City of pleasure or ville des plaisirs? Urban leisure culture exchanges between England and France through travel writing (1700–1820)

• Autores: Clarisse Coulomb
• Localización: Leisure cultures in urban Europe, c.1700-1870: a transnational perspective / coord. por Peter Borsay, Jan Hein Furnée, 2016, ISBN 9781526104304, págs. 210-233
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The third section of the book explores various strategies to move beyond the analysis of cultural transfers between well-delineated ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ societies towards a more complex analysis of mutual cultural exchange and a genuine ‘entangled history’ (‘histoire croissée’) of European urban leisure culture. In this chapter, Clarisse Coulomb analyses how in the long eighteenth century French and English urban elites constantly exchanged and adapted each other’s models of urban leisure culture – to the extent that in some cases such as the Vauxhall/Wauxhall, it became almost impossible to tell what was actually the original ‘source’ and what the ‘adaptation’. Drawing upon the accounts of eighteenth-century French and English travellers, prime agents in the process of cultural exchange, the chapter shows how waves of Francophilia stimulated the English urban elites to embrace French music and theatre and similarly Anglomania inspired French urban elites to import and naturalize many of the English leisure innovations, such as clubs, horse racing and gardens. Despite clear tendencies towards convergence, French leisure culture retained much of its distinctiveness, particularly its continuous cycle of entertainments, uninterrupted by the English Sunday, and the larger opportunities it offered women to mix with men.