Review by New York Times Review
LUC SANTE IS no doubt a well-behaved person whose lodgings are neat as a pin, but his mind teems with filth and disorder, his nostrils alert to the dankness of slums. To this explorer of the urban underbelly, the squalid and the tawdry are manna from heaven. Lost neighborhoods, the way the other half lived and died, buried treasure in the form of old photographs and documents, what he has called the "husks" cast off by the past, are the main attraction for this literary scavenger. The Belgian-born and vastly erudite Sante has followed his appetite for the detritus of the past in essays and translations and in books like "Low Life" (1991) and now "The Other Paris." "I've always been a sucker for tales of lost civilizations, pockets in time, suppressed documents," he once wrote. In "Low Life" his quarry was the underworld of 19th- and early-20th-century New York, the freak shows and shooting galleries and Bowery museums, and those first flickers of cinema, the nickelodeons. Not finished with the "husks" contained in his chapters on "Gangland" and "Coppers," this exuberant necrophiliac went on to publish "Evidence," a macabre album containing crime scene photographs from the police archives. Like the dead in "Poltergeist" whose spirits rise to strangle the suburban community built on their graves, his anonymous corpses emerge from their police-blotter ignominy and extract a moment of recognition, a twinge of fellow feeling. The elevation of the obscure and the overlooked, the discarded or hidden or marginal, to artistic status or cultural prominence has become a cottage industry for artists and writers of late, but as an anti-ghostbuster, Sante is in a class by himself. The underlying and implicit thesis of his work, that the best of life has been paved over by money and modernity, and that the marginal and unofficial are inherently superior to bourgeois culture, may be arguable, but the pleasures to be had from the fruits of his research are considerable. Paris, home to the flâneur, would seem to be natural territory for Sante, and in a way it is, though its past is hardly virgin territory. Unlike New York, oriented to the future-present with its grid topography more geared to purposeful walking than to the unpremeditated stroll, Paris is not only a pedestrian's paradise but a living museum, its past an everyday obsession. Its lovers, moreover, are among the more ardent and prolific in history, and Sante has read them all (seen their art and movies, listened to their songs), lamented with Victor Hugo, gotten down in the gutter with Zola. He acknowledges as inspiration the flâneurs par excellence Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, pointing out that the flâneur didn't emerge until the 18th century, when for the first time men had sufficient leisure time from work to dawdle. A special influence is Guy Debord, one of those uniquely French figures - '50s intellectual, "barfly" moviemaker of sorts, member of the socialist-anarchist group Lettrist International, which divided Paris into what it called "ambience units," organic neighborhoods with distinct personalities. These would be doomed by urban renewal, one of the two great scourges of Paris, a century apart. There were always reform-minded busybodies, gnawing away at disease-ridden neighborhoods and dens of iniquity, but the first major uprooting came in the mid-19th century when Napoleon III's prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann redrew the map of Paris, creating his famous boulevards and parks, annexing outlying arrondissements and separating tightly interwoven neighborhoods. Then in the 1970s it was urban renewal, which among many depredations destroyed Les Halles and gave us the Pompidou Center, reinventing the Marais as a tourist district. Staunchly resisting the editing bulldozer, "The Other Paris" is sprawling and jampacked with information, and Sante's instinctual orderliness - a graceful epigrammatic style - can't quite tame (nor does it want to) the chaos of the subject to which he owes his allegiance. More even than the text, the glorious images of the demimonde that line the margins, exuding whiffs of opium and absinthe, give Sante's book the intimate feeling of a personal scrapbook. Familiar figures appear, but with back story: The characters in "The Children of Paradise" are grounded in place and biography. There's a colorful taxonomy of prostitutes of every variety: the insoumises, the grandes cocottes, the horizontales, the amazones, the man-eaters, to name a few, registered and unregistered, high class and low, their numbers expanding and shrinking according to the fluctuating dictates of repression and tolerance. The revolution that began in 1789 and "never really ended" continues to inspire activist efforts and government retaliation. There are sections on celebrity gangsters, cafe concerts and neighborhoods themselves, each with an avalanche of well-chosen quotations, citations and illustrations. One particularly absorbing chapter traces the history of the Zone, an endlessly metamorphosing, walled-in area that began as "tundra, empty grassland," and became, in succession, or simultaneously, a site for public executions, a rough make-do home for peasants and squatters, a ragpickers' colony and hangout for prostitutes. Finally, as the city moved upward and outward and needed housing for the poor, the Zone became host to low-cost apartments - les HBM - that in 1949 became les HLM, "reduced-rent housing," a label Sante describes as "a telling move from plain speech and toward bureaucratic equivocation." Illustrations and citations document the area's transitions and improvisations: a van Gogh sketch, an Aristide Bruant song, a Zola heroine and eventually the director Maurice Pialat, who grew up in Courbevoie and made a movie about his old banlieue. At one point Sante quotes Debord in words that might be the anthem of the book: "Paris was a city so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there than rich somewhere else." It's a lovely thought, but is it true? And whose idea of beauty? Reverse snobbism, nostalgie de la boue, the aesthetic of upside down, is itself a product of a certain refinement of thinking, of, yes, bourgeois education. There's sometimes a vested interest in maintaining a divide, cherishing the lower depths as an escape hatch for the overcivilized, whereas the lower classes and immigrants who actually dwell there would happily settle for the commodities and hypocrisies of petit-bourgeois capitalism. Nor is the divide as impermeable as it sometimes seems. Sante begins his book with a lovely exchange of dialogue from Julien Duvivier's 1937 film "Pépé le Moko." Jean Gabin's jewel thief, hiding out in the Casbah, has just met the diamond-encrusted beauty played by Mireille Balin. They are reminiscing about Paris, searching for common ground, but Balin's roll call of streets (the Champs-Élysées, Rue Fontaine) is strictly posh, while Gabin (Rue St.