Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Montons à la Barrière’
- 2 The Artistic Cabarets
- 3 Music Halls and Mass Culture
- 4 Theatre and the Avant-Garde
- 5 The Bateau-Lavoir and the Lapin Agile
- 6 Wartime and the Années Folles
- 7 The Place of Memory
- 8 The Ecole de Montmartre
- 9 The Occupation: Céline and Aymé
- Epilogue: Montmartre on Film
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
Epilogue: Montmartre on Film
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Montons à la Barrière’
- 2 The Artistic Cabarets
- 3 Music Halls and Mass Culture
- 4 Theatre and the Avant-Garde
- 5 The Bateau-Lavoir and the Lapin Agile
- 6 Wartime and the Années Folles
- 7 The Place of Memory
- 8 The Ecole de Montmartre
- 9 The Occupation: Céline and Aymé
- Epilogue: Montmartre on Film
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
It is fitting that one of the first, and most comprehensive, overviews of the cultural history of Montmartre should be the special number of Le Crapouillot which appeared in 1959. Not only did it bring together some of the veterans of Montmartre culture from the Belle Epoque and the interwar years – not least its editor and founder, Jean Galtier-Boissière, who had been a frequent visitor to the bals at the Moulin de la Galette before the First World War – but it embodied that spirit of Montmartre non-conformism, which was one of its defining characteristics. At the same time, its appearance in 1959, in the transition between the Fourth and Fifth Republic. constitutes what may be considered a final chronological frontier in the district's history as a cultural centre, which had been in apparently irreversible decline since the Liberation.
This erosion was due to a number of factors: shifting patterns of cultural activity which benefited other areas, just as Montmartre in the 1880s had profited from transfers from the Latin Quarter; legislative changes, most notably the Loi Marthe Richard of 1947 closing the brothels – Louis Chevalier notes wryly that the 106 on the Boulevard de la Chapelle was turned into a Salvation Army hostel; transformations in the city's economic, demographic and urban profile, culminating in the creeping gentrification of all the arrondissements in the 1980s and following increased availability of home loans; and, finally, technical innovations which, like television, altered public taste in entertainment, and affected the closeness and sociability of intellectual and cultural groupings while tending to fragment them physically. While the Latin Quarter and the Left Bank may have shown more durability as centres of intellectual activity, due to the presence of the university and the publishing industry, they were no more immune to technological and sociological advances than Montmartre. Herbert R. Lottman concludes his study of the Rive Gauche by attributing the decline of the district as a cohesive intellectual centre in the 1960s to elements, like the proliferation of the telephone, banal in themselves, which rendered face-to-face encounters redundant, a process clearly continued by the rise of information technology.
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- MontmartreA Cultural History, pp. 267 - 277Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017