Présentation

[Autom. eng. transl.] This book revisits the vast category of texts that can be grouped under the definition of "guides" of the city of Paris, which, without always being adorned with this title, contributed in the nineteenth century to the popularization of the myth of the capital. French. Paris as a modern myth emerges in these texts as a common place, in both senses of the word: as a place, geographical and social space, but also, and above all, as a stereotype, as a linguistic and cultural cliché. The report of this type of publication with the "great literature" is often ambiguous: several great authors participate directly in the epic enterprise of staging the inhabitants of Paris (Hugo, Balzac, Nerval), others have served to denounce the inanity of the myth itself (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Goncourt). The contributions collected here focus on the many facets of this changing myth, which is interested in cliché and its diffusion, in Baudelairian Paris (which in the "Tableaux parisiens" exceeds the myth of the "capital of the Universe" to find the heart of its inhabitants), Balzacian Paris and educational applications that it can offer teachers of French literature. Haussmannian transformations are also reconsidered, as well as the fashion of the "Guides of the ruins of Paris" after the so-called "disaster" of 1871, in which the back of the myth and its complexity are revealed.