HISTORY FROM FRESH PERSPECTIVES: FRESH PERSPECTIVES

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

FRESH PERSPECTIVES

THESE BLOOKS ALMOST ALONE TO PRESENT A DIFFERENT TAKE ON A FAMOUS CITY AND ON THE PAST, YET THEIR MAIN POINTS ARE OBVIOUS

Of course...

Monarchy is the foundation of much of modern France.

The memories of Paris's 19th-century insurrections inspired later combats and achievements.

Immigrants who make the dangerous flight from misery and oppression invigorate the aging cultures where they make their way.

Affordable rents encourage outskirts' inventivity.

Setting change in the context of underlying economies can upend narrations divorced from tangible goals. It's "Follow the money" in a deeper way.

These matters are overlooked because they fit underlying social arrangements so well as to seem invisible: Take the underclass insult under the Old Regime, "Your father was a valet!" Although psychiatrists and anthropologists recognize that all aspects of cults and primal societies reinforce each other, most historians either have not heard of such a tool (since the Cold War in the United States and the 1980's in France).

But take these images —

Richard Nahem, Eye Prefer Paris; no date, but huge ads first appeared in 2011.

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Union Square in southern Manhattan, 2025 / Elisabeth Rawson

Of course their immediate goal is to reinforce a brand, but there are other ways of doing that, such as saying why one should buy it. The ads glamorize what one feels, not what makes sense — an attitude that makes people easier to control.

The Châtelet crossroad in central Paris, 2023

The figures rarely connect with the outside world. They sometimes have a happy partner or a few smiling friends, but usually they are alone.

Ad at the top of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris's elegant 7th district, 2015

Most backgrounds are voids. Mass communication, including the way in which the past or a historical site is presented, coincides with that void in eliminating whatever contradicts a narrative that serves identity or has a commercial purpose: Everything else disappears.

As can recent obliterations of the the past itself. Take eliminating Marie-Antoinette's cell, camouflaging the medieval rampart of the Louvre and the vast space that reveals the Opéra's original goal or having most of its facade hidden by an ad (all changes since in 2017).

The 19th-century Opéra, considered the most important building of the mid-19th century.

Erasing social struggles is a deletion of immediate significance, as when Paris's historical museum gives Europe's first working-class insurrection and the modern West's first major massacre two short sentences, in small print, on another context, at the back of a room.

La Barricade de la rue de la Mortellerie, juin 1848 by Ernest Meissonnier / zoom

Meissonier fought with the army that suppressed the rebels. He made the sketch on the spot.

It presents deadly barricades as a game for kids.

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The story may be changing. For the 2024 Olympics the Socialist City Hall of Saint-Denis, a working-class town north of Paris, extended the metro line from the Orly international airport in the south to its sports stadium. The immense stop, with three vast, ultra modern levels, allows easily reaching lines that go throughout the city.

On the ground-floor level is a mural that covers a third of the extremely long wall. Completely breaking with the deletions described here, it celebrates the struggle that led to establishing the eight-hour day a century ago...