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DATELINE continued 1848 A violent working-class revolution deposes Louis-Philippe, who’s replaced by autocratic Napoleon III. On Napoleon III’s orders, Baron Haussmann redesigns Paris’s landscapes and creates the Grands Boulevards. 1860s The Impressionist style of painting emerges. 1870 The Franco-Prussian War ends in the defeat of France; Paris is threatened by Prussian cannons placed on the outskirts of the city; a revolution in the aftermath 28 of this defeat destroys the Palais des Tuileries and overthrows the government; the Third Republic rises with its elected president, Marshal MacMahon.

Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 (Virago, 2003) is a fascinating collection of excerpts from Janet Flanner’s “Letters from Paris” column of the New Yorker. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have written a popular history of the liberation of Paris in 1944 called Is Paris Burning? (BookSales, 2000). 43 Since 1323 some 10,000 books have been devoted to exploring Paris. One of the best is Paris: Capital of the World (Belknap, 2005) by Patrice Higonnet. This book takes a fresh, social, cultural, and political look at this City of Light.

With the collapse of Wall Street, many Americans returned home, except hard-core artists such as Henry Miller, who wandered around smoking Gauloises and writing Tropic of Cancer, which was banned in America. “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive,” Miller said. Eventually, he met diarist Anaïs Nin, and they began to live a life that gave both of them material for their prose. But even such die-hards as Miller and Nin eventually realized that 1930s Paris was collapsing as war clouds loomed.