Clear tribute to the city of light, this biography of Jacques Offenbach uses the life and work of the composer to assemble a penetrating portrait of Paris during the Second Empire: gallants, dandies, courtiers, dissolute journalists and snobby aristocrats, in a world of halls elegant and unbridled street carnivals. The operettas of Offenbach, immensely popular, are considered part of the historical amnesia and the escapism of the revolutionary aftermath of 1848. But the author insists that these productions have to be understood as something more than brilliant distractions. By examining the superficiality and mystification of collective experience, Kracauer offers a revealing facet of social reality. The fantasy realms of his operettas followed on the one hand the unreal imperial masquerade of Napoleon III, but on the other they made an important mockery of the pomp, pretensions, fraud and corruption of the apparatuses of power. These operettas were, therefore, a clear form of revolutionary protest, in addition to the evocative symbol of a crazy and glamorous world.