Artisan fishers broke the early medieval pattern of subsistence fishing. Participants in Europe’s medieval ‘Commercial Revolution’, artisans made their living by catching fish to sell on a local market. Evidence of such people appears around 1000 CE in commercially precocious northern Italy but also in England, France, the Rhineland, and elsewhere. Commonly they arose at or near emerging towns, where skilled subsistence fishers might offer a surplus catch to other non-agricultural specialists. The chapter examines the social position of these household-based fishers, their traditional small-scale technologies, and the collective organizations (guilds) used to manage their human and environmental relations. It then turns to the urban markets where these men and their wives provided fresh fish from nearby waters. In larger towns professional fishmongers consolidated catches from various regional habitats, while communal concern for a safe and abundant supply caused municipal authorities to regulate market dealings. By the late twelfth century the interplay of seasonal demand (Lent) and supply (runs of migratory fish) coupled with cultural criteria of taste and quality shaped fish prices. Whether in great cities like Venice or Paris or small towns on the Castilian plateau or English coast, local markets offered consumers the regional fish they ate.

Zooming in on a single city, Chapter 4 focuses on Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As a prime example of the social changes brought about by urbanization, Paris was a commercial hub, the seat of royal administration, and a centre for advanced learning and education through its new university. We explore how this environment fed into the cultivation of polyphonic music at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, looking into the genres of organum, conductus, and motet, and examining the system of rhythmic modes that was developed to notate this music for posterity. Music theorists, writing a generation or more later, provide us with the names of some of those musicians responsible for the musical innovations at Notre-Dame, and thus we can identify the composers of liturgical polyphony for the first time. We learn how Léonin compiled his Magnus Liber Organi, and his successor Pérotin edited and supplemented it, giving us a unique insight into the ways in which medieval musicians preserved and reinvented the music of earlier generations.

During the 1790s, Franz Joseph Gall, a German now practicing medicine in Vienna, came forth with a new way of thinking about the mind and brain. He envisioned the mind having many specialized functions, each dependent on a different part of the brain for its expression. He had a variety of methods for determining these function–structure relationships but relied most heavily on skull features. Bumps and depressions on specific parts of the skull, he reasoned, reflected the growth of the underlying parts. Hence, by studying the heads and crania of humans and animals, one could find separate organs for music, mathematics, and even color perception. Stated differently, a skilled observer could use craniology for probing the mysteries of the mind and understanding the functional organization of the brain. In 1805, Gall left Vienna with his new assistant, Johan Spurzheim, to present his “organology” in various European centers of learning. He never returned. He settled in Paris in 1807, where he lectured and published his books on his ideas. He died there in 1828, still believing in his new science of man, yet knowing that his skull-based assertions were still the most controversial features of his doctrine.

Holmes went to Paris to further his medical studies in 1833, because the French were leading the way in basing medicine on hard scientific facts and new tools, such as the stethoscope. He took full advantage of all that Paris had to offer in the classroom, clinics, and dissecting sites. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, who railed against worthless therapies (e.g., bloodletting) and unsubstantiated theorizing, was his favorite teacher. Holmes agreed with Louis about medical quackery and learning more about phrenology while in Paris, where some of his teachers embraced it, while others damned it. Many French physicians were then publishing books on phrenology, and Paris was now home to a very active phrenological society, the Société Phrénologique. Some of the Americans he was with also visited phrenology shops. For example, John Collins Warren’s son bought books and specimens for his father while there. Yet Holmes was still not ready to present his own opinions about the new science in print. He did not even bring it up in private letters to his parents, though he did mention finding charlatanism running rampant in Britain, which he visited. He did not elaborate.

