Latin Quarter Research Articles

Impact of Neighborhood Urban Morphologies on Walkability Using Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis

With the increase in car domination, air pollution, traffic congestion, and urban sprawl, sustainable, livable, creative, and walkable cities are critical, now more than ever, for improving quality of life. The effect of neighborhood urban morphologies on walkability has received much attention in recent years. In this vein, the main research question is: how do different neighborhood urban morphologies impact the level of walkability in urban environments, and what are the essential elements impacting the walkability index? Thus, this research aims to determine the impact of urban morphology on walkability in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, as a case study by utilizing multi-spatial analysis. In particular, the study focused on assessing the walkability of four different study areas that vary according to their urban morphology: Kafr–Abdo, Smouha, Latin Quarter, and Roushdy areas. The analysis utilized GIS to calculate a number of indicators to reach the final walkability index for each study area. Results helped to identify the neighborhoods characterized by the lowest level of pedestrian walkability in relation to the area’s urban morphology in an attempt to help decision-makers suggest the appropriate interventions for those areas. The aggregated index results showed that the highest walkability index was that of the gridiron morphology, followed by the linear morphology, with the radial and organic morphologies coming in behind them, respectively. The composite walkability index values were 0.364, 0.247, 0.232 and 0.225, respectively. The reason for this is mainly the presence of the commercial density, intersection density, street density, services density, BCR, and residential density.

La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano); La Leçon (The Lesson); Les Chaises (The Chairs)

La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano); La Leçon (The Lesson); Les Chaises (The Chairs)

Melvillainy in Paris

Melvillainy in Paris Christopher Rice Click for larger view View full resolution Christopher Rice. Photo courtesy of Christopher Rice. I had only been to Paris once before. I arrived then around dusk during La Fête de la Musique on the heels of a rainy night spent outside at Stonehenge— spent inside Stonehenge, aw ake w ith strange revelers— for the solstice. Both celebrations seem ed to mark something that arrives w ith the [End Page 103] height of the sun, yet both w ere stum bled upon, sort of accidental festivals, for me. I remember the face of a kind Parisian who read the drow sy confusion of my own, as the metro teemed with its musical crowd; I remember him generously handing me a ticket and guiding me as I set out to meet a friend from Nova Scotia who had been working at Shakespeare and Company. I remember, after very little sleep, being revived by the sounds and laughter and movement everywhere, imagining that this was simply how Paris must behave most summer nights. Thus, it was with some surprise, and even a glow of nostalgia perhaps, that I discovered I had arrived again—this time for “Melville’s Energies”—in the midst of La Fête de la Musique. After greetings with my remarkable host (remarked upon at some length below), and an indulgent nap, I wandered through the streets near my new quarters by Jardin des Plantes, hugging close to the park’s sides at first as if the immensity lying beyond them threatened to envelop me—or anything drifting out too far. Before long, I gravitated towards some Cuban music and grabbed a bite, which felt more like a 3 a.m. snack by my internal clock. Then, I gathered myself and strolled towards the only Parisian haunt I knew, up towards Shakespeare and Company, where, over a decade ago, my friend Harriet arranged for me to stay on as a “tumbleweed,” a guest of the bookshop receiving lodging for light labor. I found the old shop late in the evening standing defiantly closed, watching over Notre-Dame across the Seine from its perch on the left bank, on a busy strip of downtown nightlife, on this first summer night of the season. Close to his ninety-fifth year, George Whitman was still the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company when I had been there. Being a tumbleweed in his shop meant sleeping on a dusty pullout mattress alongside the other nomads and outcasts who found themselves assisting with opening up, closing down, and working some short shift during the day. For me, this shift often consisted of the arduous task of walking George’s beloved dog “Kitty” around the Latin Quarter—not the sort of work I had signed up for exactly, and far from the best use of my talents under the circumstances, yet I executed such duties as though they constituted my highest vocation. The bookstore really was an institution in that way. In exchange for these labors, tumbleweeds lived rent-free and had our run of the bookshop late in the evenings, where sometimes I looked out at a large black-and-white image of Walt Whitman on the building’s west wall, wondering whether this was solely in token of George’s reverence for the poet or an elaborate attempt to establish some mythic lineage back to him. As I stood outside the dark shopfront now—studying a cigarette receptacle tallying votes between those backing “to be” and those favoring “not to be”—I looked up at the outline of someone smoking from the window above, drenched in the [End Page 104] balcony’s dusky glare, and from my tiny patch of gloom below, strewn amongst all the noise and carousing of the street, felt that i had been there—had looked out that window, too. Lodgings in Paris this time around were slightly more private, though similarly spartan at bottom. The quarters were advertised as cozy, compact, and “organized like a tiny ship.” Most reviews of the space tended to emphasize the host, or “superhost,” Bernadette, rather than the space itself. self-described as a “good, liberal French woman...

