In connecting the notion of modernity to urban life, it is important to recognize its status as a moral value. At the very least, moral weight--for good and ill--attaches to modernity as an expression of urban experience. Modernity is derived from urban experience to the extent that what is novel in the culture--that is, in the psychoemotional makeup of human society--is in significant part generated in the city. That idea is captured in Schwartz's subtitle: "early mass culture in fin-de-siFcle Paris." The fin-de-siFcle concept itself connotes transition, a consciousness that what was long deemed morally or physically stable (whether actually stable or indeed valuable is a matter apart) is no longer so and must fall before perpetual novelty. The fact that the concept achieves moral standing in the French language is consistent with Schwartz's citing Walter Benjamin's description of Paris as the "capital of the nineteenth century" (3).
Cultural values as such were not necessarily required for cosmopolitan cities to be identified with modernity but instead seem to have been in part derived from the fact that physical attributes of cities changed significantly in the nineteenth century and have more or less continued to change since that time. The Haussmanization of Paris under Napoleon III is one aspect of this. Vienna, too, was physically transformed from a medieval estate redolent of imperial/aristocratic grandeur to a setting more consistent with a constitutional monarchy and the bourgeois values that informed it: "The art of building . . . became the communal property of the citizenry, expressing the various aspects of the bourgeois cultural ideal" (Schorske 31). Schorske refers to the transition of Vienna's center from a "military insulation belt" to "a sociological isolation belt" (33), with traffic (and by implication commerce) flow and not royal security the overarching concern of urban experience. He notes that bourgeois valu...