There is no shortage of scholarship on Paris and its famous urban landscape. As historian Alexia Yates argues, however, during a late nineteenth century defined by massive change, the role business people and property owners played in the city’s political economy has been overshadowed by that of state authority. Shifting this focus in Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital enables her to trace how the evolution of real estate into a standardized commercial good not only shaped Paris’s unprecedented growth during the period but left a legacy for how the future city would be developed.

In the wake of the Paris Commune and Second Empire, Parisian officials in the newly republican France had to rethink the terms of city development. Facing popular suspicion of top- down schemes for growth, the likes of which had fundamentally changed Paris under Baron Haussmann, they found a possible path forward by negotiating with members of the building industry to open up new finance channels. Attempts to access this capital spawned increasingly standardized modes of producing and distributing quotidian spaces—namely, thousands of apartment buildings. Speculative builders began to develop criteria for urban property value, which they depicted on maps supplied to investors. As a result, investors became habituated toward seeing the city primarily as an assemblage of exchange values. According to Yates, the widespread dissemination of these maps and charts marked the building industry’s rise to prominence as members claimed a professional monopoly on the production of real estate knowledge based on the labor and expertise required to understand an emerging market. This new way of privileging a narrower concept of value made property owners anxious that they would be regarded as unproductive members of a newly market-oriented society that was beginning to divorce property value from an owner’s labor. They attempted to shore up their position by forming associations that pledged to carry out local development that would both bring them profit and serve the public good. The associations accomplished relatively little, however, compared to new corporations that were building and managing entire districts. The imperatives of corporate ownership accelerated a trend toward neighborhood class homogeneity and new aggressive eviction tactics. These transformations, the book concludes, marked incremental but ultimately fundamental shifts in the nature of Parisian development; whereas Parisians viewed development as a state tool in the mid-nineteenth century it was widely imagined to operate on market principles by the start of the First World War.

In less deft hands, an argument about the commercialization of real estate could remain a mystifyingly abstract array of economic and legal processes. The book contends that the real estate industry sought to transform property from a fixed immovable object to a movable commodity, easily traded like shares of stock. Yates demonstrates that property never completely transitioned to the latter, however, leaving it a contested domain whose value continued todepend on how it was used. This is particularly well illustrated in a chapter on how an emergent real estate press honed advertising practices to change the ways consumers searched for rentals. Despite having access to advertisements and guides, renters still chose to walk the city looking for places to live. The chapter’s images highlight the spatial dimensions of real estate commercialization, the attendant intellectual work required to conceptualize a city in market terms, and the effects of circulating those ideas to a wider public. Readers will appreciate the careful archival research and varied sources used to illustrate wide-ranging yet uneven changes to Parisian life, whether it is in the service of meticulously breaking down the steps of commercial lending or piecing together credit networks.

One line of argumentation could have been further developed. Between 1872 and 1911, Paris experienced an unprecedented population boom as migrants arrived from the French countryside and further afield. According to the book, this gave rise to recurring conversations about who counted as Parisians and who remained outsiders. Yates peppers each chapter with intriguing yet cursory examples of how such debates informed efforts to define identity. In one case, the licenses proposed by a group of real estate intermediaries, for instance, excluded all women and non-naturalized immigrants on the basis of setting moral and competency standards. In another, property owners opposed the creation of a land registry system in Paris that would have made transfers easier, but supported its application in French colonies, in part, to facilitate expropriation. Foregrounding the impact of such debates on real estate becomes more necessary in light of what little readers learn about the historical actors aside from their business practices. Were the real estate developers, commercial intermediaries, and politicians in question born in Paris? Were they perceived to be? In what ways did Parisian real estate allow these groups to cement their status as true Parisians and what did they gain? Because they are depicted solely through their business decisions, connecting them to the discursive constructions of citizenship would have been an opportunity to take a more expansive view of what constituted not just the political economy of business, but the political economy of success.

Nevertheless, the book’s focus on the mechanisms of growth makes it an especially useful read for people who already have knowledge of the nineteenth century Paris. Even for those lacking a background in French history, Selling Paris is an excellent example of an intellectual history of urban space sure to prove appealing to anyone interested in development.