In Europe

obvious tampering with the evidence. Europe was stunned to discover that such things were possible in an enlightened France. ‘Scandalous, cynical, disgusting and barbaric,’ the correspondent for
The Times
wrote. The French began to realise that the affair was damaging their country in the eyes of international opinion – and on the eve of a world's fair that was to be the biggest ever held. Dreyfus was offered a pardon and accepted it, too tired to fight on.
    In 1906 the army rehabilitated him. He was promoted to the rank of major and received the
Légion d'honneur
. Zola died in 1902; in 1908 his ashes were interred at the Panthéon. Once free, Dreyfus himself proved less idealistic than those who had fought for him. ‘We were prepared to die for Dreyfus,’ one of his most avid supporters later said. ‘But Dreyfus himself was not.’ Years later, when a group of intellectuals asked him to sign a petition to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti – two American victims of a political process – he flew into a rage: he wanted nothing more to do with such affairs.
    During my first few days in Paris, I take as my guide a copy of the 1896 Baedeker. In it, the avenue Jean-Jaurès is still the rue d'Allemagne, the SacréCoeur is still under construction, the most important painter of the day is Louis Meissonier, and the vanes of the Moulin de Galette have only recently stopped turning. I hail one of the 13,000
fiacres
, or hop aboard one of the forty omnibus lines crossing the city. Everything works and moves by horsepower, tens of thousands of horses for the cabs, omnibuses, carts and coaches, my entire city guide smells of horse. And all those horses must be stabled and fed – hence the hay and oats markets – and watered – there are 2,000 city fountains – to say nothing of disposing of all that manure.
    The days have been sunny and mild. From my hotel window I look out over the roofs of Montmartre, the ruins of an old windmill, the misty hills in the distance. Beneath my window are a few old gardens with tall trees, a house with a sun porch, the early spring sounds of the blackbirds, sparrows and starlings. Darkness falls gradually. Between the roofs and the grey of the evening sky, more and more yellow lights appear. The city hums quietly.
    The waters are blue and the plants are pink; the evening is sweet to behold;
    People go walking.
    The big ladies go walking; behind them, the little ladies.
    It was with this ode to Paris, written by the Vietnamese Nguyen Trong Hiep in 1897, that the wandering European writer Walter Benjamin begins his essay ‘The Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. Why did he – and so many with him – choose to grant the title to Paris? Why was the name Paris still on everyone's lips around 1900, when global power had long been focused in London, industry in Berlin, the future of good and evil in Vienna? Why was nineteenth-century Paris seen so widely as the springboard to the modern age?
    That overwhelming unanimity had to do, first of all, with the new building materials and construction techniques, the iron and glass used here so much more freely and artfully than anywhere else. Take, for example, the palaces, the Eiffel Tower, the metro tunnels under the Seine with their immense iron stairways and lifts half the size of a railway car. And everywhere the famous galleries, the ‘indoor boulevards’ that formed the motif for Benjamin's most important work.
    The lush interiors of the bourgeoisie – ‘the purses of the private man’, as Benjamin called them – became safe havens for the arts. The rise of photography – Paris led the way in that as well – forced painters to find totally new forms. It was now the splendour of a movement that made its way onto canvas, or the impression of a late afternoon. In this way the Impressionists blazed trails for painters like Pablo Picasso, who later pulled scenes and objects apart in search of structure.
    The ties between the artists were intense, the market eager. Claude Monet immediately sold his first paintings for 300 francs, twice themonthly salary of a teacher. Week after week in his diary, André Gide speaks of new exhibitions. Those were the places to which ‘the whole world’ went, the things ‘the whole world’ talked about.
    Paris overwhelmed the senses as well with its boulevards, with that stunning order imposed on the city by prefect Haussmann. In that order, Benjamin said, ‘the institutions of the worldly and