Colette, author of many pen-portraits of Paris, described one favourite corner of her adopted city as a place which ‘holds no secrets, yet it is not without its surprises’ (‘Montmartre Cemetery’, reprinted in Helen Constantine, ed. Paris Tales, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 59). The same could be said of Pinol and Garden's large historical atlas which covers familiar social, geopolitical and demographic changes in the city in the two centuries after the French Revolution, but is also packed with innumerable vignettes capturing the unexpected or quirkier aspects of Parisian life during this time. The first part of the book looks at physical changes including the impact of war, experiments in social housing and the growth of suburbs, juxtaposed with detailed examination of the demographic and political trends which have formed modern Paris. The second section is more concerned with the activities which support and define the city. Health, education and transport are here, but there is also less familiar data on what Parisians do, ranging from productive work and leisure through to religion.

As the authors note, the book exploits the possibilities suggested by new methodologies such as GIS and so is packed with detailed maps that illustrate spatial shifts as well as broader demographic trends. Many of these address questions of continuity or change over the period. We see, for example, how despite the increasing popularity of redeveloped areas such as the Bastille, young Parisians mostly still do their dancing in the 8th, 6th and 18th and 19th which housed public balls after the Revolution, then café-concerts, cabarets and more recently discos (pp. 272–4). Population density has shifted, however, with the old centre gradually losing its inhabitants to the outer arrondissements (pp. 44–6). In some places, the data in the maps might have benefited from more discursive accompaniment; a section describing the transformation of Parisian restaurants from the nineteenth century is positioned next to a map which shows the decrease in Michelin-starred establishments between 1969 and 2003. This notes their concentration in ‘les beaux quartiers’ but does not speculate why they are now spread across far fewer arrondissements. Beyond the maps are numerous short essays exploring case-studies in depth. The chapter on production, for example, which notes the historic importance of the manufacture of luxury goods to the city's economy, contains a fascinating sketch of the Parisian fur trade outlining its nineteenth-century peak (aided by the Franco-Russian alliance which assured a good supply of Siberian pelts into the capital), its association with the world of couture in the twentieth century to its more recent ‘swansong’ in the face of growing public opinion against the trade (pp. 184–5). Several essays evoke aspects of the city's vanished past. The chapter on transport describes the rise of both metro and car but also considers ‘the horse and the town’. Maps locating the numerous blacksmiths and stables at the turn of the twentieth century show just how rapidly the figure of the urban horse had been eclipsed by the end of World War I (pp. 198–200).

Anglophone readers wishing to dip into this book to access a certain piece of information quite quickly may be deterred by the lack of a thematic index which could result in certain details being overlooked. Prostitution, for example, is covered in detail in the chapter on surveillance (pp. 251–4), but it also features in the section on use of buildings which has a wonderful illustration of a police raid on a lodging house in 1895 (p. 93), and in that on restaurants with the information that an 1889 guide warned against the preponderance of women of ‘doubtful morality’ in certain Latin Quarter brasseries. Yet there is enough here to reward a more critical and sustained reading than that often given to historical atlases, and even those who feel they know Paris well will come away from this book with new insights into the city's past and present.