What is it about Paris For the last two centuries it has been the single most visited city in the world. Tourists still go for the art and the food, even if they have to brave the disdain of ticket-takers and waiters. Revolutionaries on the run, artists in search of the galleries and writers looking for the license to explore their inner selves went looking for people like themselves and created their own fields filled with experimentation and constant arguments. Would worldwide communist revolution have been conceivable without the Paris that was home to Marx, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh Would Impressionism or Cubism have become "isms" without Paris as a place to work and as a subject to paint How Paris came to be, for such a long time, "capital of the world"
The answer lies in the city’s "myths" according to the distinguished Harvard historian Patrice Higonnet in "Paris: Capital of the World. " In his book, Paris came to stand for all the contradictions of modern life; you went there to experience more fully what modern life had to offer. Paris was imagined, by locals and foreigners alike, as the hothouse of individualism, revolution, scientific progress, urbanism, artistic innovation and cultural sophistication, but it also offered the more dangerous enticements of pornography, prostitution, alienation and, at the end of the line, crime.
Higonnet fully appreciates how the two sides of the "myth" complemented each other. A product of two cultures himself--he wrote this book in French--Higonnet is ideally placed to serve as guide to the riches of the Parisian Golden Age, which ran roughly from the French Revolution to 1945. His book is beautifully produced and worth purchasing.