Review by New York Times Review
IN 1900, Émile Zola climbed to the second platform of the Eiffel Tower, camera equipment in tow, so he could photograph Paris from every angle -because only photographs could record the panoramic city he had reconstructed in his novels. In 1940, Adolph Hitler, believing he too stood at the center of something, rose from the seat of his car as it slowly circled the Place de la Concorde before dawn; later, from the top of the Parvis du Sacré-Coeur, he gaped at the city he had fantasized about since boyhood, when he studied street maps and dreamed of reconstructing Paris in the heart of Berlin. Unlikely bedfellows though they are, Zola and Hitler are denizens of Graham Robb's "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris," a valentine to the City of Light. Robb is no stranger here. The acclaimed British author of biographies of Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud, he first experienced the city as a boy, when his parents treated him to a week's holiday as a birthday present. But, as Robb learned, Paris is too volatile and complicated, too historically dynamic, to be illuminated by any one person's life. His solution: to write, as he explains it, "a history of Paris recounted by many different voices," a series of character studies arranged to commemorate the shifting streets and sundry plot lines that give meaning to the city. Some of the figures in Robb's Paris are familiar: Marie Antoinette, Baron Haussmann, Charles de Gaulle, even Nicolas Sarkozy. Some of Robb's characters may be less well known - like Henry Murger, author of " La Vie de Bohème," whom Robb satirizes as a proto-blogger dishing up "intimate slices of his life" and becoming, in effect, the "literary pimp" of his doomed mistress. Her unhappy life, the basis of his book, was his ticket out of the Latin Quarter and into a grand apartment on the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, a "new street with no history and a smooth asphalt surface," as Robb pointedly notes, "built on wasteground at the point where the Right Bank rises up towards Montmartre." Though Americans may not have heard of the ingenious criminal Eugène-François Vidocq, his portrait lies at the symbolic heart of Robb's book. Employed by the police to track down other crooks, Vidocq spent 16 years as head of the Sûreté Brigade and then founded the Bureau of Universal Intelligence, a detective agency with a huge database of information on thousands of citizens. When the bureau closed in 1843, most of the documents vanished, as did the wily Vidocq. A master of surveillance and disguise, he turned up here and there, supposedly spying on Louis Napoleon even as he was advising him. After Vidocq died, his coffin was opened - to reveal not the master criminal but the body of an unknown woman. To Robb, the disappearance of Vidocq's body and of his extensive files, some of which landed in secondhand bookshops, represent the nature of Paris itself, whose very streets come and go. The city was built on sand and swamp and from plugged-up sinkholes. Only a man like Vidocq would know "how many obscure dramas were wiped from the history of Paris by demolition and urban renewal." No reliable map of Paris existed until the end of the 18th century. When Marie Antoinette fled the Tuileries in 1791, her carriage became lost as soon as it left the palace, turning right instead of left, crossing the Pont Royal to the dark lanes of the Left Bank. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in Paris carrying a map marked with nonexistent streets. By 1853, as Napoleon III, he had employed Georges-Eugène Haussmann to lay waste entire neighborhoods and construct open vistas with broad, leafy boulevards. Napoleon III "buried acres of history," Robb writes. "A boulevard named after a battle obliterated the mementos of a million lives, and at the end of his reign, the Archives Nationales went up in flames." Yet Robb is less interested in Napoleon III than in Charles Marville, official photographer of the Louvre, who was commissioned to photograph the quartiers Haussmann would soon demolish. "It might be seen as an archaeology in reverse," Robb wryly notes. "First the ruins, then the city that covers them up." However, in Marville's photographs the streets are empty. Perhaps long exposures would have reduced any movement to a blur; maybe that's why he chose to take his pictures in the early morning. In any case, the people of Paris have eerily evaporated, just as Marville would. He sold his business and was never heard of again. "Every living city is a necropolis," Robb writes, "a settling mountain of populations migrating downwards into the soil." We retrieve what we can. A CENTURY later, the president of the French Republic, Georges Pompidou imagined a Paris of tall towers (to him, the spires of Notre-Dame were too short) made of high-tensile steel, along with a modern museum that would look like an oil refinery. While the Pompidou Center was being built, the historian Louis Chevalier wrote his masterpiece, "The Assassination of Paris," in a room at the Hôtel de Ville above the one in which Haussmann remapped the city. Yet Chevalier did more than denounce the wreckers and planners. He reconstructed his beloved city from memory. "Left to itself, History would forget," he explained. "But fortunately, there are novels - loaded with emotions, swarming with faces, and constructed with the sand and lime of language." Although Robb often narrates various sections from the point of view of his characters, inhabiting them and fudging, to a certain extent, the line between traditional history and make-believe, his characters don't sound alike, which can be a hazard