"An exciting, innovative, and significant work. The author points to how the crowd experience transcended class and gender divisions and was transformed from acts of collective violence into acts of collective consumption."—Michael B. Miller, author of Shanghai on the Métro

An outstanding gift or souvenir in a new affordable package, Spectacular Paris celebrates all that shines in the wonderful City of Light. In this celebration and photographic portrait, Spectacular Paris brings the best of this awe-inspiring city into sharp focus, capturing the unending beauty, lure, culture, and magnificence of this unique city. Paris is home to some of the world's greatest landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and the Pantheon. There is hardly any corner in Paris where you are not confronted with beauty and decor: it is layered with architectural history and culture, and has magnificently decorated buildings of royal, religious, and secular purpose at every turn and corner. Ancient, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, and modern architecture meld together in a city laid out upon the banks of the Seine. This is the perfect book for those who have been captured by the romance and beauty of Paris.

Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle. Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.

A history of public executions in France from the medieval spectacle of suffering to the invention of the Revolutionary guillotine, up to the last public execution in 1939. Paul Friedland explores why spectacles of public execution were staged, as well as why thousands of spectators came to watch them.

Have you ever wondered how the Eiffel Tower was built? Or, what it would have been like to wander the streets of Montmartre a hundred years ago and meet people like Edith Piaf and the famous painters? As you walk around the City of Light, you are travelling in the footsteps of amazing people including Napoleon Bonaparte, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gustave Eiffel. In different ways, all of these amazing characters made major contributions, making the city of Paris what it is today. A city tour unlike any other, Amazing People of Paris takes you on a fascinating journey with these icons of one of the world's most visited cities. You will meet those who contributed to the music, the art, the architecture, the politics and other vital aspects of the city's life. Come face to face with those who developed the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, the Tuilleries Gardens and other great places. Walk around the city with the stories of the people who created the sites we love to visit. What is a BioView®? Your tour of the people and places of Paris comes alive through BioViews®. A BioView® is a short biographical story, similar to an interview. These unique stories provide an easy way of learning about amazing people who made major contributions and changed our world.

Expanding the narrow script of what it means to be Parisian, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art made by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.