Chapter 5 recounts the story of Giorgio Amendola from his birth in 1907 through the complexities of his family life and politics until his father’s death. His father’s murder and his combative personality ensured that he dismissed liberal Anti-Fascism as hopelessly feeble and, in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). He soon left for Paris and for his education as a party chief in the making, notably from the Machiavellian Palmiro Togliatti, his ‘second father’. Giorgio loved Paris, City of the Revolution; he did not visit Leningrad or Moscow until after 1945. A young working-class woman called Germaine Lecocq, almost the embodiment of Paris, came suddenly into his life in a story of love at first sight. Unlike his parents’ marriage, it remained that way. The couple’s marriage and first full sexual encounter occurred on the prison island of Ponza. Not long afterwards, a daughter was born with some difficulty in Rome; Germaine’s mother arrived and thereafter remained part of their family. Eventually they moved back to Paris, and, after a brief time in Tunisia, they stayed in France until Giorgio crossed the Italian border to become a fighting partisan in April 1943.

Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker.

The years spent in Paris spanning the death of Louis XIV and the Regency of Philippe d’Orléans. Montesquieu’s social contacts and literary interests. Sale of his office and unexpected departure from parlement in 1726. Consolidation of his fortune and social position.

Three years of legal studies and other experiences in Bordeaux and then Paris under the name of Secondat de Montesquieu, in Louis XIV’s twilight years. His pursuit of intellectual interests: literature, theatre, Asia; the kindling of a new spirit.

This chapter examines Roberto Bolaño’s relation to the Tel Quel group in Paris by offering a close reading of his short story “Labyrynth.” Though few Latin Americans participated in Tel Quel, Bolaño was fascinated by the group’s ability to create an influential literary movement. The chapter provides an overview of Tel Quel’s lack of interest in Latin American writers and explores Bolaño’s commentary on each of the members, including Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva. The chapter also discusses Bolaño’s fascination with other literary groups around the world, including Octavio Paz’s circle in Mexico City, which appears in a key scene in The Savage Detectives.

It was the departure from the pre-Armistice ‘contract’ with Germany that became the crucial issue – famously blamed on Lloyd George and Wilson alike in Keynes’s tract The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). In particular there was a crucial ‘breach of contract’ when the two leaders included war pensions as so-called ‘reparations’; and these were now demanded under a specifically drafted War Guilt Clause of the Treaty. Dulles subsequently admitted his own role in what he came to regard as the Treaty’s greatest failing. What Chapter 2 demonstrates, through a close reading of the published documentation, is that Dulles’s collaborator at each crucial stage was none other than Keynes himself.

At the Paris peace conference in 1919, Keynes served as a member of the British delegation. He often represented the Treasury although himself only a temporary civil servant aged thirty-six. But there were equally youthful members of the US delegation with whom he worked closely, initially in support of the position adopted by President Woodrow Wilson in seeking a negotiated peace with Germany. Hence Keynes’s close contact with both Norman Davis and also John Foster Dulles, then a young lawyer. Their task was to define the ‘reparations’ due from Germany under the Armistice agreement – often called the ‘Lansing Note’ after the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who was Dulles’s uncle.

Baron’s chapter uses the lenses of periodical culture and reception studies to situate Joyce’s writing after Ulysses in the context of his involvement with the internationalist avant-garde editorially spearheaded by Eugene Jolas and Elliott Paul in transition. As Edmund Wilson stated in 1948, “without transition, it’s an open question whether Finnegans Wake would be comprehensible at all.” This chapter first reads letters around the serializations of Ulysses and Work in Progress to argue that Joyce learnt from his dealings with The Little Review how to use transition to orchestrate the exegesis and apologia of his rule-flouting project. The chapter examines the strategies that established the Wake’s reputation as an avant-garde triumph rather than a fraudulent con; for example, Joyce’s instigation of the publication of numerous essays devoted exclusively to the praise, explanation, and defense of his work as well as his incorporation of negative views. Most importantly, the chapterwill go on to uncover the ways in which transition brought Joyce into collaborations with a cohort of admiring idealists – involving him in relationships which in turn nourished and inflected the text as he wrote it.

