Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties [Hardcover]

Olivier Bernier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1993

A portrait of Paris during the 1930s. Among the characters featured are some of the best-known names of the period - artists, writers, designers, party-givers and political figures, including Elsa Maxwell, Picasso, Dali, Gide, Cocteau, Schiaparelli and Pierre Laval.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1930 Paris dazzled as its painters, writers, composers and designers invented modernity. But in 1935, the Great Depression had caught up with the French, Fascists and Communists fought in the streets, and war loomed as Hitler and Mussolini grew more menacing. Bernier ( Words of Fire, Deeds of Blood ) here presents a searching yet marvelously gossipy cultural history of Paris in the '30s--its last brilliant moment as a world capital. Drawing on newspapers, memoirs and eyewitness accounts, he juggles the parallel lives of Picasso, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Gide, Josephine Baker, Elsa Schiaparelli, Max Ernst, Janet Flanner and many others. Bernier offers withering profiles of a succession of incompetent, unscrupulous politicians who contributed to France's failure of will. He shows how the rage for the modern that marked the beginning of the decade gave way to alienation, anguish, befuddlement and a headlong retreat into the past. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is a richly detailed and immensely readable overview of the social, artistic, and political life in Paris during a brilliant decade of extraordinary cultural achievement. Bernier, a prolific author, art historian, and leading authority on French history, juxtaposes the richness and, at times, frivolity of life among the Parisian glitterati with the menacing storm clouds of foreign affairs and the deepening economic and political divisions within France itself. Although the mass of the population was excluded from the social whirl involving Chanel, Schiaparelli, Dali, Picasso, and Gide, and the flowering of the arts contrasted sharply with the increasing incompetence of a government engaged in what the author terms "a dance of the ministries," Bernier argues that the Thirties represented the last brilliant moment for Paris as a world capital of civilization. While his tone is at times condemnatory, he argues that the French took pride in their brilliant social life, seeing it as the one last area where France still led the world. Bernier completes his poignant tale with an epilog on how Parisian life changed with the onset of war. Highly recommended.
- Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (T); 1st edition (March 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316092754
• ISBN-13: 978-0316092753
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,157,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling cutural celebrity meets political mediocrity, January 4, 2011

By 

Paul A. Myers (Claremont CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties (Hardcover)

This book, published in 1993, by art critic and French historian Olivier Bernier is a superb mix of the cultural and political history of France and life in Paris during the 1930s. This was when Parisian culture was burning at its brightest just before its extinguishment in the crushing German defeat of June 1940. For someone like me writing novels set in Paris in the 1930s, the book is gold dust. The entire cavalcade of artists, writers, dress designers, and aristocratic celebrities is portrayed in their comedy of manners with the doomed politicians of the Third Republic, an entire glittering society is sleepwalking to its rendezvous with defeat.

Bernier has a great command of the material and is not afraid to express judgements. President Lebrun is a hopeless mediocrity; Edouard Herriott, the great Radical Socialist politician, is hopelessly inept at the central economic questions facing France during the Depression, Edouard Daladier is fatally indecisive in the face of the big questions facing France at the end of the 1930s. The profiles are highlighted with colorful anecdotes involving women that are not these politicians' wives! Paris was one of the first capitals where political and cultural celebrity intersected.

Sharp profiles of the cultural personalities are also made with Bernier's great self-assurance as a critic. Jean Cocteau's limitations are described as "the curse was an irradicable frivolity" and that he "led a life of relentless chic." He comes across as an earlier version of Truman Capote. Interestingly, Bernier takes dead-eye aim at Andre Malraux, describing him as "a living paradox" and attributing his cultural presence "to his extraordinary eloquence. In a city of talkers, Malraux was famous for the brilliance and uninterruptible abundance of his conversation." He sums him up, "Malraux knew how to dazzle; but behind the torrent of glittering words, the thought was often simplistic or plain silly--his later books on art offer abundant proof of that." Ouch! Bernier gives Malraux credit for his novels of political involvement that went far to define the cultural melieu of the 1930s.

The book is an excellent companion to Alan Riding's book about Paris under the German Occupation "And The Show Went On." Both books will be subject to further blog essays (myersbooksparis)because the relevance of the themes they deal with are so germane to understanding the 1930s and today. Superbly executed, fascinating to read.