The Other Paris by Luc Sante (review)

Paris is one of the world's most iconic cities, with a geography, a mood, and a style that the name will conjure up in the mind of anyone who has ever visited the place, whether for real, at the movies, or in imagination. In addition to this consensual Paris, even the briefest of stays will engender loyalty to a particular street or neighborhood, and it is these particular places whose history Sante unearths in his Other Paris. This is the Paris of the quartiers, the Paris you see in the early twentieth-century postcards that are now collector's items, the Paris whose inhabitants are captured in illustrations by the great draftsmen of the nineteenth century, such as Daumier, Gavarni, and Granville. Sante's book is richly illustrated with these and other images, recording dog barbers (who stripped dogs' coats to make felt), soup vendors, boulevard peddlers, rag pickers, washerwomen, prostitutes, rent strikers, and the unidentified figures who stare steadily at the camera of the anonymous photographer who seems to have been everywhere "circa 1910." This is not a coffee-table book, however, and its mode is not nostalgia. Sante's Paris is the one discovered by that most Parisian of figures, the flaneur, consecrated by Baudelaire and emulated by many other French writers from Rétif de la Bretonne and Balzac to Francis Carco, Blaise Cendrars, and the situationist Guy Debord, who recorded Paris in words.

Sante reanimates the past primarily by means of language, and it is through the words associated with them that he conveys the extraordinary variety of the forms taken by life in earlier times. Some of these survive in street names—Rue de la Parcheminerie, Rue Cloche-Perce, Rue Taille-Pain, and so on. But most of all, Sante really excels in his ear for the lexicons of subtle gradation that distinguished one phenomenon from another. Drinking places, for example, came in many linguistically delineated shapes and sizes, starting with the tapis francs, at the bottom, and the strictly functional abreuvoirs (water troughs), followed by the bastringue, the caboulot, or the troquet, and then the estaminet or the cabaret, which were outclassed in turn by the more familiar-sounding bistrot, brasserie, and café. The eau de vie served in the lower dives went by the name of poivre, camphre, or casse-poitrine (chest-breaker) and came in three different sizes of glass: the monsieur, the mademoiselle, and the niggardly misérable. The real names and identities of the "Parigots" who lived and died in the capital have vanished, but the first holder of the chair of medical hygiene at the University of Paris noted that the noms de guerre of the prostitutes in the better class of brothel—Aspasia, Sidonia, Calliope—were very different from those sported by the women who walked the streets around Les Halles: Belle-cuisse (Nice Thigh), Faux cul (Fake Ass), Le Boeuf.

Each has its own poetry, although, as Sante acknowledges, "the history of Paris teaches us that beauty is a by-product of danger" and that "liberty is at best a consequence of neglect." His palpable anger at what Paris has become leads him to conclude that neglect and danger are preferable to the sanitary but soulless conditions of today, where the poor are pushed to the city's margins and housed in windswept high-rises, while the rich have taken over the city center, which is on its way to becoming a "frozen artifact" or an "inhabited holding company," where "everything that was once directly lived has been moved away into representation."