This years Astor Lecture, by Professor Esther da Costa Meyer (Princeton) explores the fact that Paris, like other nineteenth century European capitals, cannot be studied in Franco-centric terms alone. It was not the capital of the nineteenth century (as Walter Benjamin famously put it), nor of modernity (David Harvey’s appellation). It was the capital of a colonial empire which had more than doubled under Napoleon III, and would continue to grow under the Third Republic, sometimes called the “imperial Republic.”

This lecture will focus on the many ways in which French colonialism shaped the architecture and the urbanism of the capital, its streets, parks and gardens, its libraries and museums, the treatment of its huge working-class population, and the new social geography of the city. Yet despite the asymmetry of power between the metropole and its overseas territories, colonialism was always a two-way street, and the lecture will also address the ways in which the know-how from colonized peoples enriched the city.