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Paris from the Ground Up
Paris is the most personal of cities. There is a Paris for the medievalist, and another for the modernist―a Paris for expatriates, philosophers, artists, romantics, and revolutionaries of every stripe. James H. S. McGregor brings these multiple perspectives into focus throughout this concise, unique history of the City of Light.
His panorama begins with an ancient Gallic fortress on the Seine, burned to the ground by its own defenders in a vain effort to starve out Caesar’s legions. After ninth-century raids by the Vikings ended, Parisians expanded the walls of their tiny sanctuary on the Ile de la Cité, turning the river’s right bank into a thriving commercial district and the Rive Gauche into a college town. Gothic spires expressed a taste for architectural novelty, matched only by the palaces and pleasure gardens of successive monarchs whose ingenuity made Paris the epitome of everything French. The fires of Revolution threatened all that had come before, but Baron Haussmann saw opportunity in the wreckage. No planned city in the world is more famous than his.
Paris from the Ground Up allows readers to trace the city’s evolution in its architecture and art―from the Roman arena to the Musée d’Orsay, from the Louvre’s defensive foundations to I. M. Pei’s transparent pyramids. Color maps, along with identifying illustrations, make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.
His panorama begins with an ancient Gallic fortress on the Seine, burned to the ground by its own defenders in a vain effort to starve out Caesar’s legions. After ninth-century raids by the Vikings ended, Parisians expanded the walls of their tiny sanctuary on the Ile de la Cité, turning the river’s right bank into a thriving commercial district and the Rive Gauche into a college town. Gothic spires expressed a taste for architectural novelty, matched only by the palaces and pleasure gardens of successive monarchs whose ingenuity made Paris the epitome of everything French. The fires of Revolution threatened all that had come before, but Baron Haussmann saw opportunity in the wreckage. No planned city in the world is more famous than his.
Paris from the Ground Up allows readers to trace the city’s evolution in its architecture and art―from the Roman arena to the Musée d’Orsay, from the Louvre’s defensive foundations to I. M. Pei’s transparent pyramids. Color maps, along with identifying illustrations, make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.
352 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2009
About the author
James H.S. McGregor
7 books5 followersWhen I was ten I borrowed my Dad’s Smith-Corona portable typewriter and started a novel about pirates. I didn’t get very far. A few years later the Smith-Corona went to college then grad school with me. Its completion rate increased, but the work it was called on to turn out—term papers in sociology, political science, Russian history and the like—was less exciting if more meaningful than my first attempt. After working my way through a number of undergraduate majors, I stumbled into Comparative Literature and the typing grew more focused, more earnest and more fun.
Comparative Literature turned into a career. The Smith-Corona morphed into a series of ever cheaper, ever smaller and more efficient computers. I wrote professional articles and books on Giovanni Boccaccio and other figures in medieval Italian literary history. Near the end of my academic career, I started writing books about cities. It turned out that all those term papers on social science and history had been waiting for a chance to get into conversation with the art and literature I had been teaching. The first book, called Rome from the Ground Up, described a city where I had spent two important, eye opening years.
That book was under contract with a small press in lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center was hit. The editor there believed that the market for books about foreign cities had collapsed with the second tower and decided not to publish. I sold Rome to Yale University Press about a year later. When my editor at Yale left, enthusiasm for publishing the book went with him. Fortunately I’d gotten a good reading of the book from an expert Yale had consulted, and with that in hand, I approached the literature editor at Harvard UP. He was persuaded, and I was offered a contract. On the strength of the contract, I was able to sign on with a wonderful literary agent.
Four books later, HUP and I parted ways. Yale, under dynamic new leadership, is the publisher of my latest book, which is a new direction for me but also a complement to my city books. Four of those books--Paris, Rome, Venice and Athens--focus on places either in the Mediterranean or deeply engaged with it. The new book, Back to the Garden, looks at that part of the world and the societies it has influenced from a rural rather than an urban viewpoint. It traces the history of regional reliance on and understanding of the natural environment.
For the last year I’ve been writing a follow up book that focuses on American environmental issues, especially our muddled thinking about two critical and confusing topics: wilderness on the one hand, wild (and domestic) animals on the other.
Now retired from academics, I live in Cambridge with my wife (we met in Rome!). And though it pains me to confess it, I still have nothing meaningful to say about pirates.
