Review of The Personality of Paris: Landscape and Society in the Long Nineteenth Century by Alan A. H. Baker (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Anthropomorphism has been a temptation for many authors and artists who take Paris as their subject. Like ventriloquists, they make the city ‘speak’ and ‘move’ by lending it human characteristics and feelings. In nineteenth-century guidebooks Paris was depicted as having a gay, mischievous temperament; its reputation as the capital of pleasure meant it carried an air of insouciance and displayed an irreverent attitude towards authority.