The Other Paris: An illustrated journey through a city's poor and Bohemian past - Hardcover

Sante, Luc

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 057124128X ISBN 13: 9780571241286

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2015

Synopsis

Paris, the City of Light. We think of it as the city of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of white façades, discreet traffic and well-mannered exchanges. But there was another Paris, hidden from view and virtually extinct today - the Paris of the working and criminal classes that shaped the city over the past two centuries.

In the voices of Balzac and Hugo, assorted boulevardiers, barflies, rabble-rousers and tramps, Sante takes the reader on a vivid journey through the seamy underside of Paris: the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians; the flea markets, the rubbish tips, and the hovels.

Featuring over 300 illustrations The Other Paris is a lively tour of labour conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, serial novelists, and poets who chronicled their evolution. It upends the story of the French capital, reclaiming the city from the bon vivants and the speculators, and lighting a candle to the works and days of the forgotten poor.

About this title

Review:

Sante loves the lower depths, cutting his teeth a couple of decades ago with Lowlife, a book about crime and prostitution in bygone Manhattan. Now comes a book it feels as if he was born to write, about the underbelly of Paris, an extraordinary and sometimes appalling submersion in nostalgie de la boue and French social problems, which takes on an added gravity in the wake of recent tragic events. (The Observer)

Sante is in a class by himself. (Molly Haskell New York Times)

This brilliant, beautifully written essay is the finest book I have ever read about Paris. Ever. Thank you, Luc Sante. (Paul Auster)

Moving and discursive. (Economist)

A wonderfully rich book, packed with information, lively in style, evoking the turbulence of a vanished time and city. (Allan Massie Wall Street Journal)

Nowadays, the old crowded, swarming, surly cities are at least half-forgotten. But in this great chronicle Luc Sante recalls when Paris was rougher, when the poor, the tough, the unregulated, the underworld, thrived there; maybe the city was also less rough, in that there was room for nearly everyone all the way down the social ladder. Hanging over The Other Paris is the contemporary curse of cities that perhaps hit Paris first, of cities that have become bland transnational stopping places for the privileged. Magisterial as ever, Sante returns us to the flavor, texture, savor, shouts, and clashes of the bygone city. (Rebecca Solnit)

The Other Paris is a heartbreaking spectacle, immense in intellectual and political scope and emotional reach. Peopled by crooks and movie stars, gamblers and thinkers, the world's premiere city of dreams is rendered, through Luc Sante's fine hand, historian's eye, and poet's heart, into a place we hardly knew - a world of hitherto unknown mysteries and realities. A grand journey in an epic work. (Hilton Als)

"We have forgotten what a city was," writes Luc Sante provocatively about Paris. By the last chapter of this absorbing book we are convinced. Washerwomen and rag pickers, bohemians and clochards, anarchists and apaches, all play their part in this alternative urban history. This is not the Gay Paree of Maurice Chevalier, though he too makes an appearance. (Witold Rybczynski)

For anyone familiar with Sante's work, it should come as no surprise that the situationists function as a kind of animating spirit in The Other Paris ... The only way of getting to know a city, he means to tell us - or, for that matter, getting to know ourselves - is to wander, starting at the periphery rather than the center, to build by slow accretion, out of the details that resonate or stick. (David L. Ulin Los Angeles Times)

Book Description:

A tour of the lost Paris of the last two centuries - poor, unvarnished and truly bohemian.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 057124128X
• ISBN 13: 9780571241286
• Binding: Board book
• Number of pages: 320