Comparative Literature turned into a career. The Smith-Corona morphed into a series of ever cheaper, ever smaller and more efficient computers. I wrote professional articles and books on Giovanni Boccaccio and other figures in medieval Italian literary history. Near the end of my academic career, I started writing books about cities. It turned out that all those term papers on social science and history had been waiting for a chance to get into conversation with the art and literature I had been teaching. The first book, called Rome from the Ground Up, described a city where I had spent two important, eye opening years.
That book was under contract with a small press in lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center was hit. The editor there believed that the market for books about foreign cities had collapsed with the second tower and decided not to publish. I sold Rome to Yale University Press about a year later. When my editor at Yale left, enthusiasm for publishing the book went with him. Fortunately I’d gotten a good reading of the book from an expert Yale had consulted, and with that in hand, I approached the literature editor at Harvard UP. He was persuaded, and I was offered a contract. On the strength of the contract, I was able to sign on with a wonderful literary agent.
Four books later, HUP and I parted ways. Yale, under dynamic new leadership, is the publisher of my latest book, which is a new direction for me but also a complement to my city books. Four of those books--Paris, Rome, Venice and Athens--focus on places either in the Mediterranean or deeply engaged with it. The new book, Back to the Garden, looks at that part of the world and the societies it has influenced from a rural rather than an urban viewpoint. It traces the history of regional reliance on and understanding of the natural environment.
For the last year I’ve been writing a follow up book that focuses on American environmental issues, especially our muddled thinking about two critical and confusing topics: wilderness on the one hand, wild (and domestic) animals on the other.
Now retired from academics, I live in Cambridge with my wife (we met in Rome!). And though it pains me to confess it, I still have nothing meaningful to say about pirates.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 29, 2025
This is one of those books that you are glad you have finished. You can take that in both a positive and negative sense.
From a positive perspective, I’m glad I read this book in preparation to an upcoming trip to Paris. I loved how it talked about the development of the city chronologically, all the way up to the late 2000s. It spoke about the development of the map of Paris based on the surrounding geography and also the development of the architecture, frequently demonstrating how Paris was a driver of architectural development throughout the world. This was exactly the type of book I was looking for, and I feel it will give me a greater appreciation of what I see on my trip.
This book was great at going into detail about certain architectural points of interest, with the author making great effort to describe each of the structures in architectural terms. However, this positive is where things start to morph into negatives….
While this book is at times engaging, for the most part it was pretty dry and led to a choppy read. I don’t have a background in architecture, so I found that I was constantly looking up different architectural terms so that I could understand what the author was describing. There were colour pictures throughout the book, but not nearly enough, so I found myself having to hold my phone in one hand to look up different structures while I was trying to read the descriptions. This certainly isn’t what I want to be doing when I’m trying to get away from technology by reading a book… although I definitely ended up learning a lot this way!
Some of the chapters started out very strong, but I found the author would lose me as it progressed. For instance, the chapter speaking about medieval churches went into great detail about the development of Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, which was great, but then seemed to give almost as much detail about every other mediaeval church in Paris… and there lots of them! Admittedly, finding the perfect balance of brevity and detail would be impossible, but personally, I found that some of the chapters dragged on too long.
Although detail generally erred on the side of too much, there were certain bits that seemed a bit skimpy. For instance, the author hardly talked about the Eiffel Tower at all. Given the fact that this tower is the icon of the city and had such a contentious start, I felt that he should have done a better job at telling the Eiffel Tower story. It would have been a great representation of how common it is for Parisians to detest architecture and then fall in love with it and later generations.
Another era that I still don’t have an appreciation for, despite the fair number of pages devoted to it was Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of the city. In other books not about urban development of Paris, his name was constantly mentioned, so I was hoping this book would give me a very good understanding of his role as the “creator of modern Paris”. I now have a bit of an understanding, but I am left feeling that the significance of his role was understated. I wish the author would have devoted more pages/pictures/maps to this process, perhaps instead of all of the extra church architecture!
The author made a concerted effort to sprinkle in human stories that explain what was going on as Paris developed. This was really cool, especially in relation to more recent developments that don’t tend to make the history books. With that said, the personal stories were written in a fairly clinical manner, so they were not as engaging as I know they could have been.
To finish on a positive note, one thing that was so appreciated was the 10 maps at the end of the book. One of my pet peeves when reading books like this is that the publishers always seem to skimp on the maps. It was so useful to have that resource with the quick flip of a page rather than have to pull out the phone yet again. The fact that there were multiple maps was an even more impressive addition. In fact, the maps are better than anything that I found on the Internet and I have taken pictures of all of them for my upcoming trip. I now know where I can take a two block detour from the common roads to see something different that will enrich my experience.