Episodic memory and self-reference in a naturalistic context: New insights based on a virtual walk in the Latin Quarter of Paris

Although it is now well-known that self-reference processing benefits the episodic memory of laboratory material, studies have rarely investigated its influence on memory for specific episodes in a naturalistic context. We immersed 64 healthy young participants who were personally either very familiar or unfamiliar with the Latin Quarter of Paris in a virtual environment resembling it. They all navigated using a joystick and memorized as many specific events as possible encountered in this environment, together with their perceptual details and spatial and temporal context. However, one group was assigned to a self-perspective condition (i.e., centered on their own interaction with the environment) and another to a condition requiring the mental simulation of an other-perspective (i.e., centered on the interaction of an avatar with the environment) during the period of navigation and the subsequent memory retrieval tasks. The main results showed that both high personal familiarity (irrespective of the perspective) and a self-perspective (irrespective of the familiarity) improved the recall and recognition of specific events and their spatiotemporal contexts and the sense of remembering. Specifically, high personal familiarity was the most efficient condition for improving the memory of allocentric spatial context while, conversely, self-perspective was the most efficient for enhancing temporal context memory. An additive effect of self-perspective and high familiarity was observed regarding the memory of perceptual details and egocentric spatial context. These findings highlight the benefits of self-reference in episodic memory for specific events. They might help pave the way for the development of new perspectives for cognitive remediation of episodic memory encoding in daily life.

ЕРНЕСТ ДЕНИ И СРБИ : О „НАЈВЕЋЕМ ПРИЈАТЕЉУ СЛОВЕНАˮ ПОВОДОМ СТОГОДИШЊИЦЕ СМРТИ ERNEST DENIS AND SERBS: ABOUT “THE GREATEST FRIEND OF THE SLAVSˮ ON THE OCCASION OF THE CENTENARY OF DEATH

The work of Ernest Denis (1849–1921), a historian, professor and diplomat, is embedded in the idea of the “eternal friendship” between the French and the Serbs. However, one hundred years after his death, the man, in whose house in the Latin Quarter there is L’Institut d’études slaves within Sorbonne University, is unknown to the broader public. In the interwar period, Denis, who from 1912 was also a member of the Serbian Royal Academy, was respected as the “advocate of the subjugated people” and “the greatest friend of the Slavs”. However, after 1945, his work sank into oblivion, except for historians and history buffs. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the work of this French intellectual, based on archival records (Les Archives nationales de France – Site de Paris), the press, his works and memories of his contemporaries. The revaluation of the personality and work of Ernest Denis on the occasion of centenary of his death, is a chance to piece together the mosaic of remembrance and highlight the activities of the present-day L’Institut d’études slaves at Sorbonne.

Nostos and Nineteenth-Century Italian-Canadian Immigration: Mapping the Earliest Latin Quarters

In this article, I examine the formation of the first Latin Quarter in London (ON) at the end of the nineteenth century, and thus at the dawn of modernity. I analyse how these first (mostly Southern) Italian immigrants attempted to soothe their need for a sense of belonging, how they negotiated their collective nostos and, concomitantly, how they dealt with the palpable nostalgia for a return to their Mediterranean homeland.

