In Streetscapes of War and Revolution, Claire Morelon situates the transition from Empire to Republic in October 1918 within the urban environment of Prague and the wider context of World War I. As Morelon writes, this moment was ‘supposed to usher in a new era of freedom, breaking away from the dark Habsburg past. Yet in the streets of Prague that autumn, the lights were still out’ (p. 253). This darkness was due to ongoing fuel shortages, even in the autumn of 1920 very little public lighting was lit, and also the loss of hope in the bright future of the city that had perhaps existed in the pre-war era. This book analyses the changing relationship between the state and its citizens within the longer timeframe of 1914 until 1920. Morelon is able to identify and highlight the continuities rather than describing the establishment of Czechoslovakia as a rupture. The revolution is not neatly labelled as Bolshevik or nationalistic, but as something which grew from wartime suffering, and it was captured by the everyday experiences of street life.

By examining Prague, the book makes a strong contribution to existing research about the successor states of the Habsburg Empire which often focuses on the contested borderlands, such as Dominique Reill, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (2020), Kathryn Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World on the Polish Border (2021) and Marco Bresciani, The Battle for Post-Habsburg Trieste/Trst: State Transition, Social Unrest, and Political Radicalism (1918–23) (2021). Morelon unsettles narratives about the centre versus the periphery through an example of how the contradictions and tensions between the old systems and the new existed even at the so-called centre of the new Republic. The book also contributes to research about other capital cities in wartime and how the responsibilities between states and their citizens were negotiated, such as Belinda Davis’ Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (2000) and Veronika Helfert’s ‘Frauen, wacht auf!’ Eine Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte von Revolution und Rätebewegung in Österreich, 1916–1924 on Vienna and the Austrian Republic (2021).

Morelon is to be commended for choosing not to structure the book around ethnically defined groups or gender. The experiences of different groups are woven throughout the book. Three chapters discuss the militarization of the city as men were mobilized for battle, the patriotic fervour, and the effects of death, injury and refugees as the war lingered. In these chapters, even while support for the war was high, expectations clashed as the authorities privileged the needs of the military over the civilian population’s expectations of the rule of law. With increasing war deaths, injured soldiers and refugees, propaganda could not hide the military losses. Chapter four demonstrates how the inability of the state to provide enough food meant that citizens turned to the black market and all social classes were thrown together in the quest for food. Chapters five and six connect these threads and, as the breakdown on the home front led to the transition from Empire to Republic, analyse how this played out on the streets of Prague.

For Morelon, ‘space itself was the object of enquiry rather than specific groups or institutions in the city’ (p. 297). The research draws on material culture as well as police reports and newspaper articles, creating a dynamic reconstruction of the appearance and experience of Prague. There is a tension within this approach as the groups and individuals shaped the city as much as they were shaped by it. The police reports are also occasionally taken at face value, a problematic approach particularly when using these to understand the actions of female protesters who may have wanted to obscure their tactics to evade punishment. However, Morelon acknowledges that just because something was ubiquitous, this does not mean it was popular. Shopkeepers were denounced to the police for selling foreign goods but, as she notes, this may have been as a result of patriotic fervour or the social pressure to conform or even the result of individual grudges. Whatever the cause, the effect was to transform the streetscape (p. 113).

This book is written in a highly engaging style and the use of images, maps and vignettes creates a vivid picture of the streetscape. As such, it is highly recommended for scholars of the Habsburg Empire and its successor states, those researching urban landscapes and the effects of World War I, as well as students. The urban landscape offered an opportunity for Morelon to deconstruct assumed borders and to look at how everyday life in Prague reflected and shaped the tensions between citizens and the state.