A Bar At Folies Bergere

During the nineteenth century, Paris further developed into the entertainment capital of the world. Alistair Horne, the author of the Seven Ages of Paris, vividly illustrates several historical moments that occurred in Paris. Through the horrors and triumphs, Paris was able to endure through it all for ages and still emerge greater than before. In comparison, Vanessa R. Schwartz, the author of Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle, demonstrates how the explosive popularity of the boulevard, the newspapers, wax museums, panoramas, and early cinema led to the creation of a new culture in Paris. Driven by consumerism, a cultural revolution was happening, who’s new culture transcended gender and class divisions. Both authors

Bonheur was an important figure in women’s right; she herself reflects the social movement for women. She was a women that didn’t let society’s standards keep her down; she worked hard to build her career. Bonheur was the first woman in France to get a permit to wear pants.1 The police’s reasoning for allowing Rosa this permit was because of health, and her doctor co-signed the permit.1 The slaughterhouses and fairgrounds would dirty her dresses thus it was impractical for her to wear a dress. Bonheur was smart she knew what wearing pants would do to her career.1 She knew buyers would not purchase paintings that came from a woman who wore pants, so Bonheur would wear dresses to social events.

When I first heard the name Charles Baudelaire a few weeks ago, I just thought of him as another historical author that we had to learn about in an English class. Little did I know, how his work would affect me in the next weeks. Baudelaire coined the term modernity which was a period of ongoing change and transition to urban and industrial life. As a person who believes technology is destroying communication skills, it was interesting to see how Baudelaire faced the same troubles through urbanization instead of technology. A piece of Baudelaire’s piece that stood out to me was The Eyes of the Poor in his famous work called Paris Spleen. Baudelaire used the word ‘spleen’ in his work to show a sense of disgust with everything.

As the world has grown throughout the centuries, females have generally been under the domination of males. This remained culturally entrenched until the late nineteenth century, when women began to appear in public more often and also began to join alongside men in the work force. In the network of employees and employers in the emerging institution of the Parisian department store, men and women depended on each other for survival in the workplace. Such interdependence is a microcosm of the bourgeois French society during that time, which Emile Zola wrote of in The Ladies’ Paradise, the eleventh book of the Rougon-Macquart series detailing middle-class life. According to Professor Brian

In part three, Miller gives life to the Bon Marché; the store slowly but surely becomes a part of the bourgeoisie class and social culture, giving them such practices as displaying art, selling nouveautés, a library of books, and a venue for concerts. The store attracts a certain kind of upper-class. They wished to be able to take part in something as close to the middle-class as possible. The store added more middle-class employees and merchandising items that personified middle-class values; the Bon Marché helped construct the new idea of how the middle-class looked and acted.

During Flaubert’s lifetime, the Revolution of 1789 and the autocratic reign of Napoleon were recent memories. With the revolution came the end of the feudal system and a rise to a new group: the bourgeoisie. This group was made up of merchants, capitalists, and other professionals who did not inherit their fortune and were not born into the nobility. Emma and her husband belonged to this group. Her disappointments in life stemmed from her dissatisfaction with the lifestyle of the French bourgeoisie. She aspires to be a part of the aristocratic lifestyle of the nobility; a lifestyle more sophisticated, refined and glamorous than her own. The bourgeoisie craved the same treatment as the nobility, and were constantly attempting to exhibit their wealth creating tastes that were often characterized as gaudy. As a member of the educated elite with inherited money, Flaubert despised the moral conservatism, rough manners, and unsophisticated taste of this new class. Frustrated by the mediocracy of rising middle class, Flaubert uses Emma’s disgust with her lifestyle to convey his own dislike for the bourgeoisie. Emma felt the full suffering of the middle class as "the appetites of the flesh, the craving for money, the melancholy of passion, all blended together in one general misery” just like France’s

In the modern Paris, society is divided into different classes of people, different jobs, and different features of modern life. The Belly of Paris, written by, Émile Zola is about a man named Florent who was wrongly put in prison from Louis-Napoleon’s coup-d’etat. He escapes from prison and returns from the countryside to find an unrecognizable Paris. The Belly of Paris describes the class differences in the 1870s - there is the bourgeoisie, which is defined as the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes; the capitalist class who own most of society's wealth and means of production contrasted with the lower working class. By portraying and describing characters as the food

“Old Paris” was viewed as a collection of picturesque memories, cherished dwellings, close neighborhoods, and lively streets. The people inhabiting “Old Paris” included those in the banlieues

exhibition of his longing for the familiarity of Paris and the sanctity of his past, a

“In a world that was theirs it was almost a regulation always to wish for more than you could have.” Such a world had only just arrived during the early nineteen sixties—with a surge in economic output, an increase in the average income, and the commercialization of mass-produced consumer goods—following the Second World War. This was a time during which France, in particular, transitioned from a class-based, limited-consumption culture to a consumer society in which individuals defined their positions and self-worth based on the possessions that they owned. Georges Perec’s novella Things: A story of the Sixties details the rise of this wealthy consumer society and the various industries that made it possible, through the story of a young couple in their twenties striving to attain an idealized life-style, while hoping to somehow escape what they consider to be a bourgeois trap.

Between the end of the First World War and Hitler's seizure of power a cultural explosion occurred in Paris that altered our notions of art and reality and shaped our way of viewing the world ever since. In the 1920's, Paris became the undisputed international capital of pleasure and was regarded as the cultural and artistic center of Europe with a reputation for staging one of its most glamorous eras, as well as some of the most spectacular revues in the world. Imagine for a moment, that it really is 1920's Paris. You are leisurely strolling through the gas lit promenades. World War I is over and the exuberance of jazz musicians, symbolist painters, and American expatriates

The art of Edouard Manet depicted modern life in the new Paris, as advocated by the writer Baudelaire. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a writer in nineteenth century Paris, a contemporary of Manet, who knew Manet personally, and who wrote about the idea of modern life. Baudelaire encouraged the artists of the day to paint modern scenes, such as looking at the world around them for inspiration, rather than turning to scenes from the

Through its depictions of the new age of materialism, Realism eventually became a symbol for the bourgeoisie who had, from humbler origins, recently risen to new positions of power within the Parisian government. Nevertheless, Realist works had begun to gain acceptance in salons only reluctantly; some still scorned their work as “monstrously ugly”.

The short story“The Necklace” by Gui de Maupassant follows Madame Loisel and her husband who are living in the middle-class during the rise of the middle class in Paris, France.There are many different examples of irony throughout the short story, demonstrating Maupassant's talent at commenting on the society in which he was immersed in. The theme of “The Necklace” is revealed through the character Madame Loisel, irony, and symbolism.

In the 18th century, European society put an emphasis on social standing; each social class was expected to act differently, thus affecting the way one would get treated and the amount of opportunities available to them. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, food imagery and the way each character acts towards food reveals the distinctions between the various social classes and, more importantly, the mediocrity of the French bourgeoisie. However, Flaubert chooses not to focus on all of the social classes, but solely on the characteristics and mannerisms surrounding the middle and the high classes. Revolving the novel around middle-classed characters who represent the middle class, Flaubert criticizes the bourgeoisie through their desire to escape