In the end, I was happy that I read this book, but if you read it, don’t think it will be a quick/easy read. It’s the type of book that you can pick up every night over the course of a few months and it will reliably put you to sleep, but once you finish it, your life will be enriched:-)
From a positive perspective, I’m glad I read this book in preparation to an upcoming trip to Paris. I loved how it talked about the development of the city chronologically, all the way up to the late 2000s. It spoke about the development of the map of Paris based on the surrounding geography and also the development of the architecture, frequently demonstrating how Paris was a driver of architectural development throughout the world. This was exactly the type of book I was looking for, and I feel it will give me a greater appreciation of what I see on my trip.
This book was great at going into detail about certain architectural points of interest, with the author making great effort to describe each of the structures in architectural terms. However, this positive is where things start to morph into negatives….
While this book is at times engaging, for the most part it was pretty dry and led to a choppy read. I don’t have a background in architecture, so I found that I was constantly looking up different architectural terms so that I could understand what the author was describing. There were colour pictures throughout the book, but not nearly enough, so I found myself having to hold my phone in one hand to look up different structures while I was trying to read the descriptions. This certainly isn’t what I want to be doing when I’m trying to get away from technology by reading a book… although I definitely ended up learning a lot this way!
Some of the chapters started out very strong, but I found the author would lose me as it progressed. For instance, the chapter speaking about medieval churches went into great detail about the development of Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, which was great, but then seemed to give almost as much detail about every other mediaeval church in Paris… and there lots of them! Admittedly, finding the perfect balance of brevity and detail would be impossible, but personally, I found that some of the chapters dragged on too long.
Although detail generally erred on the side of too much, there were certain bits that seemed a bit skimpy. For instance, the author hardly talked about the Eiffel Tower at all. Given the fact that this tower is the icon of the city and had such a contentious start, I felt that he should have done a better job at telling the Eiffel Tower story. It would have been a great representation of how common it is for Parisians to detest architecture and then fall in love with it and later generations.
Another era that I still don’t have an appreciation for, despite the fair number of pages devoted to it was Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of the city. In other books not about urban development of Paris, his name was constantly mentioned, so I was hoping this book would give me a very good understanding of his role as the “creator of modern Paris”. I now have a bit of an understanding, but I am left feeling that the significance of his role was understated. I wish the author would have devoted more pages/pictures/maps to this process, perhaps instead of all of the extra church architecture!
The author made a concerted effort to sprinkle in human stories that explain what was going on as Paris developed. This was really cool, especially in relation to more recent developments that don’t tend to make the history books. With that said, the personal stories were written in a fairly clinical manner, so they were not as engaging as I know they could have been.
To finish on a positive note, one thing that was so appreciated was the 10 maps at the end of the book. One of my pet peeves when reading books like this is that the publishers always seem to skimp on the maps. It was so useful to have that resource with the quick flip of a page rather than have to pull out the phone yet again. The fact that there were multiple maps was an even more impressive addition. In fact, the maps are better than anything that I found on the Internet and I have taken pictures of all of them for my upcoming trip. I now know where I can take a two block detour from the common roads to see something different that will enrich my experience.
In the end, I was happy that I read this book, but if you read it, don’t think it will be a quick/easy read. It’s the type of book that you can pick up every night over the course of a few months and it will reliably put you to sleep, but once you finish it, your life will be enriched:-)
February 18, 2022
Currently about halfway through the authors discussed in 'The Cambridge Introduction of Fench Literature,' I decided to take a detour and read about Paris. James H.S. McGregor's 'Paris from the Ground Up' is a nice combination of history, town planning, and architecture of one of the world's greatest cities. [It is one of a Harvard "from the ground up" series that includes Rome, Venice, and Washington, D.C.]
The reader learns some architectural vernacular with examples. The book's ten maps help the reader see the spatial progress of the city over centuries, as well as locate its great stuctures and parks. Examples of the buildings and "places" of focus include churches, palaces, theaters, universities, museums, gardens, railroad stations, hospitals, monuments, sculptures, and military memorials. Art history is given its due. The book includes dozens of photos both inerior and exterior, ancient and contemporary. The author provides just enough French and Parisian history to bind all this together into a coherent story.
While McGregor's book is not primarily intended as a guide to the reader of French literature, He certainly provides a lot of context for the works of the great authors, many of which are mentioned. Certainly a well conceived and executed book.
