Eric Hazan Boeken

In this book, the Parisian writer Eric Hazan takes you for a stroll through Paris as it was for his famous forebears Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, and Nerval. A Paris that sparkles in the fresh, airy watercolours and drawings collected by the architect Destailleur, now housed in the Prints and Photographs Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Despite the city's enduring medieval look, the Paris illustrated here is stirred by a revolutionary spirit, a city that crowned emperors and twice restored the monarchy.This is the capital as it was before Haussmann's major transformations: from the Marais and the Latin Quarter to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Palais Royal, from the Pont des Arts and the Pont Neuf to the theatres on the Boulevards and the Louvre. In these views, the inhabitants ride about on horses or fish in the Seine, flounder in muddy streets, or sit outside in one of the newfangled sidewalk cafés to watch the world go by.

Eric Hazan's elegant, characteristically learned account of his journey through contemporary Paris, written in a tone both intimate and authoritative, is at once a companionably unhurried evocation of the city's rich, radical past and-at a time when capital is dramatically reorganizing its topography-a bracingly urgent intervention in debates about the city's future. As André Breton might have observed, there really are no lost steps here. -Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking Praise for The Invention of Paris: This is a wondrous book, either to be read at home with a decent map, or carried about sur place through areas no tourists bother with. -Adam Thorpe, Guardian Hazan is all business. He trudges through Paris street by street, quoting what Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire or Kafka said about a particular spot, pointing out where barricades were once erected and thieves gathered for drinks. -Donald Morrison, Financial Times Hazan's brick-by-brick account of the city's history of strife and political posturing is riveting. -Publishers Weekly Hazan wants to rescue individual moments from general forgetting and key sites from the bland homogenization of international city development; he is also a passionate left-wing historian seeking to rescue the truth of Paris's revolutionary past. -Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

Discover French history as you’ve never read it before in this bold account of the French Revolution from the perspective of the lower classes. This blow-by-blow narrative busts pervasive myths and reveals how the French Revolution shaped the Western world. The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat—the events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical imagination for more than 200 years. It has been a template for heroic insurrection and, to more conservative minds, a cautionary tale. In the hands of Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Paris, the revolution becomes a rational and pure struggle for emancipation. In this new history, the first significant account of the French Revolution in over twenty years, Hazan maintains that it fundamentally changed the Western world—for the better. Looking at history from the bottom up, providing an account of working people and peasants, Hazan asks, how did they see their opportunities? What were they fighting for? What was the Terror and could it be justified? And how was the revolution stopped in its tracks? Hazen offers a vivid retelling of events, bringing them to life with a multitude of voices. Only through the people can we fully understand the legacy of French Revolution.

Éric Hazan erkundet Paris zu Fuß und verbindet dabei Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte. Er zeichnet einen einzigartigen Atlas der Stadt, von Montmartres Anfängen bis zu den Protesten von 1968. Diese überarbeitete Neuauflage eines modernen Klassikers bietet zahlreiche Fotografien und enthüllt die bewegte Geschichte der Metropole.