Integrating the history of Paris with the history of consumption, the press, publicity, advertising and spectacle, this book traces the evolution of the urban core districts of consumption and explores elements of consumer culture such as the print media, publishing, retail techniques, tourism, city marketing, fashion, illustrated posters and Montmartre culture in the nineteenth century. Hahn emphasizes the tension between art and industry and between culture and commerce, a dynamic that significantly marked urban commercial modernity that spread new imaginary about consumption. She argues that Parisian consumer culture arose earlier than generally thought, and explores the intense commercialization Paris underwent.

This book explores the commercial modernity of Parisian urban culture and consumer culture in the 19th century.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Engine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport. The omnibus generated innovations in social practices by compelling passengers of diverse backgrounds to interact within the vehicle’s close confines. The arrival of the omnibus in the streets of Paris and in the pages of popular literature acted as a motor for a fundamental cultural shift in how people thought about the city, its social life, and its artistic representations. At the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history, Engine of modernity argues that the omnibus was a metaphor through which writers and artists explored evolving social dynamics of class and gender, meditated on the meaning of progress and change, and reflected on one’s own literary and artistic practices.

Collecting David Harvey's finest work on Paris during the second empire, Paris, Capital of Modernity offers brilliant insights ranging from the birth of consumerist spectacle on the Parisian boulevards, the creative visions of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, and the reactionary cultural politics of the bombastic Sacre Couer. The book is heavily illustrated and includes a number drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier, one of the greatest political caricaturists of the nineteenth century.

The first monograph to examine the depiction of reading women in French art of the early Third Republic, Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 evaluates the pictorial significance of this imagery, its critical reception, and its impact on nineteenth-century notions of femininity and social relations. Artists discussed in the volume range from Manet, Cassatt and Degas, to less familiar figures such as Lavieille, Carrière, Toulmouche and Tissot.

Nineteenth-century Paris is often celebrated as the capital of modernity. However, this story is about cultural producers who were among the first to popularize and profit from that idea. Graphic Culture investigates the graphic artists and publishers who positioned themselves as connoisseurs of Parisian modernity in order to market new print publications that would amplify their cultural authority while distributing their impressions to a broad public. Jillian Lerner's exploration of print culture illuminates the changing conditions of vision and social history in July Monarchy Paris. Analyzing a variety of caricatures, fashion plates, celebrity portraits, city guides, and advertising posters from the 1830s and 1840s, she shows how quotidian print imagery began to transform the material and symbolic dimensions of metropolitan life. The author's interdisciplinary approach situates the careers and visual strategies of illustrators such as Paul Gavarni and Achille Devéria in a broader context of urban entertainments and social practices; it brings to light a rich terrain of artistic collaboration and commercial experimentation that linked the worlds of art, literature, fashion, publicity, and the theatre. A timely historical meditation on the emergence of a commercial visual culture that prefigured our own, Graphic Culture traces the promotional power of artistic celebrities and the crucial perceptual and social transformations generated by new media.