Geographical approach to Sustaining the potential Cultural Heritage of Alexandria, Egypt, 2030: Visualization of the Latin Quarter for the Tourism Industry

Geographical approach to Sustaining the potential Cultural Heritage of Alexandria, Egypt, 2030: Visualization of the Latin Quarter for the Tourism Industry

Offline: The legacy and lessons of May '68

Doctors have only cared for the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Imagine you are a distinguished Professor of Medicine, the Rector of one of your country's most garlanded universities. Your students are angry. They have seen fellow students at a nearby university rebel against atrociously poor conditions—overcrowding, incompetent curriculum reforms, and feelings of utter alienation. Tensions are palpable. The air is chilled by the threat of violence. What would you do? Let us not judge. In 1968, at the Sorbonne in Paris, Professor Jean Roche (1901–92), co-discoverer (in 1952) of tri-iodothyronine and one of France's most eminent scientists, made a choice. Was it panic? A miscalculation? The New Yorker called his decision an “unpardonable academic error”. Whatever one's view, the events that followed his decree on May 3 led to the largest conflagration affecting a European nation since World War 2. Roche, a physician and thyroid biochemist, precipitated a national crisis that changed France. His decision to call in riot police to protect the university, its staff and students, was the trigger for unprecedented political upheaval. For 5 weeks, through a combination of street protests and a general strike of about 9 million people, France was paralysed. The consequences, and its meaning 50 years later, deserve reflection. For what happened in May '68 shows how a society reacts when driven to the edge of schismatic social change. “On the night of May 9–10 the Latin Quarter of Paris was a battleground with police releasing tear-gas in an attempt to destroy barricades erected by students…The demonstrating students have widely differing political views; but all insist on the need for university reform.” The Lancet's coverage (May 18, 1968) was sympathetic to the student protests. But in the aftermath of May, progressive voices concluded that the largest mass movement in French history achieved nothing. And so the myths have grown. May '68 was a particularly French expression of the widespread 1960s counterculture. It was a youthful, ultimately playful, revolt. It was spontaneous. It was about free speech. It was poetic (“It is forbidden to forbid”). It was urban. Or, as Raymond Aron put it, May was “the event that turned out to have been a non-event”. It is true that on May 30, 300 000 people marched down the Champs-Elysées to demand order be restored. De Gaulle won. Jails filled. France's Fifth Republic was intact. Students returned to their classrooms. But in more important ways, France—and western Europe—was forever changed. As Daniel Singer wrote in Prelude to Revolution: France in May, 1968 (1970), “the modern state might not be as impregnable as it looks”. May '68 matters not because students failed to seize power. Those few weeks matter because they showed, in Singer's words, “the unsuspected depth of…pent-up discontent”. Medicine played its part too, but, in an echo of Roche's instincts, as a break on the quickening pace of history. Medical students in France in the 1960s came from mostly wealthy families. They were destined for well paid jobs. Although many medical students took part in debates about university reforms in May '68, their discontent was quickly dissipated. As Singer concludes, medical students, “felt no overwhelming professional reasons for reshaping society”. Medicine was the defender of the ancien régime: “many budding doctors…will do no more than grumble”. Despite a victorious conservatism, the legacy of May '68, as Kristin Ross describes in May '68 and its Afterlives (2002), is nevertheless confident, even expectant. Something happened. Students, workers, and farmers refused to be caged in their social categories. Novel and unforeseen alliances among heterogeneous communities were forged. There was a revival of solidarity across classes and ages. A mass movement challenged a fiercely nationalist government. A new era of political engagement was ignited. Resistance to exploitation diffused across an entire nation. From anti-globalisation protests in Seattle to the Occupy movement, from anti-Iraq war campaigns to Arab Uprisings, these are the offspring of May '68. One might judge these mass events to be failures. You would be wrong. Each has shaped the moral conscience of a generation. Each has renewed our sense of social justice. Each has reanimated a dialogue about who we are and what we can be. It all began in Paris in May '68.

