapluies, a painting by Auguste Renoir, (1881-1886) in order to discover the parallel emer- gence of modernity in Paris through the textual and later the visual. Within the framework of Baudelaire’s definition of modernity in his essay, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” and in terms of the industrial landscape and the contrasts of exteriority and interiority, I analyze these works of fixed art forms to explore the dichotomy between conceptions of modernity and its representation. “A Une Passante” A new facade of Paris was the result of sweeping archi- tectural changes: the landscape had become modern. Baron Hauss- © 2010 by Karen Turman.