Lecture by Maurizio Gribaudi. Paris the “Capital of the 19th Century:” Urban Forms and Social Practices

Camille Pissarro. Boulevard Montmartre, 1897.

Thursday, 27 October 2016, 19:00

Paris is known as the “capital of the 19th century.” This idea is represented in the aesthetics of urban leisure, trade revival, the birth of consumer society, as well as the robust policy of urban development, which had ultimately destroyed the former structure of the city.

These aspects are, undoubtedly, important. However, their generalization and expansibility to the whole territory of the city and the whole century contributed to the fact that numerous contradictions and gaps within this process were ignored. Together with the explosive boulevard culture, other forms of modernity and social interaction developed, too. Old central districts, stigmatized by the contemporaries as medieval and unhygienic, were actually populated by active communities with their own hierarchies and forms of social mobility.

In his lecture Maurizio Gribaudi will show how to reveal the complicated dynamics, distinctive of the 19th century Paris urban space, by using different sources.

Maurizio Gribaudi is a historian, demographer, and fellow researcher at the Laboratory of Demography and Social History of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). He is interested in formation of social communities in urban environment. He also worked on the issue of displacement and migration between the city and the country (in the North of Italy and Parisian Region). He has recently been focused on physical and social dynamics in Paris and France from the end of the 18th century till now. Together with Marc Barthelemy and Julien Perret he is a co-founder of the GeoHistoricalData project.

The lecture continues the course City – Discrimination, Segregation, Integration – French Experience, developed by the French Institute in Ukraine, exploring these issues from historical, sociological, and demographic perspectives.

The lecture will be delivered in French with consecutive interpretation into Ukrainian.

Admission is free

Organizer – l’Institut Français d’Ukraine

Partner – Visual Culture Research Center

Supported by: ERSTE Stiftung та Charles Stewart Mott Foundation