when a historian affects the pose of a novelist. Robb claims he wrote with "a flavor of the time in mind," and insists he didn't insert anything artificial into his stories. That "Parisians" required as much research as his earlier, more conventionally structured book "The Discovery of France" is evident on every page. Yet if "Parisians" resembles Simon Schama's "Dead Certainties," which is also about the limits of historical knowledge, Robb, in employing the techniques of the novelist, animates his characters mainly for "the pleasure of thinking about Paris." That pleasure is also the reader's. The Pompidou family inhabited a town house on the Île Saint-Louis next to the building Baudelaire lived in as a young man. It's no accident that Robb mentions this, for the poet and the novelist (as well as the historian and the photographer, the con man and the archivist) are the true protagonists of his always changing, always vibrant Paris. Robb even imagines a Proust "acquainted with the law of modern life according to which one's immediate surroundings remain a mystery while distant places seen in guidebooks and paintings are as familiar as old friends whose material presence is no longer required to maintain the friendship." And so the miracles of modern life also include a novel, "À La Recherche du Temps Perdu," that can't be read between stops on the Métro and that, like Robb's delightful mapping of Paris, captures living persons in time past, time passing and even time to come. A historian using novelistic techniques, Robb animates characters for 'the pleasure of thinking about Paris.' Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of "White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson." Her anthology, "Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing," will be published next fall.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 2, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
In 1787, an obscure French artillery officer, awkward in manner and dress, wanders Parisian streets and has a brief encounter with a prostitute before returning to his modest lodgings. He is Napoleon Bonaparte. An architect examines the subterranean environs of Paris in the late eighteenth century and realizes that large portions of the city are in danger of collapsing into sinkholes. He is Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the Man who Saved Paris. On an evening in 1791, a foreign born woman and her guide explore Parisian streets on a clandestine search for an escape route from the city for herself and her family. She is Marie-Antoinette, and her confusion leads to delay, exposure, and death for the king and queen. Robb, a biographer who lives in Britain, has written extensively on France and has a long-term love affair with Paris. In this unique and thoroughly enjoyable work, he has presented aspects of both the geography and history of Paris through a series of vignettes built around the personal experiences of historical figures. He combines the genres of tourist guide and urban history.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With the same exhilarating sense of historical adventure and narrative elegance he brought to The Discovery of France, Robb's new book might be called The Discovery of Paris. Through a series of chronological episodes, Robb relates little-known events in the city's history, each featuring a fascinating figure, some well-known (Napoleon or the great criminal-turned-sleuth Vidocq), some less so (Henry Murger, the struggling writer whose Latin Quarter vignettes became La Vie de BohEme). Each figure discovers or reveals an unknown Paris. In the 1770s Charles-Axel Guillaumot explored the ancient quarries beneath the city and built the catacombs there; a little-noticed carved panel at Notre-Dame is at the heart of a 1937 episode involving espionage, alchemy, and a future nuclear inferno. The most thrilling chapter tells the supposedly true tale (the original records are lost) behind The Count of Monte Cristo; only the tale of actress and singer Juliette Greco framed as a shooting script fails to entice. With his profound knowledge of Paris, its treasures and squalor, its heroes and victims, Robb reveals a city of not only lights but darkness, which, though discovered, remains unknowable and alluring. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
To Whitbread Book Award-winning biographer Robb (Victor Hugo), Paris is clearly "a miraculous creation where even the quietest street is crowded with adventures." Serious Francophiles who share his point of view may enjoy this quirky journey through time and space. Part history, part travelog, part "Ripley's Believe It or Not!," this creative historical geography takes us on a tour of Paris via a series of chronologically arranged vignettes stretching from the eve of the Revolution of 1789 to the present. Through the use of rich imagery, masterly attention to detail, and basically good storytelling, the book records a series of moments and meetings when characters both obscure and famous interacted with key landmarks like the Palais Royal, Notre Dame, or Place de la Concorde. Robb artfully re-creates the drama and turmoil of key events like the bloody horrors of the Commune, De Gaulle's triumphant 1944 entry into Paris, or the tumultuous student demonstrations of May 1968. This is not history as such but a creative montage of how history, individuals, and geography intersected at key moments in Paris. The results may interest those who share "the pleasure of thinking about Paris." Verdict For serious Francophiles or large, specialized collections in French history and culture.-Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
