Bridge of sighs

The Other Paris. By Luc Sante. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 306 pages; $28. Faber and Faber; £25.

“EVERYTHING is always going away,” Luc Sante writes in “The Other Paris”, a moving and discursive portrait of the city’s poor and bohemian past. “Every way of life is continually subject to disappearance.” And so it would seem to be with Paris—for all that it looks, much more than many other great cities, as if it has been carefully protected from the developments of the modern world. With its stringent building regulations and beautiful boulevards, Paris can seem like a living museum. Mr Sante, conjuring a city that has survived many different kinds of violence before the terrorist attacks of November 13th, reminds the reader that this could not be further from the truth.

A Belgian writer and critic who was educated in America, Mr Sante has made it his life’s work to walk alongside those who never make it to the top of the heap. “Low Life” (1991) painted a vivid portrait of life in New York’s Lower East Side in the 19th and early 20th centuries; not for nothing was he a historical consultant on Martin Scorsese’s film, “Gangs of New York”. But New York is a city that wears its transformations on its sleeve. Paris does not, although it has been altered again and again by the twin forces of revolution and civic planning, as Mr Sante ably shows.

“The Other Paris” is no ordinary history book, though the reader will learn about Philippe-Auguste’s 12th-century city walls and how Louis XIV replaced fortifications with boulevards in the 17th century. Mr Sante is a flâneur, that uniquely French description that mixes sauntering with observing the world, revealing his subject through themes rather than chronology. “La Canaille” (a haughty word meaning “the masses”) is his chapter on the force of the crowd; “Saint Monday” takes the reader into the old drinking dens of Paris; “Le Business” reveals (is anyone surprised?) where the city’s prostitutes were to be found, and what their lives were like. In Mr Sante’s Paris there is room for everyone.

This is a book to be read with a map of the city to hand. Though beware—many of the streets to which Mr Sante refers have long since vanished. In the 19th century it was Georges-Eugène Haussmann and his team of engineers who gave Parisians the city in which they live today: after 1853 Napoléon III allowed him free rein to remake its topography almost completely. Mr Sante admits that Haussmann’s achievements were remarkable—from the construction of great parks to the installation of public urinals. But he refers too to Haussmann’s work as “depredations”, and it is clear that he mourns the huddled courtyards, alleyways and impasses that were swept away as a result.

Many of these cours des miracles—the name, Mr Sante writes, that was given in the Middle Ages to an encampment of beggars, whores and thieves—are restored to life in his text. The book takes what may be familiar, such as the origin of the idea of “bohemia” and “bohemians” in “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème” by Henri Murger, a 19th-century writer and poet, and sets it against its less glamorous origins, the “pothouses of the deep past” with names such as Les Chats en Cage (“the imprisoned cats”), Le Tombeau du Lapin (“the rabbit’s tomb”), and L’Abattoir. Some may go to Paris for its fine cuisine, but in the old market of Les Halles Mr Sante finds sellers of hot water coloured brown with carrots, burned onions and caramel; people who washed dishes in restaurants sold the leavings on diners’ plates. And Paris has always had to contend with brutality: his graphic depictions of executions in the Place de Grève, and the city’s prisons—Grand Châtelet, the Maison de la Force and the Bastille—show how tough the authorities felt they had to be.

Life in Paris, Mr Sante writes, is a game—a hard one; now the city is in “the end game played by money and power”. And yet the quality of the author’s attention to the place alone seems to indicate that he cannot quite bring himself to give up hope, and neither should the reader. This book has many illustrations, though it is a shame that often the images are too small to make much of an impact. It achieves its aim of providing “a reminder of what life was like in cities when they were as vivid and savage and uncontrollable as they were for many centuries, as expressed by Paris, the most sublime of the world’s great cities”.