Paris between Empires, 1814-1852 (Paperback)

Between 1814 and 1852 Paris was the capital of Europe, a city of power and pleasure, a magnet for people of all nationalities that exerted an influence far beyond the borders of France. Paris was the stage where the great conflicts of the age, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, revolution and royalism, socialism and capitalism, atheism and Catholicism, were fought out before the audience of Europe. As a contemporary proverb put it: when Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold. "Paris Between Empires" tells the story of this golden age, from the entry of the allies into Paris on 31 March 1814, after the defeat of Napoleon I, to the proclamation of another Bonaparte, his nephew Louis-Napoleon, as Napoleon III in the Hotel de Ville on 2 December 1852. During those years, Paris, the seat of a new parliamentary government, was a truly cosmopolitan capital, home to Rossini, Heine and Princess Lieven, as well as Berlioz, Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier. Its salons were crowded with the aristocracy and intelligentsia of Europe, attracted by freedom from the political, social and sexual restrictions that they endured at home. Not since imperial Rome has one city dominated European life.

This was a time too, of political turbulence and intellectual ferment, of violence on the streets and women manipulating men and events from their salons. In describing it Philip Mansel draws on the unpublished letters and diaries of some of the city's leading figures and those of the foreigners who flocked there, among them Lord Normanby, Lady Holland, Napoleon's lifelong enemy the Russian amabssador Count Pozzo di Borgo, and Charles de Flahaut, lover of Napoleon's step-daughter Queen Hortense. His book shows that the European ideal was as alive in the 19th century as it is today.