Paris : the secret history.

YEARS ago, while strolling through a Parisian flower market, I was accosted by a man with a posy in his hands and a poem on his lips. "Here are some fruits, some flowers, some leaves and some branches," he declaimed, quoting the poet Paul Verlaine, "And here is my heart, which beats only for you." At which the stranger dropped his bouquet, unzipped his pants and presented me with an organ quite different from his heart. In Paris, I reflected as I hurried away, the boundary between lyricism and squalor is as fragile as a rosebud, and as permeable as a man's fly. With "Paris: The Secret History," Andrew Hussey shows that it was ever thus, as he sifts through two millenniums of history to expose the dark side of the City of Light. Addictively readable and richly detailed, the book recounts "the story of Paris from the point of view of ... marginal and subversive elements in the city," those "insurrectionists, vagabonds, immigrants, sexual outsiders, criminals ... whose experiences contradict and oppose official history." For Hussey, a biographer of the Situationist thinker Guy Debord, these elements make up an essential part of the Parisian landscape. Following the poet Jean de Boschère, he emphasizes the "endless play of polarities - shadow and light, past and present" - that give the city not just its charm, but its edge. Such an approach comes as a welcome corrective to the "cliché and commodity" that, Hussey rightly notes, mark most contemporary representations of Paris: "The Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame are all part of a global visual culture, a Disneyfied baby language that distorts and destroys real meaning." This book seeks to restore "real history" by replacing "the kitsch tourist version of the city" with far grittier imagery. The author duly strips even the city's best-loved monuments of their "Disneyfied" patina. Notre-Dame, he writes, stands on "a place of Druidic sacrifices and pagan worship," and "long into the 16th century" was the site of "an orgiastic, four-day saturnalia ... often ending in murder and group sex." The Sacré-Coeur basilica, built by the French government in 1873 on the very spot where it had brutally suppressed a workers' uprising three years before, "represents the grim victory of the forces of social order over the oppressed." In 1889, Parisians saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower as "almost certainly a bad omen," and compared the structure to a "suppository." The Place Dauphine - the deserted triangular square alongside the Pont-Neuf that Henri IV named for his son in the early 17th century - has since been known as "the clitoris of Paris." With tidbits like this, readers will never look at Paris the same way again. At its best, Hussey's offbeat, irreverent approach also challenges received wisdom about French history. When tracing the larger political developments that shaped the city, he offers up many hair-raising, hilarious details. In 613, an early Frankish queen was "found guilty ... on the charge of the murder of 10 kings. Her punishment was to be tied to a camel for three days, and to be beaten and raped by anyone passing by." Why a camel? I have no idea, and Hussey offers no hypotheses. The factoid, though, amusingly illustrates the otherwise banal truism that "the Franks excelled at terror." In much the same way, the author enlivens his remarks on the succession crisis of 1137 by noting that Louis VI's heir "had been killed in an accident with one of the wild pigs which roamed the streets of Paris." Who knew? Hussey did, and he is unstinting with his unforgettable trivia. His care with basic historical facts, however, is not always so impressive. Writing about the Reign of Terror, Hussey refers - more than once - to the new regime's quasi-executive organ, the Committee of Public Safety, in the plural, but there was only one such committee. Less trivially, he says that this body "quickly became a law unto" itself after its inception in the spring of 1793. While it was extremely powerful, it coexisted uneasily with the Committee of General Security and the Paris Commune, both of which also wielded considerable power. And Thomas Carlyle, one of the 19th century's best-known chroniclers of the Revolution, was not "an Englishman" but a Scot. Other missteps are also jarring. Notwithstanding his desire "to make my own maps of the city," Hussey would have done well to stick to the grammatically correct names of the landmarks he catalogs, like the Palais du Luxembourg, which he calls "the Palais de Luxembourg." When committed by a tourist asking for directions, this is exactly the sort of gaffe that inspires Parisians to claim they've never heard of the place. Further, the author's meditation on the sordid underbelly of classical-age Paris would have benefited from a mention of Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization," which famously showed that by 1656 one in a hundred of the city's inhabitants languished in mental asylums. Similarly, when Hussey notes that in 18th-century Paris underground booksellers fed the public's "appetite for politics and porn," one misses a reference to Robert Darnton, who wrote three influential books on the subject. These works are all indispensable guides to the city's "secret history," and their absence is palpable here. Still, Hussey makes an invaluable contribution by debunking the myth that Paris's history is "a repository of all that is finest and most magnificent in the human spirit." For this city is far more than the sum of its grand boulevards, quaint side streets and picturesque structures rising high above the Seine. It is a place where one medieval