This book brings together some of the most significant and influential recent work in French urban history. The trend of historical thinking and research today, typified by such books as Montaillou, is to focus on the surviving demographic and socio-economic documentation of a given period or society as indicators of the changes undergone by the people of that time or place. Such is the direction of this important new study of the urban experience of France in the nineteenth century. Miraculously, the society and the era have survived almost intact in the wealth of extant demographic and socio-economic data: census figures, police and other official documents, urban surveys, marketing records, maps, firsthand accounts and diaries, genre paintings. photographs, and contemporary periodicals. The contributors are a group of noted scholars and each of their essays assesses a different aspect of the relations between urbanisation, structural change, politics, and the lives of ordinary men and women.