Abstract
Using research on Toulouse, this article explores the limits of ‘statuomania’ in a major French city that was dominated by a strongly republican municipality, keen to testify to its principles. It looks at the alternative strategies that were adopted alongside efforts to achieve republican statues, and at the distinction between republican spectacles and republican monuments, suggesting that street names offered an ideal, cheap and effective mechanism for the ‘republicanization’ of public space. Nonetheless, there were problems. Street names also serve to underline the importance of the local dimension: republican homogeneity in terms of provincial street names has been overstated. There are European History Quarterly Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 34(2), 265– also questions to be raised about the issue of government aid for statue-building projects. Was the opportunist leadership unwilling to back a municipal council committed to a radical version of the Republic as well as being the declared enemy of the Toulousain Minister of the Interior, Ernest Constans?
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