The Other Paris

by Lucy Sante

Overview

A trip through Paris as it will never be again—dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian

Paris, the City of Lights, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Lucy Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world.

Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses, Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of her narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted pre-Haussmann streets, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city.

A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the work and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536459
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/18/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,118,494
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lucy Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. Her books include Low Life, The Other Paris, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. Sante has contributed to The New York Review of Books since 1981, and has written for many other magazines. She is the visiting professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College and lives in Ulster County, New York.

Editorial Reviews

This brilliant, beautifully written essay is the finest book I have ever read about Paris. Ever. Thank you, Lucy Sante.” —Paul Auster

“Nowadays, the old crowded, swarming, surly cities are at least half-forgotten. But in this great chronicle Lucy 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 premier city of dreams is rendered, through Lucy 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

“Sante’s knowledge of the voluminous Paris literature is prodigious . . . Sante’s great gift is [her] ability to draw on the ‘verbal photography’ of previous writers to send the reader back in time.” —Arthur Goldhammer, BookForum

"Sante vividly captures this ‘other’ Paris . . . The Other Paris is immersive and enjoyable. The abundant pictures are fascinating." —Booklist

“‘We have forgotten what a city was,’ Lucy Sante provocatively writes about Paris. By the last chapter of this absorbing book, we are convinced. Washerwomen and ragpickers, 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

“All who love Paris will love this book.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

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…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…If Sante's book sometimes overwhelms with encyclopedic density, its great virtue is to send the reader down investigative paths of his own.

The New York Times Book Review - Molly Haskell

08/10/2015
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.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2015
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

Library Journal

2015-06-01
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 flâneur, 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 urinals—and 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 Périphérique) 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 population—including vagrants, whores, actors, criminals, communards, revolutionaries, and anarchists—but 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.

Kirkus Reviews