Phantoms in the Classroom: Midwifery Training in Enlightenment Europe

Phantoms in the Classroom: Midwifery Training in Enlightenment Europe

Passion and Narration in the Contemporary Arab Novel

Abstract In this article, we propose to explore an aspect of semiotics that has been slow to emerge as a central issue in narrative semiotics. A substantive debate has recently begun today on the achievements and prospects of Greimas’ semiotics of inspiration. Without claiming to have a theoretical range, this article proposes to cast a semiotic light on one of these questions to show the transition from passion to modal. For instance, it demonstrates that the “terror” that is the subject of our analysis can be translated as an additional state between “wanting” and “not-able-to-not-do,” going beyond “the competence to do,” as related by its dictionary definition, to defining other states of passion as a “disposition” or a “feeling that leads to.” What occurs when this passionate state is embedded into a definite narrative? To approach this practical aspect of the question, we have chosen the contemporary Arab novel al-Hayy al-Latini (Latin Quarter) by Suhayl Idris, focusing on a sequence entitled “manipulation and terror.”

Introduction

Introduction Richard J. Golsan This issue of South Central Review has a special, personal resonance for me. The first part of the issue is devoted to the life and work of Tzvetan Todorov, the great critical theorist, historian, and public intellectual who died in Paris in February 2017 from complications from Parkinson's disease. I had known Todorov for more than twenty years. When I first met him, he was an intellectual inspiration to me. As the years passed he became a mentor and a dear friend. Todorov was a formidable presence on the intellectual scene in France and around the world for almost a half century. Originally a literary critic and one of the most important, if not the most important of the structuralist theorists, Todorov introduced the West to Russian Formalism and wrote, among many other early works, a book which remains the definitive study of literature and the fantastic (The Fantastic: A Structualist Approach to a Literary Genre). Following the publication in the early 1980s of The Conquest of America, dealing with the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, Todorov turned his attention to more historical (and often) more controversial topics, including World War II, the Holocaust, and life in concentration and death camps. Todorov also wrote brilliantly about totalitarianism, a subject he knew only too well, having spent his childhood and adolescence in Communist Bulgaria. Often reluctantly, Todorov waded into contemporary political topics in France as well as in the world at large, discussing and denouncing French racism, American imperial ambitions, torture, and especially terrorism, both after 9/11 and in the wake of the Islamic extremist terrorist attacks that have rocked France since 2015. Always a humanist seeking what the great seventeenth-century French playwright Molière called le juste milieu—the "just" or "reasonable" middle ground—Todorov was of course highly critical of torture and terrorism, but also of excessively xenophobic responses by the nations that fell victim to the latter. By no means completely preoccupied by these matters, Todorov also found time to write important studies of the French moraliste tradition and especially the Enlightenment. A life-long admirer of the plastic arts, Todorov also wrote important works on painters including the Dutch masters, Goya, and Russian modernist painters like Malevitch. [End Page 1] The cluster of materials devoted to Todorov in this issue includes several essays by Todorov scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. Henk de Berg offers a thoughtful appreciation of Todorov the intellectual, and Karine Zbinden provides a concise account of Todorov's evolution as a thinker and writer. Nathan Bracher assesses Todorov's importance in helping us to understand the role of the autobiographical, the subjective, in the writing of history, and William Vaughan makes a compelling case for why academic philosophers should take Todorov's work seriously. We also include here an interview I did with Todorov not long before his death in his apartment on two chilly gray evenings in Paris in September 2016. At that point Todorov could leave his apartment in the Latin Quarter only with the greatest of difficulty. As the reader will see, despite his illness and the great fatigue that accompanied it, Todorov offers in the interview a sweeping and concise account of his youth in Communist Bulgaria, his immigration to France, and his intellectual evolution over a long and extraordinarily fruitful career. (I wish to thank my colleague and friend Nathan Bracher for ably transcribing the recorded interview. I have edited the transcription in some instances for concision and clarity). The concluding piece in the cluster is a remembrance I wrote of Todorov following his death. I include it here in the hope that it will convey to the reader some sense of Tzvetan's generosity and wisdom, and his courage at the end. Modest though he was, I suspect Todorov would have been embarrassed with the mention of these personal qualities that, however, describe him very well. We are also happy to include in this issue several other pieces on a wide range of other topics. First, however, we are printing here a series of photographs of the remarkable cane that a French...

