Paris on the Brink
The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends
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- €18.99
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- €18.99
Publisher Description
Paris on the Brink vividly portrays the City of Light during the tumultuous 1930s, from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to war and German Occupation. This was a dangerous and turbulent decade, during which workers flexed their economic muscle and their opponents struck back with increasing violence. As the divide between haves and have-nots widened, so did the political split between left and right, with animosities exploding into brutal clashes, intensified by the paramilitary leagues of the extreme right. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini escalated the increasingly hazardous international environment, while the civil war in Spain added to the instability of the times.
Yet throughout the decade, Paris remained at the center of cultural creativity. Major figures on the Paris scene, such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, André Gide, Marie Curie, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Coco Chanel, continued to hold sway, in addition to Josephine Baker, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Man Ray, and Le Corbusier. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre could now be seen at their favorite cafés, while Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, and Elsa Schiaparelli came to prominence, along with France’s first Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum.
Despite the decade’s creativity and glamour, it remained a difficult and dangerous time, and Parisians responded with growing nativism and anti-Semitism, while relying on their Maginot Line to protect them from external harm. Through rich illustrations and evocative narrative, Mary McAuliffe brings this extraordinary era to life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her enlightening cultural history, McAuliffe (Dawn of the Belle Epoque) details the swirling world of art, fashion, literature, and politics of 1930s Paris. Despite the instability of the decade, which ended with German occupation, Paris remained the center of European cultural creativity, and McAuliffe follows the lives of the city's influential people as they negotiated the decade's shifting political and economic sands. In 1929, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli designed a line of brightly colored clothes, as well as off-the-rack skirts with lower hemlines that would come to define glamour in the decade. A 21-year-old Simone de Beauvoir met and began a relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre just as he was to begin military service. Picasso aligned himself with the Republican cause in Spain, expressing his politics through his art in his painting Guernica, which he unveiled at the 1937 Paris World Fair. By 1939, Jean Renoir had captured the decadence and brutal sadness of the decline of France in his film The Rules of the Game. Meanwhile jazz singer Josephine Baker, living in Paris, helped secure passports for Eastern European Jews seeking refuge in Latin America. With a breathless pace, McAuliffe's richly detailed history wonderfully captures Paris in the 1930s.
