As a neighbourhood that powerfully shaped the cultural imaginary of late nineteenth-century Paris, Montmartre has attracted a good deal of scholarly interest. From the role that it played in the history of the 1871 Paris Commune (as the neighbourhood where the first act of resistance against the Thiers government took place), to the rise of Montmartre cabarets in the 1880s, and its celebration as the birthplace of the modern artistic avant-garde, Montmartre's manifestations in fin-de-siècle politics, art and culture have been described as anti-authoritarian, playful and experimental. Instead of merely reiterating these attributes, however, Brigstocke's contextualization of the relevance of fin-de-siècle Montmartre from the perspective of the biopolitical discourses of the Third French Republic, and his emphasis on the neighbourhood's investment in ‘speaking truth to power’, allow for a radical rethinking of Montmartre's significance in French and European cultural and urban history.

Each of the three parts of the book reflects the innovative character, theoretical sophistication and richness of the author's arguments. The first chapter of the book's first part dwells on the symbolism of the black cat in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, as well as in the paintings of Édouard Manet. According to Brigstocke, in these works ‘the black cat exemplified a kind of “limit-experience”, an experience at the extremities of reason, sexuality and organic life itself’ (p. 48). Representatives of Montmartre's culture in the 1880s also searched for such ‘limit-experiences’. As the next two chapters document, this interest was part and parcel of a rejection of religious, political and scientific authority for the sake of an ‘experiential authority’ based on the ‘testing and contesting [of] the accepted frameworks for experiencing, representing and performing the life of the city’ (p. 49), which they used to challenge the ‘experimental authority’ of the liberal elites of the Third Republic. While government technocrats harnessed reason and modern science for social engineering projects whose goal was to regulate every aspect of the life of people living in the city, supporters of ‘experiential authority’ strove ‘to make visible new forms of truth [author's emphasis] concerning the life, violence and destructiveness of the modern biopolitical city’ (p. 66). Paralleling scientific experiments conducted in the laboratory, the Montmartre cabarets experimented with humour as a means to subvert the former's relevance.

In the second part of the book, focusing on the Chat Noir cabaret, Brigstocke emphasizes that the humour, buffoonery and carnivalesque spirit of this establishment promoted a politics of neighbourhood vitality counterpoised to that of Paris. Promoting a strong sense of autochthony, Montmartre imagined itself as being a place both within and without the city, an island of creative freedom that elaborated its own version of urban modernity. The Chat Noir also relied on a strategy of ‘counter-display’ based on the mix-up of time and ‘an emphasis on error’ (p. 136) to call into question the relevance of narratives of historical and scientific progress as embodied in the museum, together with the whole ‘culture of imperialist display’ (p. 125). Last but not least, through its shadow theatre productions, the Chat Noir called to life phantasmagorical landscapes that were parodies of modern phantasmagorias, in which life was represented as a totality.

This emphasis on nothingness as the pendant of totality, and the failure of the republican order to generate a sensorial experience based on personal life experiences, connected Montmartre popular culture to that of late nineteenth-century anarchism. The last part of the book perceptively discusses this connection. Alike to the artists of the Chat Noir, late nineteenth-century anarchists wanted to speak truth to power by subverting dominant discourses. Although they are remembered mostly through their propaganda by the deed, as Brigstocke points out, they were no stranger to humour. Many anarchists frequented the Montmartre cabarets, and some of the latter even sold anarchism as a spectacle to bourgeois audiences. Anarchists rejected traditional forms of authority for the sake of replacing them with an immanent authority derived from the power of affect that the shock value of their act had. They recognized the power of laughter as a quintessential expression of vitality, and they wanted to find a similar source of vitality in the act of terror itself. By causing terror for its own sake, anarchists expected that ‘truth itself could come alive’ (p. 182). However, as Brigstocke explains, ‘whilst the act of violence itself was indeed an excessive, non-representation form of communication, a solitary “!”, this excessive event could quickly be re-appropriated within hegemonic scientific discourses’ (p. 187), in which anarchists were depicted as degenerate and hysteric criminals.

By 1900, however, many of these connections were part of the past. The violence of 1890s anarchism was tamed by the emergence of anarcho-syndicalism, while Montmartre popular culture became increasingly commodified. Yet, as the book's author points out, Montmartre's investment in searching for new forms of ‘experiential authority’ ‘invented a new ‘embodied imagination’, transforming the experience of the city and opposing its rationalization, fabricating’ – in the process – ‘a re-enchanted, magical, dynamic counter-modernity (p. 198). Brigstocke sees the rise of Montmartre popular culture as the beginning of a process of contestation and re-imagining of urban space that leads via the Dada and the Surrealists to the Situationist International and the events of May 1968 in Paris. With this, as he argues, Montmartre could serve as a template for the present and continue to inspire contemporary efforts to democratize and create alternate spaces in the city.

It is hard not to see the many strengths of this book. Theoretically informed and up to date in regard of relevant debates in the field of contemporary philosophy, urban history and historical geography, Brigstocke's analysis of Montmartre's significance is an intellectual tour de force which powerfully draws out the emancipatory potential that art, laughter and creativity can play in the reimagining of urban spaces, past and present.