power broker "hung his enemies up by their penises"; where during the religious massacres of the late 16th century and the revolutionary purges of the late 18th, the streets ran red with blood; where the Second Empire's most gifted poet, Charles Baudelaire, ordered his steak "as tender as the brain of a little child"; where the populace, during sieges both foreign and domestic, subsisted on rats, dogs and dead men's bones; where "80,000 Jews, from all over France, had passed through" en route to the Nazi death camps; and where, as recently as the fall of 2005, suburban riots disrupted the country. Hussey does not comment on this last episode, but he includes a photograph of three agitators - all young men of African descent - facing off with invisible authorities against a backdrop of burning wreckage. Far crueler and more complicated than its picture post-cards imply, Paris has always played host to outsiders and outlaws. In this respect its past, as rewritten by Hussey, may well hold a key to its future. The story of Paris from the point of view of 'insurrectionists, vagabonds, immigrants, sexual outsiders, criminals.' Caroline Weber, the author of "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution and "Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

The 16th-century French wars of religion were less about Christian theology than about who ruled France; centuries later the French authorities, aided by , a significant number of ordinary citizens "willingly and enthusiastically" sent tens of thousands of Parisian Jews to their deaths during WWII. In his sprawling, eclectic, self-indulgent and entertaining unofficial antihistory of Paris, Hussey (The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord), head of French and comparative literature at the University of London in Paris, tells the story of Paris from the perspective of the city's marginal and subversive elements insurrectionists, criminals, immigrants and sexual outsiders. Highlights include descriptions of the Pont-Neuf during the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII as a cultural epicenter, a hangout for con artists and prostitutes, and a cauldron of antigovernment, antiroyal and antireligious activity. Hussey also tells of the "sacred geometry" of Notre-Dame as vivified by Victor Hugo. Also noteworthy in this overstuffed, unrestrained effort are Hussey's critique of former French president Mitterrand as "a master of double-dealing and double-talk whose only real loyalty was to himself and his position in power," and Hussey's take on the 2005 riots instigated by violent black and Arab suburban youths. B&w illus. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this impressive, fascinating, and highly readable work of cultural history, Hussey (French & comparative literature, Univ. of London, Paris) traces the history of Paris in chronological fashion through the lens of the "underclass," i.e., what the 19th century called the "dangerous classes"-insurrectionists, day laborers, criminals, gypsies, prostitutes-and the "bawdy and rough" areas they called home. He dispels certain popular myths, showing that there has never been any such thing as a "typical" Parisian and that for its first 1000 years Paris was not a great or beautiful city. These two themes shape his history. Though Hussey eschews the salons of the Enlightenment, he nonetheless draws connections between "high" and "low" Paris, demonstrating how insurrectionary hatred and bitterness developed in the lower depths. His familiar stories of the 1789 Revolution, the reconstruction activities of Haussmann, and the passions of the Commune are enriched by his argument that palpable class and geographic divisions became a powerful psychological factor driving such events. This is a timely book, for Hussey observes that Paris is still being shaped by new arrivals who are playing a role in remaking the city yet again. Recommended for academic collections and large public libraries.-Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A compelling history of the city on the Seine. Hussey (Comparative Literature/Univ. of London; The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord, 2001, not reviewed) observes that once humans arrived in Europe, the site on the Seine appears to have been continuously occupied. He discusses the Romans and their predecessors (Julian was the first to call the place "Paris," for the Parisii--of Celtic origin--who once lived there) and takes us through centuries of ensuing history in entertaining and enlightening fashion. All the familiar names are here: Clovis, Sainte Genevi've, Charlemagne, Ablard and Hlo™se, the Charleses and Francises and Henris and Louises (Louis XVI was, says Hussey, "a man without qualities" with a "silly Austrian wife"), Napoleon, de Gaulle. And countless artists, novelists, poets, playwrights, philosophers and prostitutes. Hussey sees the ancient conflict between ideas and desires as key to understanding the city. He guides us through important French poetry, novels, films, music--but also along the rivers of blood running in the streets in just about every century. He examines the long history of North Africans, Jews and other immigrants to the city. He wonders at the foul collaborations of many Parisians with the Nazis. Throughout, he endeavors mightily to focus on ordinary life, but he spends much time recalling the city's cultural history, as well--e.g., the building of Notre Dame, the arrival of the railway and Metro. An immensely readable, richly detailed and sometimes disturbing chronicle that explores much of the darkness in the City of Lights. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.