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Paris: Reflections Of A Modern City, Brian J. Schultz

History Theses

From 1853-1870, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussman transformed Paris from a medieval infrastructure to a modern bourgeois metropolis. This sweeping reform not only changed the aesthetic of Paris, but also its class structure, forms of leisure, and the way in which people viewed their rapidly changing society. Utilizing two icons of aesthetic modernity, Charles Baudelaire and Edouard Manet, I intend to demonstrate that revisiting Paris in the second half of the nineteenth-century, the very model of infrastructural modernization, can help us discover the roots of aesthetic modernism with all its contingencies and contradictions.