Flynn’s chapter argues for the crucial role of nineteenth-century French naturalism in the conception and evolution of Joyce’s Dubliners. Specifically, it argues that Joyce’s ambition to correct the development of his country through representing the debilitation of its capital city is modelled on Émile Zola’s aim in his naturalist, twenty-novel series Le Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893) to present and diagnose the pathologies of the Third Republic through representing several generations of a diseased family. However, in their indirection, Joyce’s stories expand upon an ambiguity intrinsic to naturalism – the subjectivity inherent in any would-be objective perception of reality – an ambiguity developed to comic effect by the second-generation naturalist, Guy de Maupassant in the story “Auprès d’un Mort” (Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse). The chapter argues that the first story of Dubliners, “The Sisters,” is inspired by this minutely observed, disenchanted, and enigmatic story. The chapter closes by looking at the final scene of “The Dead” to argue that Joyce turns the dead end of naturalism into a test for an Irish readership.

Telemann’s Beschreibung der Augen-Orgel oder des Augen-Clavicimbels (Hamburg, 1739) has generally been interpreted as a commentary on the “clavecin pour les yeux” invented by the French Jesuit mathematician and philosopher Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688–1757). This publication was widely received as an influential contribution to one of the liveliest debates of the Enlightenment – the intense controversy over Castel’s theories of sound-color analogy. A look into the genesis and influence of Telemann’s Beschreibung reveals the source of its text and exposes a bilingual tableau of intellectual loyalties and rivalries. Among the luminaries who weighed in were Voltaire, Rameau, Mizler, and Mattheson, whose unpublished manuscript on the subject includes the same French letter that inspired Telemann. This essay confirms that the letter’s author was Castel himself. Telemann’s text was a fairly literal translation, but it was quickly and anonymously translated back into French by Castel, who deceptively published it as though it had Telemann’s imprimatur. Due to the composer’s celebrity, this text, as erroneously attributed to him, appeared in no fewer than eight versions between the years 1739 and 1757 in French, German, and Latin.

In representing print in the context of the history of human knowledge more generally, the national libraries were at an advantage. However, while they could offer permanent exhibitions, whether of books or antiquities, they could not easily present them in the contexts of modern achievements. For this, the multitude of temporary exhibitions, presenting old and new objects side by side, offered another perspective. They also reached audiences unfamiliar with the fixed presentations whether in London or Paris.

A question frequently arises in the field of human rights as to why the rights do not become real, even when they are recognized in legal frameworks. More specifically, how to convert economic, social and cultural rights into concrete reality? Why do not the legal frameworks translate into equality, changing the circumstances of those living in vulnerable conditions? Or, more specifically, what are the conditions that favour or hinder the implementation of ESCR?

This chapter explores whether it is possible to talk meaningfully of an African brand of crime fiction. It seeks broad trends in localized examples but, in so doing, it privileges those texts that have resonated beyond national and indeed continental borders. Following a survey of the role played by the Parisian publishing industry in the global dissemination of African crime fiction, the focus turns inwards, examining how authors including Benin’s Florent Couao-Zotti and South Africa’s Margie Orford and Deon Meyer stage the continent’s social realities, typically in the wake of independence. Crucial here is the appropriation of the city. On the other hand, authors including Mali’s Aïda Mady Diallo and Moussa Konaté and Ghana’s Kwei Quartey and Nii Ayikwei Parkes use their work to subvert the literary myths of rural Africa. The chapter argues that Sub-Saharan African crime fiction has an important anthropological function, adapting the genre’s urban DNA in order to map the tensions between the traditions of rural Africa and life in its modern cities.

This chapter presents the institutions of central and local government. The balance of powers in favour of the executive within the Fifth Republic Constitution formalises realities of power. The traditional centralised French state with its local representatives controls many important public services. Developments over the past forty years have given more power to regions and large cities. These have provided a counterbalance to centralisation in economic development. The growth of Independent Administrative Authorities reflects developments in other developed countries. Nearly fifty years of the ombudsman function (now constitutionalised as the Défenseur(e) des droits) provides alternative redress to the administrative courts. The chapter concludes with an overview of the sources of French administrative law. The law is no longer primarily drawn from the case law of the Conseil d’Etat, but the Constitution, the enactment of codes, and the importance of EU law and the European Convention have diversified sources of law. Case law remains more important than in private law and legal scholarship is enriched by the participation of leading members of the Conseil d’Etat as authors.