City of Light, City of Shadows: Paris in the Belle Epoque

Paris in the Belle Époque is remembered as a golden age of cultural flourishing and political progress. The time between the revolutionary 1870s and the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the modern French capital take shape: by day Parisians could admire the rising Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur Basilica, while at night they roamed the Bohemian world of the Moulin Rouge.

But as Mike Rapport reveals in this authoritative and beautifully written new history beneath its elegant veneer Paris was at war with itself. The Belle Époque was also an era of social and religious unrest, women's emancipation and violent clashes over what it meant to be French.

Paris pulsated with the pleasures and anxieties of modernity: blazing electric lights illuminating the night, the first cars speeding down the boulevards, as well as the first Métro trains and plane flights. At the same time reactionary forces reasserted themselves-mostly dramatically in the infamous Dreyfus affair.

Told through the eyes of the greatest personalities of the age-novelist Émile Zola, feminist activist Marguerite Durand, Vietnamese diplomat Nguyen Trong Hop and socialist politician Jean Jaurès-the book weaves together stories of splendour and suffering, delight and agony, offering a brilliant account of the shadows cast across the City of Light.