ABSTRACT

I have used the example of the Palais Royal to introduce the main themes of this book, seeing it as a particular site, full of contradiction and uncertainty, that played an important role not only as a political site in the French Revolution but also as the starting point for many modern spaces of consumption such as the arcade and the department store, and as a key site in an emergent bourgeois public sphere. I wanted to choose a site that allowed me to say ‘in this site we can see a microcosm of modernity’. I also wanted to suggest, starting with the example of the Palais Royal, then following this with other examples found in the later chapters, that we can come to understand the process of social ordering better by looking at some of its spaces, or perhaps more precisely some of the spatializing processes that have been very significant in ordering modernity as a process. I am trying to show, as others have attempted over the past decade or so, that a sociology of space can make a valid and useful contribution to social theory.