Nicholas Hewitt’s cultural history of Montmartre is a fascinating exploration of the quartier’s many facets and myths, from the eighteenth-century little town, on to the period stretching from the1860 annexation into the capital to the Occupation. The latter forms the core of the book, challenging traditional chronological boundaries which focus on the area’s Belle Epoque glory days. A brief epilogue surveys filmic representations, all the way to Amélie Poulain and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, whose ‘spectacular conscious bad taste,’ Hewitt stresses, ‘finally restores to Montmartre its cultural essence’ (277)—a concluding reminder of the book’s acute awareness and skilful dissection of Montmartre’s allure. This is an erudite study, which mobilizes urban history to probe the (re-)making of Montmartre as Paris’s pleasure centre and centre of the avant-garde, especially as Montparnasse’s rival within the city’s cultural topography. The imprint of Louis Chevalier’s Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (and, to a lesser extent, of his Classes laborieuses, classes dangereuses, which is also relevant to Montmartre imaginaries), and the neighbourhood’s complex status as a lieu de mémoire loom large; they also serve as pegs to deconstruct its history, always complicating these representations and incorporating them in the area’s mythologies, which are a central theme of the book. Erudition never compromises the vivid rendition of Montmartre life, as Hewitt charts the transforming fortunes—and fluctuating spatial boundaries—of the area as a magnet for the bohemia but also well-heeled bourgeois and international tourists chasing the frisson of slumming it—and their constant reinvention. The rise and fall of Montmartre’s artistic movements and cultures forms the structure of the early chapters; Hewitt probes their interplay with the area’s topography, its facilities (and affordability) and sites of entertainment and sociability, comprising cabarets, music halls, theatres and artistic communes such as the Bateau Lavoir. Montmartre naturally teems with colourful individuals, for instance local icons such as Nerval, Utrillo, Toulouse Lautrec and Le Chat Noir’s Rodolphe Salis. Along the way, Hewitt also sheds light on lesser-known figures and pursuits, for instance Montmartre’s role as the birthplace of the luxury book trade in the inter-war period. This, in turn, highlights long-term trends towards profitability, commercialism and institutionalization, and the move from bohemia and avant-gardes to mass culture.
The study disentangles deftly the realities of Montmartre life from the cultural representations, commercial packaging and mythmaking (in particular the individual and collective self-fashioning so integral to Montmartre identity), accounting for the area’s appeal, fortunes but also its growing staleness and downright vulgarity. Hewitt depicts Montmartre as a site of cultural creativity, power and entertainment involving ‘contestation but also assimilation and appropriation’ (4). This perspective, as well as the study’s broad time-frame, shift the focus from the familiar depiction of aspiring artists and revolutionaries to Montmartre’s connections with right wing ideas and movements, examining how its culture of contestation could be levelled at the left, and how deeply embedded commercialism was. The area’s mutually defining connections with anarchism, for instance, contrast with the ways in which the commercial packaging of Montmartre relied on ‘at least the illusion of radicalism’ (59). Antisemitism and misogyny also ran rife in local culture; thus, the book’s final chapter explores Montmartre during the Occupation, through the writings of two notorious residents: Marcel Aymé and Céline.
This is a wonderfully enjoyable, knowledgeable and well-written book, which captures and unpacks the contradictions of its eponymous quartier, and conveys its charms without ever surrendering to them.