The reader learns some architectural vernacular with examples. The book's ten maps help the reader see the spatial progress of the city over centuries, as well as locate its great stuctures and parks. Examples of the buildings and "places" of focus include churches, palaces, theaters, universities, museums, gardens, railroad stations, hospitals, monuments, sculptures, and military memorials. Art history is given its due. The book includes dozens of photos both inerior and exterior, ancient and contemporary. The author provides just enough French and Parisian history to bind all this together into a coherent story.
While McGregor's book is not primarily intended as a guide to the reader of French literature, He certainly provides a lot of context for the works of the great authors, many of which are mentioned. Certainly a well conceived and executed book.
December 23, 2017
Very interesting. Architectural details get a bit tedious especially as there aren’t lots of pictures or illustrations of churches and buildings mentioned. I’d give it 3 and 3/4 stars
June 8, 2019
A very cool look at Paris throughout its lifetime—from the Gauls to the Romans, to its architecture, and kings. A great read before our travels there!
November 17, 2009
I'm not sure who the audience is for this book. Paris lovers likely will find it too basic, and novices will be confused by the haphazard arrangement of information about different topics. The chapter-by-chapter "shifting lens" perspective didn't really work for me. I could tell the book was well-researched, but the organization of each chapter was puzzling. Many chapters jumped around in time rather than developing events or sites chronologically within a chapter. Some sites were mentioned superficially in a paragraph or less while others received more detailed treatment. The photographs were the best part of the book!
April 10, 2010
This time around when I read The Three Musketeers I had a map at hand since we'd just stayed in the part of Paris where most of the action takes place. And then I got interested in how the city had changed between the 17th and 19th centuries, and even further back. This book gives a really good overview of the way the city has evolved from its earliest days. There was a little too much detail in the description of the major cathedrals for me, but other than that it was exactly what I wanted. This isn't a light travel book, though - it's more like an academic study. Wish I'd read it BEFORE we went to Paris!
August 6, 2011
I love the beginnings of things-- ancient history, early poetry, early painting and sculpture-- and thus the beginning of this book, with the first stirrings of Paris, the earliest peoples, structures, and places in modern Paris where you can still see vestiges of these, was a real treat. If you are interested in the city-- the geography, history, architecture, character-- this is a real find. The author lost me when he began describing painting after painting in the Louvre in detail with no photo illustrations, and I skimmed the rest. But I'll re-read the first part before going to Paris again, and find my way to special places revealed.
March 28, 2010
This book managed to answer lingering questions I have had for years. Why are there no Parisii ruins in Paris? Why can't I find any information on them? The book is thoroughly researched; unlike many of the other histories of Paris I have read, I felt like the author had read more than the standard texts while doing his research. The first few chapters are compellingly written, but the prose then becomes pedestrian. Excellent maps, illustrations, and resources in the back of the book. Recommended for classrooms and tourists who like to do serious reading.
September 6, 2010
Not exactly a history book, nor an architecture book, but it gives a detailed and very readable perspective on a number of Paris's most beloved icons - Notre Dame, the Louvre, Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower and more. The author manages to make the ste's history come alive. Very good preparation for a visitor (like me) who wants to know what he's going to see before he gets there, and more importantly, what it means.
November 26, 2015
This was a bit uneven, but I'm glad I read it before my trip to Paris a few years ago. Without it, I probably wouldn't have known to go to the basement of the Louvre to see the base of one or two of Philippe Auguste's medieval towers, or to look up the bit of Philippe Auguste's city wall in the neighborhood where I stayed. I think this is also the book that taught me the history of the statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf. Fascinating stuff for a history buff about to visit the City of Light.
January 16, 2012
I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this book. The history of Paris is, of course, fascinating and the way it is presented makes it very accessible and interesting. The writing flows smoothly through time periods and in a geographically logical order. A concise way to absorb the history of Paris and France in general.
September 24, 2009
This is an easy history of Paris as seen from the viewpoint of it's building from a Roman outpost to the city of light. If you know Paris at all, you'll love it. If you know Paris a little, it will enlighten you and draw you to return see for yourself. (I'm available as tour guide!)
October 14, 2010
This is a very factual and well-presented book. I wasn't enchanted by the writing style. I would prefer something by Ackroyd when it comes to city biographies.
July 20, 2011
This one reads like a history textbook. If you're looking to warm up to Paris, this probably isn't the book. If you're curious about Paris' history, this is a good one.
May 31, 2014
A whole chapter on Notre Dame?! Seriously?!
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews