Rebel Cities

Author/Guide: Mike Rapport

Why a Booktrail?

1700s: A tale of three cities..

ISBN: 978-1408702918
Genre: Historical, Non-Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

London, Paris and New York in the eighteenth century, as today, were places where political authority, commerce and money, art and intellectual life intersected. But the cities were also home to dangerous criminals, corrupt politicians – and slaves.

Rebel Cities explores the stormy debate about the nature of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: were they places of enlightenment, sparkling wells of progress and civilisation, or were they dens of vice, degeneracy and disorder?

Drawing on hundreds of letters, travelogues and eye-witness accounts, Mike Rapport vividly evokes the sights, sounds and smells of these cities, masterfully weaving their history with the politics of revolution.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Paris

Boasting the pinnacle of the French legal system but also of the fall of the monarchy. Ut was the centre of manufacturing and art, a great place of woship in the Notre-Dame cathedral and a tiny island at its heart – Ile de la Cite – the political, legal and religious centre of the city.

23 February 1763 – A huge equestrian statue and King Louis on horseback, placed at the centre of Place Louis XV now Place de la Concorde

This is the city of the revolution – the square where the French Revolution has The Bastille at its centre where the worst of the violence was committed.

London

London might not have experienced a revolution during this period but it did undergo several manor changes. The segregation of poverty and wealth was the most pronounced here out of the three cities in the book. The poor East and the rich West were drifting further and further apart.

New York

A walking city much like the other two and one that and a city which very much was growing upwards. It might not have had the towers of London at the time but it had around 22 spires puncturing the sky at that time. It was the river and the maritime industry which identified this city. New York was the main port of entry for a polyglot mix of immigrants. It was also the reason that the East River and its maritime activity which turned the city into a financial powerhouse.