1. It is useful, and enlightening, to follow the varying fortunes of the term revolution. See Alain Rey, « Révolution»—Histoire d'un mot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). The strength of this work lies in its insistence on chronological development of usages and at the same time the intermingling of different usages, even within the same sentence, moving between the Revolution as a unique historical event and revolution as a sociopolitical concept with cyclical overtones.

2. "La littérature est l'expression de la société comme la parole est l'expression de l'homme." Louis de Bonald, Législation primitive (Paris: Le-Clere, An XI [1802]), 2:207. The phrase originally appeared in an article in the Mercure de France, no. 41 (An X [1802]), and was appended as a footnote to the later work.

3. Compare the contrast drawn by Claude Lévi-Strauss between cities of the Old World, which are objects of contemplation and reflection, with those of the Americas, which never accede to this status. Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1958), 106-8. The Revolution is certainly a primal factor in the constitution of Paris as an object of philosophical and cultural as well as economic and political speculation.

4. The chronotope renders Time "artistically visible" and, conversely, invests Space with "the movements of time, plot and history." M. M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel—Notes toward a Historical Poetics," in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. The extension of ''chronotope" to as polysemic a phenomenon as revolution is consistent with Bakhtin's own wide-ranging use of the concept. See Henri Mitterand's analysis of the varying levels of specificity of the chronotope in "Chronotopies: La Route et la mine,'' in Zola—L'Histoire et la fiction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), esp. 179-95.

5. "Le XIX ^e siècle, un espace de temps <Zeitraum> (un rêve de temps, <Zeit-traum>) dans lequel la conscience individuelle se maintient de plus en plus dans la réflexion, tandis que la conscience collective's enfonce dans un sommeil toujours plus profond." Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capitale du XIX ^e siècle, trans. Jean Lacoste (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993), 406 (K 1, 4).

6. This is Bernard Marchand's characterization of the serial novel of the 1840s. Paris: Histoire d'une ville XIX ^e -XX ^e siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 62. This work is indispensable for anyone concerned with modern Paris and its usually chaotic, often conflictual relationship to the country and especially to the state.

7. Michel de Certeau elaborates the parallel in L'Invention du quotidien (Paris: UGE-10/18, 1974). Translated by Steven Rendell, under the title The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See, in particular, chapter 8, "Marches dans la ville." The readings of urban and literary texts in the chapters draw on de Certeau's conception of the city as the locus of divergent and even conflictual urban and textual practices.

8. "Les croyances sociales . . . ont un double caractère. Ce sont des traditions ou des souvenirs collectifs, mais ce sont aussi des idées ou des conventions qui résultent de la connaissance du présent. . . . D'où il résulte que la pensée sociale est essentiellement une mémoire, et que tout son contenu n'est fait que de souvenirs collectifs, mais que ceux-là seuls parmi eux et cela seul de chacun d'eux subsiste qu'à toute époque la société, travaillant sur ses cadres actuels, peut reconstruire." Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), 295-96. See also Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 188-89. The urban narratives of nineteenth-century Paris made possible just the sort of reconstruction that Halbwachs had in mind, although he does not discuss literature.

9. In the insistence on the knowability of the city, I part company with the rich analyses of Christopher Prendergast in Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992). Writing from a perspective informed by the work of Raymond Williams, Prendergast focuses on the resistance to as well as the construction of dominant ideological representations of Paris and is greatly concerned with the discrepancy between these representations and actual life in the city. See, in particular, chapter 1, "Parisian Identities." For Prendergast the very possibility of knowledge of the city is problematic.

10. One of the most interesting of recent works is Sandy Petrey, Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Working from the speech-act framework of J. L. Austin, Petrey argues that realist fiction "performs" the Revolution rather than "reflecting" the world produced by a neatly identifiable series of events. This performative quality, which Petrey analyzes to great effect in close readings of individual texts, turns realist fiction into an active participant in history, not the passive recorder constructed by several generations of critics.

11. When asked by the king to justify the choice of Rouen over Paris as the first city of France, the emperor allegedly maintained that Paris was a great country unto itself and later, in Paris, made the celebrated proclamation "non urbs, sed orbis." The frequency of the image made it a cliché before the end of the sixteenth century. See Jean-Pierre Babelon, Paris au XVI ^e siécle (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 15-35 (quotation on p. 28).