From Latin Quarter to Montmartre: Investigating Parisian Real Estate Prices

This paper estimates buyers' preferences for dwelling attributes and neighbourhood characteristics. The collected data allows for the simultaneous consideration of a wide range of intrinsic characteristics, such as surface, floor, etc., and neighbourhood characteristics, including noise, crime, school quality, distance to jobs, etc. The marginal willingness to pay is identified from transaction data under the assumptions of the hedonic model described by Rosen (1974). We use very local fixed effects combined when possible with administrative boundaries as geographical discontinuities to isolate the effect of each amenity. Estimation is achieved by using flexible semi-parametric methods. Characteristics explain more than 90% of the variance of dwelling prices, showing a significant positive marginal willingness to pay for job accessibility and school quality, and a negative marginal willingness to pay for a higher crime rate in the area. By contrast, noise level or public transport accessibility have less influence on housing prices. These results are robust to the inclusion of census tract fixed-effects, which also drastically reduces the spatial correlation of the residual prices.

The Color Line: African American Artists and Segregation – Musée du Quai Branly

When I was a student in the Latin Quarter, I often walked by the commemorative plaque in honor of African-American writer, Richard Wright, located Rue Monsieur Le Prince. Thanks to Wright and his works, I came across the experience of Black American artists in Paris after World War One, which they commonly described as a liberation and a rebirth compared to the sufferings of being second rank citizens in their mother country. Unfortunately, the French general public hardly recollects the pres...

Made in France? The (re-)invention of ‘Mai 68’

Whenever young people protest, references to the French ‘Mai 68’ are quickly made. For nearly 50 years, former activists and journalists have turned events in the Latin Quarter in Paris into the main symbol for the potential of youth to pressure governments. Western European politicians and scholars easily index ‘Mai 68’ as the positive core of ‘European Memory’. French accounts during the historical moment initially emphasized, however, the global experience of student unrest. Such interpretations understood mobilization in Mexico, Poland and Nigeria as sharing one horizon of expectation and turned worldwide anti-authoritarian student unrest into an interpretive frame. With the unfolding of events in France, the French narrative shifted from a globally experienced present to a nationally framed ‘évènement’ of the past. This shift from lived experience to memory turned the student mobilization into a succession of French historical events coined ‘les évènements de mai-juin 68’. The commemoration of French events as a paradigmatic case sidelined mobilization in other European, Asian, African and Latin American countries. Meanwhile, this nationalization gave way to a pacified Franco-centred narrative which could be juxtaposed to the European memory scale whilst neglecting its internal contradictions stemming from the diverse European and global peripheries.

Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism. By Michael Goebel. Global and International History. Edited by Erez Manela, John McNeill, and Aviel Roshwald.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+344. $120.00.

<i>Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism</i>. By Michael Goebel. Global and International History. Edited by Erez Manela, John McNeill, and Aviel Roshwald.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+344. $120.00.

Le Juif Süss au Quartier Latin en 1950. Entre emballement médiatique et réalité de l’antisémitisme

In October 1950, a cinema club directed by Éric Rohmer created an uproar by programing the Nazi propaganda film, Le Juif Süss, in a cinema in the Latin Quarter (Paris). Was this a reflexive approach, led by a group of cinephiles ? A provocation of a small antisemitic group ? A simple publicity stunt ? Antiracist activists and resistant associations had no doubt : they immediately demanded the cancellation of the screening and greater awareness on the part of public officials about the “return of fascism.” The scandal of the Juif Süss reveals the plausible nature of antisemitism in the early 1950s, as well as the reactions produced by civil society and institutions. It creates the occasion to question the place of hate speech in the post-Shoah period, as well as the means used for combatting it.

Review: Paris Ville Lumière: Une transformation urbaine et sociale, 1855–1937, by Joanne Vajda

