Scholars of European history are undoubtedly acquainted with the urban renovation that David Harvey interrogates in this ambitious study of Paris from the July Monarchy (1830–1848) through the Commune of 1871. In the first decade or so of his reign, the French emperor Napoleon III and his prefect the Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann initiated a sweeping transformation of Paris from a city of medieval infrastructure to the modernized commercial showplace of the 1870s. Synthesizing the historiography of Paris in the era of Haussmannization is a herculean task, and one that Harvey, a renowned geographer and urban studies scholar, accomplishes with elegance and insight. Without neglecting the discursive elements of Parisian social life in this period, Harvey scrutinizes the way that social relations in the new Paris were shaped by material changes in daily life, using what the author calls a “methodology of historical-geographical materialism” (p. 19). Indeed, Harvey's ability to weave place and ideas is one of this eminently readable study's greatest strengths. Though there is much that is familiar in this story, the synthetic approach allows old truisms of 1848, the Second Empire, Haussmannization, and the Commune to illuminate one another productively. Here, the quixotic plans of utopian socialists confront the sight of raw sewage running through the streets of Paris.

Despite his attention to material conditions, Harvey is just as interested in the mythic ruptures that neatly bookend the Second Empire: the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune. From Baudelaire to Marx, those that witnessed the events of 1848 experienced them as a sharp break from the past. Deliberately reading against this myth, Harvey endeavors to ascertain the ways in which “the radical transformations” of the Empire were “prefigured in the thought and practices of earlier years …” (16). In his discussion of the July Monarchy, Harvey demonstrates that social reform theories like those of the Saint-Simonians inflected the thought of such disparate figures as the brothers Pereires (founders of the Crédit Mobilier) and the future Emperor himself. Scholars like T. J. Clark have seen the Second Empire as a period in which the Parisian body politic was crushed under the force of “commodification and spectacle,” but Harvey insists that the great challenge (and failure) of the efforts of Napoleon III and his advisers was to construct a body politic grounded upon both the creative alternatives of the 1840s and imperial power.

In the second and strongest part of the book, Harvey traces Haussmann's “abiding concern for the totality of urban space,” from the design of street urinals to the “grand symmetrical effect” of the new boulevards (111, 100). The originality of Harvey's analysis comes in the way that he embeds Haussmann's vision within a textured landscape of social and economic changes. He offers enlightening discussions of credit reform, the shifting class face of Parisian property holding, the complex fate of small-scale production in Paris after 1848, and the geographic dispersion of workers. The author concludes that the imperial designs of Haussmannization sought and yet were ultimately undermined by the “free circulation of capital” in Paris and the economic liberalization that accompanied it. By the time readers reach Harvey's evocative and often moving discussion of the Commune in his final three chapters, they are well prepared to accept his contention that “the raw materials for the Commune were put together by the slow rhythms of the capitalist transformation of the city's historical geography” (308). A study that combines urban theory and social history quite deftly, Paris, Capital of Modernity offers a compelling overview of the forces that remade Paris in the nineteenth century.