City of Light, City of Shadows

Paris in the Belle Époque

By: Mike Rapport

Narrated by: Paul Daintry

A top historian offers a new history of Paris’s Belle Époque, the luminous age of the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, but also of social unrest and violent clashes over what it meant to be French

From the wrought ironwork of the Eiffel Tower to the flourishing art nouveau movement, the Belle Époque is remembered as a golden age for Parisian culture. Beneath the veneer of elegance, however, fin de siècle Paris was a city at war with itself.

In City of Light, City of Shadows, Mike Rapport uncovers a Paris riven by social anxieties and plagued by overlapping epidemics of poverty, political extremism, and anti-Semitism. As the Sacré-Cœur and Eiffel Tower rose into the skies, redefining architecture and the Paris skyline, Paris’s slums were plagued by disease and gang violence. The era, now remembered as a high point of French art and culture, was also an age of intense political violence, including anarchist bombings, organized right-wing mobs, and assassinations.

Weaving together these stories of splendor and suffering with the fabric of the city itself, the book offers a brilliant account of Paris’s Belle Époque—revealing the darkness that suffused the City of Light.

©2024 Mike Rapport (P)2024 Basic Books

Critic reviews

“Mike Rapport is a historian with the rare ability to engage his reader both on the level of local detail and sweeping narrative. City of Light, City of Shadows had me spellbound.”—Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse

“In this book, which fizzes with all the energy of Belle Époque Paris, Rapport conveys superbly the conflicts, tension, and anxieties underlaying the glittering spectacle of Parisian modernity. His narrative is brilliantly anchored in the spaces and places of the city. For lovers of Paris, the book should become an indispensable accompaniment to any future visit to the city.”—Julian Jackson, author of De Gaulle

“A fascinating, multilayered panorama of the evolution of the French capital at a key period in its history.”—Jonathan Fenby, author of France: A Modern History from the Revolution to the War With Terror