Joanne Vajda Paris Ville Lumiere: Une transformation urbaine et sociale, 1855–1937 Paris: L'Harmattan, 2015, 422 pp., 133 b/w illus. €40 (cloth), ISBN 9782343055633 Behind an imprecise title and lackluster cover lies a book that lovers of the French capital will enjoy. Joanne Vajda discusses the urban and social transformation of the City of Light that was mediated by high-class tourism in the period 1855–1937. We learn how the members of the “traveling elite” helped transform the neighborhoods they patronized, originally near the Grands Boulevards, then moving westward, always on the Right Bank; the scholastic Latin Quarter and artistic Montparnasse are not featured, and Montmartre makes only a cameo appearance. The beginning and end dates in the book's title relate to the first and last international expositions Paris hosted, and the bulk of the research concerns the Second Empire and the Belle Epoque. In this study, which originated in her doctoral research at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Vajda taps into a multitude of print and archival sources, taking the painstaking path necessary to comprehend the sociocultural, financial, and environmental dynamic between, on one hand, Paris's business and high-end districts as well as residential beaux quartiers and, on the other, the rich men and women attracted to the city from all over the world. Her sources include guidebooks (including multilingual pamphlets published by hotels), essays by fashionable French writers, hotel guest books, building permits, citizenship applications, bankruptcy files, auction catalogues, and police reports. The first section sets the cultural stage for the “the city of the guidebooks,” the “Paris desœuvre, sensuel et cosmopolite” (389) shaped by, and for, foreigners. Indeed, attracting upscale tourism was one of Baron Haussmann's objectives, and such tourism remains a key economic engine for the Parisian economy. Among other intriguing facts, we learn that by 1855 foreigners were allowed entry on a daily basis into many monuments and museums that the French could patronize only on Sundays; …

Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida

Interview conducted July 10, 1998 and November 6, 2000 in Paris. Transcribed and formatted by Stephane Delorme.When a philosopher admits to a fascination with cinema, is it just chance that his thought leads him to encounter the ghosts haunting dark theaters?- Cahiers du cinemaIt is not obvious that ajournai such as Cahiers du anemawould interview Jacques Derrida. Above all because, for a long time, Derrida seemed to be interested only in the phenomenon of writing, in its trace, in speech, in the voice. And then came several books: Memoirs of the Blind, around an exhibition at the Louvre, Echographies of Television, a conversation about that mass medium with Bernard Stiegler that affirmed a new interest in the image. And then too, a film, Derrida's Elsewhere, directed by Safaa Fathy, and a book Tourner les mots, cowritten with the film's director, which finally tackled the experience of cinema. That's all we needed to go and ask some questions of a philosopher who, even though he admits he's not a cinephile, nevertheless has truly been thinking about the cinematographic apparatus, projection, and the ghosts that every normally constituted viewer feels an irresistible urge to encounter. Derrida's discourse, which resonates in the following interview, is thus that of neither a specialist nor a professor speaking from the height of commanding knowledge, but very simply that of a man who thinks and who goes back to the ontology of cinema while shedding new light on it.Cahiers du cinema: How did cinema enter your life?Derrida: Very early. In Algiers, when I was ten or twelve years old, at the end of the war then right after the war. It was a vital way of getting out. I lived in a suburb of the city, El Biar. To go to the movies was an emancipation, getting away from the family. I remember well the names of all the movie houses in Algiers, I can see them still: The Vox, The Cameo, The Noon-Midnight, The Olympia . . . No doubt I went to the movies without being very selective. I saw everything, the French films made during the Occupation, and especially the American films that returned after 1942. I would be totally incapable of listing the titles of the films, but I remember the sort of films I saw. A Tom Sawyer for example, certain scenes of which came back to me recently: a cave where Tom is closed up with a little girl. A sexual emotion: I saw that a twelve-year-old boy could caress a little girl. I was about the same age. Of course a large part of one's sensual and erotic education comes from movies. You learn what a kiss is at the movies, before learning it in life. I remember that adolescent erotic thrill. I would be totally incapable of citing anything else. I have a passion for the cinema; it's a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not the least memory for cinema. It's a culture that leaves no trace in me. It's virtually recorded, I've forgotten nothing, I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of the titles of films from which I don't remember a single image. I am not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term. Instead I'm a pathological case. During periods when I go to the movies a lot, particularly when I'm abroad in the United States where I spend my time in movie theaters, a constant repression erases the memory of these images that nonetheless fascinate me. In 1949, I arrived in Paris, for advanced preparatory school, and the rhythm continued, several shows a day sometimes, in the countless movie theaters of the Latin Quarter, especially the Champo.Cahiers du cinema: What is for you the first effect of film in the state of childhood? You mentioned the erotic dimension, which is certainly essential in the apprenticeship of images. But is it a relation to gestures, a relation to time, the body, space?Derrida: If it wasn't the names of films, or the stories, or the actors that made an impression on something in me, it was surely another form of emotion that has its source in projection, in the very mechanism of projection. …

