The Aspen Institute

Ms. Charlotte Perret, a close friend of Ascend’s, will present her book on the street fairs of Paris, At Their Doorstep. At Their Doorstep is a pictorial history of the itinerant street fairs that brought mass entertainment to the neighborhoods of early 20th-century Paris. While still residing in Paris in the early 1980s, author and educator Charlotte Perret interviewed the few surviving carnival folk who owned and operated the game stands, carousels, and performance venues. From those interviews and hundreds of never-before-published photographs, she tells the story of a culture that has since vanished.