In the revolutionary year of 1848, a French writer, Henri Lecouturier, denounced Paris as a metropolis of vice, where debauchery could be seen on every street corner and in every public garden. This view of the city, far from acting as a deterrent, probably had helped to draw visitors to Paris over the previous three decades, during which period the number of foreign residents steadily grew; by the time Lecouturier decried the French capital, for example, one in 20 Parisians was German.
Paris's appeal arose in part because, for almost a quarter of a century until the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, it had been closed to outsiders who, following the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1815, flocked into France to see what they had been missing. Maria Edgeworth, for example, travelled from Ireland to Paris in 1820, confident that she would find a special welcome since her relative the AbbΘ Edgeworth had attended Louis XVI at the guillotine in 1793. The timing of her visit meant that she was in the city for the public execution of Louis-Pierre Louvel, who earlier in the year had murdered the king's nephew the Duc de Berri, evidence of the ongoing tensions between pro- and anti-royalists which would not be resolved until after 1848. Another Irish visitor, Sydney, Lady Morgan, who would write extensively about both France and Paris, first arrived in Paris in 1816 when she claimed to have accepted invitations to call at 20 different houses in the course of a single evening.
The intensity of the city's social life following the fall of Napoleon was certainly one of its principal attractions. But so too was the vibrancy of political debate in Paris. As Philip Mansel makes plain, after centuries of absolutist government, the opportunity to experience constitutional politics based on the British model thrilled Parisians. Attending debates in the Chamber of Deputies became as popular an activity as spending an evening at the opera. The Russian Princess Bagration, notorious for wearing nothing in the evening other than white muslin "clinging to her form and revealing it in all its perfection", was said to follow every session of the chamber and send accounts of the proceedings to the Tsar.
But political discussion was by no means confined to parliamentary spaces or to elected representatives. Some of the most passionate arguments took place in the salons of women who, denied the right to vote or to stand as candidates, would otherwise have been unable to have any say in the process of policy-making. Among Mansell's heroines in this respect are the Comtesse de Souza and her Scottish daughter-in-law the Comtesse de Flahaut, as well as another Russian, the Princess Lieven, whose lover for many years was the head of Louis-Philippe's government, Franτois Guizot.
But an interest in politics was not just confined to members of the aristocracy. Ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the population of Paris had come to believe itself responsible, not just for the fate of the city but of the entire country. And during the first half of the 19th century, Paris would be the crucible of political development in Europe. ╔tienne Cabet, founder of the left-wing newspaper Le Populaire, was responsible for inventing the word "communist", while a former print worker and friend of George Sand, Pierre Leroux, first coined the term "socialism". And it was in Paris that the anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon declared that "property is theft".
Naturally, not everyone agreed with this sentiment and the key theme to Mansell's book is the struggle between the disenfranchised masses of Paris and the city's burgeoning bourgeoisie for political control; a brief concluding chapter shows how, after the collapse of the second empire in 1870, the latter decisively gained authority and re-established order. This concentration on the kaleidoscope of politics means that the author cannot pay as much attention to other aspects of Parisian life during the period, in particular its role at the centre of the Romantic movement. And by focusing almost exclusively on life in Paris itself, Mansell is often obliged to ignore the world beyond, even when it had an impact on the city.
Charles X, for example, features prominently from the moment when, as the Comte d'Artois, he rode into Paris in April 1814. But having been obliged to abdicate just over 16 years later, he and his family are barely mentioned again in the text. Similarly, although a symbolic figure of enormous importance in Paris, Bonaparte's son, the Duc de Reichstadt, scarcely features because most of his short life was spent in Vienna. Otherwise, however, here is a book which deserves nothing but praise for its readability, its erudition and its entertainment - an all-too-rare trio of qualities.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist and author