Introduction: The Gunshot Concert

In the summer of 1935, as Hitler’s troops were readying their occupation of the Rhineland, a group of left-wing writers gathered before a crowd of over three thousand in the Latin Quarter’s Palais de la Mutualité. Paris in June can be a swamp, and la Mutualité—a poorly ventilated theater built at the height of the Depression—was hot as ever. Paul Vallaint-Couturier, the editor of the Communist daily L’Humanité, rose to give his speech in a bathing suit. In the auditorium were Gide and Malraux, Brecht and Musil, Pasternak and E.M. Forster—who before an audience of improvised newspaper fans and sweat-stained shirts rehearsed the arguments he later made in Two Cheers for Democracy.

The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians by Mark A. Lause (review)

Reviewed by: The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians by Mark A. Lause Craig Monk (bio) The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians. By Mark A. Lause. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2009. Pp. 181. Cloth, $45.00.) To read American bohemianism as a minor theme in the cultural history of New York City is to do a disservice to the intellectual richness of the former, a sprawling diversity of ideas stretching back more than a century and a half. Radical thought might thrive in Manhattan, but, as Mark Lause demonstrates here, its genesis can often be traced through events felt most acutely outside the city, and the influence it wields can be found even further afield. In practical terms, the roots of bohemia in the United States are often sought first in the protest offered by residents of the Seventh Village, Greenwich Village in the years leading up to the First World War. The importance of the cultural life that thrived elsewhere in the city in the 1850s and the 1860s is often ignored, and The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians finds the legacy of European upheaval alive and well among a collection of colorful outcasts who converged on Charles Pfaff ’s Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon on Broadway. While this study seeks to chart a more complicated set of social and intellectual connections during the middle of the nineteenth century, the most compelling story at its heart is the discussion of the life of an intellectual now largely forgotten: Henry Clapp, son of a Massachusetts bookseller whose family’s true legacy may have been the wanderlust of the merchant seaman. Suffering chronic bronchitis in his early twenties, Clapp escaped to the American South and returned to Boston with a new view of his country and a renewed zeal for social reform that drew him into the abolitionist movement. Making his name as a newspaperman of independent thinking, Clapp lost any ardor for temperance while traveling in Europe, living in Paris as Henry Murger’s chronicles of the Latin Quarter echoed through the streets and in London as a growing demand for cultural artifacts emboldened a generation of writers and painters. When a more worldly Clapp returned to the United States, he settled in New York. While The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians fails to capture the tragic arc of Clapp’s fall, Lause draws New York as a legitimate outpost of bohemia, where conventional thought was challenged at one of the most critical points in American history. While Greenwich Villagers would, three generations later, interrogate the soul of Woodrow Wilson’s Democrats, Clapp’s bohemians came of age during the emergence of the Republican Party. Much more than slavery was discussed in the cellar at [End Page 270] Pfaff ’s, of course, by outsiders who craved veneration but came from a background that promised no access to it, by outsiders who sought literary success but had little recourse to a cultural industry to nurture it. Ada Clare, the so-called Queen of Bohemia, appears across Pfaff ’s constellation, as does Walt Whitman, but the essence of their work fails to escape the shadow of the impending war that preoccupies Lause’s discussion. Indeed, this is a book that buries its lead: the role in the rise of the Republican Party played by articulate, networked radicals who did have access to newspapers across the American Northeast. Clapp could never be described as an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and, for the bohemian, Lincoln’s fledgling party was too equivocal in its opposition to slavery. But while Republican conservatism was incompatible with the radicalism of Fourierist socialism, for example, other land reformers of Clapp’s acquaintance found much in common with many individuals who ran under the new party’s banner. Even as many of their best writers set to work undermining the Democrats, bohemians doubted that the ballot box would solve problems that would soon result in war, acknowledging at the same time that conflict would challenge other values, such as freedom of expression, held most dear. Indeed, it was the changed priorities of the 1860s that killed the Saturday Press, Clapp...