Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends

In her enlightening cultural history, McAuliffe (Dawn of the Belle Epoque) details the swirling world of art, fashion, literature, and politics of 1930s Paris. Despite the instability of the decade, which ended with German occupation, Paris remained the center of European cultural creativity, and McAuliffe follows the lives of the city’s influential people as they negotiated the decade’s shifting political and economic sands. In 1929, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli designed a line of brightly colored clothes, as well as off-the-rack skirts with lower hemlines that would come to define glamour in the decade. A 21-year-old Simone de Beauvoir met and began a relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre just as he was to begin military service. Picasso aligned himself with the Republican cause in Spain, expressing his politics through his art in his painting Guernica, which he unveiled at the 1937 Paris World Fair. By 1939, Jean Renoir had captured the decadence and brutal sadness of the decline of France in his film The Rules of the Game. Meanwhile jazz singer Josephine Baker, living in Paris, helped secure passports for Eastern European Jews seeking refuge in Latin America. With a breathless pace, McAuliffe’s richly detailed history wonderfully captures Paris in the 1930s. (Sept.)