Michael Georg Conrad (1846-1927), whom literary historians regard as one of the most active promoters of Munich modernity through the founding of the journal Die Gesellschaft, lived in the French capital from 1878 to 1882 before settling permanently in Bavaria.

He supported himself by working as a language teacher and as a correspondent for several German newspapers. In addition to a collection of short stories, the four years of his Parisian stay, which he explicitly presents as the end of his "years of travel and learning," gave rise to a series of journalistic works written to provide his compatriots with an insight into the cultural, political, and social life at the beginning of the Third Republic.

This work attempts to catalog these contributions, both to restore a "foreign" perspective of the French capital, its art, and its literature at a key moment in its history, and to account for the intellectual positions of the best-known advocate of Zola in Germany.