"A top historian offers a new history of Paris's Belle aEpoque, the luminous age of the Eiffel Tower and the Sacrae-Cur Basilica, but also of social unrest and violent clashes over what it meant to be French From the wrought ironwork of the Eiffel Towerto the flourishing art nouveau movement, the Belle aEpoque is remembered as a golden age for Parisian culture. Beneath the veneer of elegance, however, fin de siaecle Paris was a city at war with itself. In City of Light, City of Shadows, Mike Rapport uncovers a Paris riven by social anxieties and plagued by overlapping epidemics of poverty, political extremism, and anti-Semitism. As the Sacrae-Cur and Eiffel Tower rose into the skies, redefining architecture and the Paris skyline, Paris's slums were plagued by disease and gang violence. The era, now remembered as a high point of French art and culture, was also an age of intense political violence, including anarchist bombings, organized right-wing mobs, and assassinations. Weaving together these stories of splendor and suffering with the fabric of the city itself, the book offers a brilliant account of Paris's Belle aEpoque-revealing the darkness that suffused the City of Light"-- Provided by publisher.
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