Paris, Capital of Modernity

A collection of David Harvey's essays on Second Empire Paris, read as the place where nineteenth-century capitalist modernity took shape.

The book is arranged in three parts: Representations, Materializations and a Coda. Early chapters take up the myths of modernity and the body politic. The long middle section follows the city through space relations, credit and finance, rent, the state, labor, women's work, consumerism and spectacle on the boulevards. It reads the work of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola alongside this material, and closes with the building of the Sacré-Coeur basilica. The volume is heavily illustrated and includes drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier.

Harvey is a British-American geographer and Marxist theorist, Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and long associated with urban political economy and the idea of the right to the city. Here his usual economic analysis is applied to a single city and a single period, with literature and caricature as evidence.