The Rank

On a lighter Parisian note, I read my first Katherine Rundell book, Rooftoppers, which I would have ADORED at age ten but also found extremely fun at age forty!

The heroine of Rooftoppers is orphan Sophie, found floating in a cello case the English Channel after a terrible shipwreck and adopted by a charming eccentric named Charles who raises her on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry. Unfortunately the English authorities do not approve of children being raised on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry, so when they threaten to remove Sophie to an orphanage, Charles and Sophie buy themselves time by fleeing to Paris in an attempt to track down traces of Sophie's parentage.

Sophie is stubbornly convinced she might have a mother somewhere out there who survived the shipwreck! Charles is less convinced, but willing to be supportive. On account of the Authorities, however, Charles advises Sophie to stay in the hotel while he pursues the investigation -- but Sophie will not be confined! So she starts pursuing her own investigations via the hotel roof, where she rapidly collides with Matteo, an extremely feral child who claims ownership of the Paris roofs and Does Not Want want Sophie intruding.

But of course eventually Sophie wins Matteo over and is welcomed into the world of the Rooftoppers, Parisian children who have fled from orphanages in favor of leaping from spire to steeple, stealing scraps and shooting pigeons (but also sometimes befriending the pigeons) and generally making a self-sufficient sort of life for themselves in the Most Scenic Surroundings in the World. The book makes it quite clear that the Rooftoppers are often cold and hungry and smelly and the whole thing is no bed of roses, while nonetheless fully and joyously indulging in the tropey delight of secret! hyper-competent! child! rooftop! society!!

The book as a whole strikes a lovely tonal balance just on the edge of fairy tale -- everything is very technically plausible and nothing is actually magic, but also, you know, the central image of the book is a gang of rooftop Lost Kids chasing the haunting sound of cello music over the roof of the Palais de Justice. The ending I think does not make the mistake of trying to resolve too much, and overall I found it a really charming experience.

Sometimes I think that if I ever gain full comprehension of the various upheavals and rapid-fire political rotations that followed in the hundred years after the French Revolution, my mind will at that point be big and powerful enough to understand any other bit of history that anyone can throw at me. Prior to reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, I knew that in the 1870s there had briefly been a Paris Commune, and also a siege, and hot air balloons and Victor Hugo were involved in these events somehow but I had not actually understood that these were actually Two Separate Events and that properly speaking there were two Sieges of Paris, because everyone in Paris was so angry about the disaster that was the first Siege (besiegers: Prussia) that they immediately seceded from the government, declared a commune, and got besieged again (besiegers: the rest of France, or more specifically the patched-together French government that had just signed a peace treaty with Prussia but had not yet fully decided whether to be a monarchy again, a constitutional monarchy again, or a Republic again.)

As a book, Paris in Ruins has a bit of a tricky task. Its argument is that the miserable events in Paris of 1870-71 -- double siege, brutal political violence, leftists and political reformers who'd hoped for the end of the Glittering and Civilized but Ultimately Authoritarian Napoleon III Empire getting their wish in the most monkey's paw fashion imaginable -- had a lasting psychological impact on the artists who would end up forming the Impressionist movement that expressed itself through their art. Certainly true! Hard to imagine it wouldn't! But in order to tell this story it has to spend half the book just explaining the Siege and the Commune, and the problem is that although the Siege and the Commune certainly impacted the artists, the artists didn't really have much impact on the Siege and the Commune ... so reading the 25-50% section of the book is like, 'okay! so, you have to remember, the vast majority of the people in Paris right now were working class and starving and experiencing miserable conditions, which really sets the stage for what comes next! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not working class. but they were in Paris, and not having a good time, and depressed!' and then the 50-75% section is like 'well, now the working class in Paris were furious, and here's all the things that happened about that! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not in Paris any more at this point. But they were still not having a good time and still depressed!'

Sieges and plagues are the parts of history that scare me the most and so of course I am always finding myself compelled to read about them; also, I really appreciate history that engages with the relationship between art and the surrounding political and cultural phenomena that shapes and is shaped by it. So I appreciated this book very much even though I don't think it quite succeeds at this task, in large part because there is just so much to say in explaining The Siege and The Commune that it struggles sometimes to keep it focused through its chosen lens. But I did learn a lot, if sometimes somewhat separately, about both the Impressionists and the sociopolitical environment of France in the back half of the 19th century, and I am glad to have done so. I feel like I have a moderate understanding of dramatic French upheavals of the 1860s-80s now, to add to my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1780s-90s (the Revolution era) and my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1830s-40s (the Les Mis era) which only leaves me about six or seven more decades in between to try and comprehend.