Of course, this remarkable book deals with the history of the Parisian real estate market. Those interested in this important economic sector will be delighted by the precise and accurate description of a rising private business in the second half of the nineteenth century: building and selling apartments and buildings. Nevertheless, such a description is neither a story of public action in the real estate market nor “a familiar story of Parisian development” (p. 4). As Alexia Yates underscores, “the history of the Parisian real estate market excavates the ambiguous place of liberal capitalism in Third Republic France” (p. 264). Therefore, there are at least two ways of reading this business history.

In the first one, or the core, one may understand how, throughout the nineteenth century, real estate moved from amateurism to professionalism, from public affairs—Haussmann, for instance—to privatized business. Thanks to a new type of corporation, the limited incorporation (société anonyme), the frontiers between capital market, finance, and real estate changed dramatically. Step by step, accommodation became not only a private issue of providing a place to stay but also a source of business and revenues. Private companies entered this new market and invented new methods of management. The first private investors in real estate soon became a focus of interest for writers (see Emile Zola's character Aristide Saccard or Jules Romains's character Frédéric Haverkamp). Riding on the back of this growing success, real estate agents (agents immobiliers) struggled for recognition as a new profession and a social group. It was not an easy task because of the bad reputation of intermediaries in France; moreover, some of the first real estate agents had joined the profession after a personal bankruptcy or been pushed by their families after proving themselves bad at or lazy in other businesses. To promote their activity and develop their market, the new professional association and individuals created journals in which to advertise their products. To justify the market price of real estate, they contributed more or less to developing quantitative methods in order to calculate an appropriate price of property from a geographical and comparative point of view. Because of such rationalized methods, new real estate agents claimed to be more efficient than their predecessors. They claimed to be able to avoid the wild or irrational behavior generated by market fever. By describing this new profession, the author contributes indirectly to a better understanding of the “businessman,” a concept and a new profession emerging in the same period. She gives an interesting definition of a real estate agent as a man who “makes a living managing the affairs of others” (p. 147). Such precision could help business historians to go further in the comprehension of the “manager,” “management,” and “entrepreneurship.”

The second way of reading this book is broader. Through Paris, Yates draws a picture of French society confronted by an emerging capitalism. The study of the real estate market clarifies the role of private market and private initiative in France, which, the author demonstrates, was more important than usually seen abroad. This rigorous business case study of a growing industry enlightens the reader as to how management and institutional innovations are actually designed and implemented through production processes—not only through products. It clarifies the vision of the French business model. Last but not least, it underlines the importance of public-private cooperation in the country. Yet developing a new market in Paris was not a smooth process. Its history raises critical questions: What drives innovation and public action—social needs and political bodies or speculation and market initiatives? What are the ultimate criteria to design new buildings and solve the housing problem—promote beauty and luxury to attract wealthy customers (e.g., foreigners) or allow workers and new Parisian middle-class white-collar workers to live near their jobs in low-rent apartments? From the nineteenth century onward, these arguments punctuated economic and political debates. The author shows how some academics (including Maurice Halbwachs and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu) were enlisted to support one side of the argument or the other. Regularly, in political debates—in the municipality of Paris, for instance—some criticized the perspective that the capital city be transformed as a place for tourists rather than for living and working Parisians. These questions remain vivid in today's Parisian political and social life—and probably in many capital cities around the world.

Studying the Parisian way of life, the author moves from macro to micro level. For the emerging agents immobiliers, building new housing implied an understanding of the use of private property and the development of new ways of marketing to consumers and individuals. Advertisements and floor plans printed in professional journals made public what had been until then a private matter. The agents immobiliers and their journals started to classify the market by types of house, number of rooms by flats, local zones, prices. Hence, they made public some of the most hidden social rules. In order to develop the market for rental apartments, they suggested some changes in decoration or organization of rooms either in new buildings or in old ones. From the Urbanism point of view, new buildings and their real estate agents reinvented some aspects of Parisian private life and contributed to deeply transforming the city's structure and social organization. By the end of the nineteenth century, 48 percent of Paris's buildings were four stories or higher (p. 18). The actions of real estate agents also led to a modification of consumer behavior.

Gradually, thanks to real estate agent activities, Parisians moved from rental to ownership. Yates demonstrates that, until the twentieth century, most of the city's wealthy residents—and of course, its poorest—had remained in the rental market. Then, the richest individuals aimed to own apartments, or even full buildings, renting them to others. All these factors contributed to the emergence of new social values with regard to housing issues, private and social life, and bourgeois or worker behaviors.

At a national level, this book again raises the crucial question of market-private initiative as a useful means for the development of new industries and markets. For political and economic reasons, French political and business leaders fought each other on several occasions. From the mid-nineteenth century onward they let the free market and private investors lead the development of a new real estate industry, or they tried to regulate it. For instance, at the turn of the twentieth century, many public services (gas, electricity, public transport) were in private hands in Paris whereas some were publicly owned in London or Glasgow.

For the emerging agents immobiliers, they had to solve a key question: How to create a commercial and mobile commodity, that is, money and business value, from a fixed asset? In the nineteenth century, construction and housing moved from a private concern to a matter of production, finance, and commerce. Thanks to a new corporate form, real estate investment companies emerged rapidly. The Parisian real estate market described by the author is a clear example of the role and place of private initiative in French society. These elements have been underestimated by many academic and political commentators. To outsiders, France has the reputation of being resistant to capitalism, preferring public action and state bodies to private initiative and free markets. For business historians, this example and the French experience cast doubt on present ideas about the effects of free market globalization on innovation.