Le Paris des Lumières d'après le Plan de Turgot

This work was published on the occasion of the Paris 1730 exhibition based on the Turgot plan, organized by the National Archives Historical Center and the National Museums Association. The Paris drawn in 1734-1739 by Louis Bretez at the request of Provost Michel Etienne Turgot has not yet completely disappeared... From this famous plan and the texts that accompany it in this book, an effort of imagination is nevertheless necessary to rediscover this Paris of the Enlightenment era that was the admiration of Europe. How to know, facing the university buildings of Jussieu, that the Abbey of Saint-Victor was there. Sitting at the foot of the Fountain of the Innocents, do you have any idea that you are in the former cemetery of the same name. And to the east of the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who remembers that one of the richest libraries of the 17th and 18th centuries stood there, where scholars and writers came to work. On the other hand, a walk in the Jardin des Plantes, a visit to the Place des Vosges or in the Marais are enough to verify the accuracy of the Turgot Plan. The association of extracts from it with contemporary images - paintings, drawings and engravings - and modern photographs allows the reader-visitor to travel, between past and present, through one hundred and fourteen remarkable places in Paris. Turgot's dreamed Paris is therefore not the nostalgic account of the alteration or disappearance of sites and monuments in the capital, but the evocation of the real life of a city and its places of memory... You will find in this catalog 20 plates of the Turgot plan reproduced in full.