-Martin, Gare du Nord) aromatically recalls the less known byways of "The Other Paris." In fact, in watching the film, we soon discover that the class divide is not as great as it seems. Gabin has been misled by Balin's elegance: Her jewels are no heirloom, no signifier of a patrician background, but the fruits of her life as a kept woman. Moments later, as they're falling in love, they discover they actually lived and went to school in adjacent quartiers. If Sante's book sometimes overwhelms with encyclopedic density, its great virtue is to send the reader down investigative paths of his own. In watching "Pépé le Moko" again, I began wondering about Fréhel, the torch singer who commiserates with Gabin, mourning her music hall career by playing her own records. Her name comes up later in the book, with Sante providing a vivid sketch of a life and face as full of reversals and sorrow and resilience as any fabled chanteuse could want. Following the scent, I tracked her to Wikipedia, then YouTube, where lo and behold, one of her most famous songs, "La Zone" (1933), has been paired in a mini-documentary with a trove of grainy but incandescent photographs pre-HLM! There it all was: one of Sante's lost neighborhoods, not lost at all. Not even past. ? MOLLY HASKELL is the author of "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies." Her most recent book is "My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Sante charts the evolution of Paris, from the vivid and savage and uncontrollable collection of neighborhoods that comprised it in the Middle Ages to the one Georges-Eugène Haussmann restructured in the 1850s that gutted and rooted out the unsavory and created the boulevard-structured coherence so iconic today. Ultimately, Haussmannization destroyed not only the physical and industrial chaos of the city but its social fabric as well. Before, different classes lived out their lives side by side, within their own self-sufficient city-districts. With the help of extensive research and the voices of Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Balzac, and anonymous pamphleteers, Sante vividly captures this other Paris: the Bohemian underworld of musicians, artists, and prostitutes; the poor; alcohol consumption; public health; crime; carnival; and revolution upon revolution. Though the writing is somewhat disorganized, The Other Paris is immersive and enjoyable. The abundant pictures are fascinating. Recommended for those with a good foundation of French history. The back-and-forth look at the many monuments is great for history-minded travelers.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This vivid and thorough compendium describes the history of the Paris neighborhoods historically occupied by the poor, the dirty, and other undesirables. Focusing primarily on the 19th and 20th centuries, Sante zigzags through the arrondissements, touring the history of the hospitals, bordellos, cafes, and drinking establishments of the poor. He takes readers into the noisy arcades, past the guillotine, and by the cour des miracles, a cluster of dilapidated houses beyond the reach of the law. Nearly every page includes beautiful old photos, drawings, and accompanying images in the margins that help tell the story of the often unmentioned side of Paris. In a chapter on insurgents, Sante recounts the story of an anarchist named Ravachol, who planted two bombs (that killed no one) in March 1982 but was so feared that he was blamed for a long list of unsolved crimes and then publicly executed. Sante, a flaneur, does not want to glamorize the past but rather gives readers an intense "reminder of what life was like" when cities were wild and savage and survival was uncertain. The sheer volume and variety of the obscure stories gathered here make this eclectic history a rambunctious and wholly entertaining guide to Paris and an educational experience worth savoring. 377 illus. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When thinking about Paris, places such as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Notre Dame come first to mind. Equally part of the city's unique character, however, is its notorious underbelly. For centuries, both before and after Baron Hausmann and other urban planners, a far less sanitized version coexisted and in many cases defined the City of Light. This was the Paris of prisons, brothels, workhouses, cabarets, dance halls, Les Halles, bohemians, the urban poor, and an unpredictable and often volatile rabble. Now mostly eradicated or pushed to the outer perimeters of the city, the remnants of a disreputable past are still faintly visible to those who care to look. Sante (writing and photography, Bard Coll.; Low Life) takes the role of flâneur, walking through primary source documents, firsthand accounts, and more than 300 images of the streets of Paris to tell its tale and remind readers of what life was like for residents before gentrification. VERDICT A fascinating stroll through a vanished, wild past. Recommended for general readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/20/15.]-Linda Frederiksen, Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver © Copyright 2015. 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.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sante (Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930, 2009, etc.) explores how the neighborhoods of Paris have defined the city and perhaps created the true Parisian. The author begins and ends with the flneur, who wanders throughout the city, engaging the denizens and availing himself of the complete education available from life primarily conducted in public. He sees the palimpsest of a city centuries old that in many ways doesn't change at all. There are quartiers or neighborhoods where unexplained recurrences are the norm, and many are devoted to a single specialty, whether it's street performers, prostitutes, pickpockets, or beggars. They have been self-contained places where generations spent their entire lives, living, working, and dying. Many succumbed to plague, cholera, war, or absinthe. All that changed when Baron (an assumed title) Haussmann became prefect of the Seine in 1853 and proceeded to remake the city. He built bridges and a new sewer system, established the Bois at Boulogne and Vincennes, improved lighting, built new public urinalsand all of the progress destroyed the quartiers, a process that continued well into the 20th century. Throughout this rich book, Sante shares the exuberance of the French language with strings of slurs, insults, and pejorative jargon. The last city wall of 1841 established "the zone" (now Priphrique) outside the city, which became a catchall slum exempt from taxes or opening to the suburbs. The book bogs down somewhat as the author recounts a diverse populationincluding vagrants, whores, actors, criminals, communards, revolutionaries, and anarchistsbut he describes them without condescension or reproach, just appreciation of the city they built. Taking Paris to the desperate years after World War II, Sante sees continuance of the "historical regurgitation, when all the ghosts came out maybe for a last dance." All who love Paris will love this book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
