City of Light

· The Landmark Library Book 10 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
208
Pages
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

A sparkling account of the nineteenth-century rebuilding of Paris as the most beautiful city in the world, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series.
'This really is an impressive book' Sebastian Faulks.

'Brisk, vivid and unexpectedly stirring... No one writes as evocatively and entertainingly about Paris as Christiansen does' Mail on Sunday.

'Every page is a pleasure, every building, every gas lamp brought shimmering to life... Don't board the Eurostar without a copy' The Times.

'A wonderful book, amazingly vivid... But also a truly original work of scholarship' Theodore Zeldin.

In 1853 the French emperor Louis Napoleon inaugurated a vast and ambitious programme of public works, directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine. Haussmann's renovation of Paris would transform the old medieval city of squalid slums and disease-ridden alleyways into a 'City of Light' – characterised by wide boulevards, apartment blocks, parks, squares and public monuments, new railway stations and department stores and a new system of public sanitation.

City of Light charts a fifteen-year project of urban renewal which – despite the interruptions of war, revolution, corruption and bankruptcy – would set a template for nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban planning and create the enduring and globally familiar layout of modern Paris.

About the author

Rupert Christiansen is the opera critic and arts columnist for the Daily Telegraph. His books include Tales of the New Babylon: Paris in the Mid-19th Century and Romantic Affinities: Portraits From an Age 1780-1830. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.