Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld

Dominique Kalifa

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

Vice, Crime, and Poverty

How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld

Dominique Kalifa
Translated by: Susan Emanuel
Preface by: Sarah Maza

In the series European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

https://doi.org/10.7312/kali18742

Overview
Contents

About this book

Vice, Crime, and Poverty traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Dominique Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience.

Author / Editor information

Kalifa Dominique :

Dominique Kalifa is professor of History at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. He is a specialist of the history of crime, social control, and mass culture in 19th and early 20th France and Europe. He is the author of several books including L’Encre et le sang. Récits de crimes et société à la Belle Époque (Fayard, 1995), Crime et culture au XIXe siècle (Perrin, 2005), and Les Bas-fonds. Histoire d’un imaginaire (Seuil, 2013).Dominique Kalifa is professor of history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, where he is the director of the Center for Nineteenth-Century History. His many books include La véritable histoire de la “Belle Époque” (2017).

Reviews

John Merriman, author of Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree that Gripped Belle Epoque Paris:
Kalifa is the leading historian still teaching and writing about modern French history in France. In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, he shows how the lowest of the lower classes came to be represented by, or analogized with, indigenous colonized peoples. He offers interesting reflections on the successors of the inhabitants of the bas-fonds and the emergence of new designations for them, along with the internationalization of crime. Yet again, Kalifa provides much to discuss.

Venita Datta, author of Heroes and Legends of Fin-de-Siècle France: Gender, Politics, and National Identity:
This is a lively and fun read. More than tracing the evolution of living conditions of the poor and indigent, Vice, Crime, and Poverty also represents an important contribution to the histoire des mentalités, telling us how different eras viewed the poor in terms of social changes at those times. The transnational aspect greatly enhances this study, making it a significant contribution to the field by offering insights into both European and American history.

Edward Berenson, author of Europe in the Modern World:
Dominique Kalifa is one of the best French cultural historians of his generation and a worthy successor to Alain Corbin at the Sorbonne. Vice, Crime, and Poverty examines the urban ‘underworld,’ not in the twentieth-century sense of organized crime but as an imaginary shaped discursively in the nineteenth century by a widespread if morbid fascination with the apparent dangers of urban life.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Foreword Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. The Advent of the Lower Depths
1. In the Den of Horror Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
2. Courts of Miracles Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
3. “Dangerous Classes” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	60
PART II. Scenarios of Society’s Underside
4. Empire of Lists Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
5. The Disguised Prince Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
6. The Grand Dukes’ Tour Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
7. Poetic Flight Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
PART III. Ebbing of an Imaginary
8. Slow Eclipse of the Underworld Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
9. Persistent Shadows Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
10. Roots of Fascination Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	198
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: General/trade;

eBook

Published: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 9780231547260