A View of Paris

In this sweeping and beautiful biography of a city, Artemis Cooper tell the story of the cultural life of Paris. A View of Paris is a story which covers the great sprawling novels of Balzac and Hugo to those of Gide and Camus; painting from the revolutionary but strictly neo-classical David, through the new ways of seeing developed by the Impressionists and the Surrealists to the wild exuberance of Picasso; fashion from Worth to Channel; architecture from Haussmann to the Eiffel Tower, in whose shadow the first Paris Olympiads were held in 1900 and 1924; and music from Gounod, Berlioz and Bizet to Satie. It ranges from the Folies Bergère where Josephine Baker danced in a skirt made of sequinned bananas; to the smoke-filled cafés of Saint Germain where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote and held court, and Juliette Gréco sang in nightclubs packed with sweaty bodies doing 'le jive'. Above all, this cultural history of Paris aims to reflect a creative tension that the Revolution uncovered but never resolved: the tension between order and anarchy, authority and liberty, classical and Romantic, the old and the new.