Wakeman, Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 401. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index

Like the subject of her book, Paris from 1945 to 1958, Rosemary Wakeman looks both to the past and to the future to inform her conception of the modern city. Wakeman’s book belongs in the long and distinguished list of urban theorists, from Walter Benjamin to Henri Lefebvre to David Harvey, who have tried to understand how meaning is inscribed onto city spaces, but also how those city spaces themselves either encourage or prevent their use as vehicles for political, social, and cultural expression. Like these forerunners of urban exploration, or modern flâneurs, Wakeman examines not only how citizens ordered and used public space to suit their needs, but also how these spaces were shaped by official discourses and the performance and practice of governmentality. Yet, Wakeman looks also to a future for urban history by offering a different way of viewing the city. Reacting to an oft-repeated argument that the city became an unfamiliar, anxiety producing, and alienating space with the rise of modern consumer capitalism, Rosemary Wakeman tries to rehabilitate post-Second World War Paris as a place which, while certainly fraught with tension, actually offered its inhabitants a fluid, dynamic space onto which Parisians could inscribe a multiplicity of meanings and modernities. The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 offers readers a chance to revisit the traditional narrative of the death of civic engagement and the closing of public space with the advent of intense modernization and reconstruction after the devastation of the WWII. Wakeman argues that her “general contention is that, contrary to the traditional narrative of decay, the public spaces of Paris flourished. The city’s public landscape was intensified. The streets overflowed with ritual, drama, and spectacle. Public space in Paris—from the petit quartier to the city’s grandest ceremonial sites—was fluid, polyvalent, pierced with political and social tensions.” (8) To accomplish this goal of showing a different side of Paris, Wakeman adopts a view much like early twentieth century panoramic artists. Although she explicitly admits to privileging the east side of Paris, her exploration of the city and the ways it was imagined is vast. The Heroic City covers a wide range of events and discourses that helped construct a mid-century city. From how the visual media represented the city and its struggles to urban planners and their re-imagining of the city to political uses of public space during the housing crisis, Cold War, and early struggles for decolonization, Wakeman does indeed show how Paris was a contested terrain and its very topography was shaped by the way Parisians performed within its spaces. Interestingly, given that the Fourth Republic is often seen as a failed experiment, sounding the death knoll of Resistance hopes for a renewed French Republic, Wakeman actually argues that the mental picture of Paris in this period was ultimately heroic and she uses the idioms of poetic humanism and poetic space to capture the essence of this imagined landscape. Although Wakeman is not the first, nor will she be the last, to emphasise the humanistic nature of postwar hopes, her discussion of the urban landscape certainly does provide an example of victorious humanism, though it was short lived. Wakeman’s exploration of the Left Bank intellectual scene and its re-imagining of the city nicely illustrates this success. As opposed to the high modernist vision of city planning, one which saw the city as a site waiting to be cleared of all that was irrational, unhygienic, or sentimentally historic, the new elite of urban planners shared a vision of a decentred metropolis. Wakeman points to urbanists like Marcel Poëte, Gaston Bardet, and Pierre Lavedan, among others, …