Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
by Graham Robb
Picador 496pp £18.99
The Week bookshop £17.09 (incl. p&p)
Graham Robb's new book starts on a November night in 1787, with a young artillery lieutenant wandering through Palais-Royal, then Paris's entertainment district, picking up a young prostitute and taking her back to his hotel. It is typical of Robb's teasing narrative style, said Rupert Christiansen in The Sundav Tclccraph. that


it only gradually emerges that the young man is a Corsican named Bonaparte (who wrote a detailed account of his experience that night). This "deeply engrossing, ingenious and rewarding book" goes on "to follow various such trails through the urban jungle*', in a scries of vignettes of Paris life stretching from 1750 to 2005. Marie Antoinette gets lost in the unmapped streets around the Tuileries Palace as she tries to escape the Revolutionary authorities. In 1940, Hitler takes a one-day tour of the city that leaves "the architecturally obsessed Fiihrer in a state of almost childlike admiration". "Each chapter contains a surprise, written up in a rich and supple prose which only occasionally becomes a trifle too baroque and excitable for its own good.
Parisians is "marvellously entertaining", said Philip Hensher in


The Daily Telegraph - a worthy successor to The Discovery of France, Robb's "superb" last book. Paris's history is a massive subject, and the author approaches it by writing a series of character studies that cast light on interesting historical episodes, such as the Paris Commune, or the events of 1968. Early 19rh century Paris is represented by "a superb chapter" on Eugene Francois Vidocq - the master criminal who became a private detective. The story of "Belle Epoque modernity" is told through the eyes of Proust, who is a wonderfully observant witness to such developments as the telephone and the


Metro. Some chapters arc written in the form of a pastiche: existentialist Paris is presented as a Nouvelle Vague-style screenplay, featuring the likes of Sartre, de Beau voir, Juliette Greco and Miles Davis.
This book "is so richly pleasurable that you feel it might emit a warm glow if you left it in a dark room", said John Carey in The Sunday Times, It is .1 brilliantly detailed study of the City of Light and the "murderers, spies, conspirators, alchemists, royals and scavengers" who have walked its streets. In fact, from time to time Robb's "love of picturesque detail threatens to over- whelm the reader", said Anita Brookner in The Spectator. Even so, this is an "absorbing" history and an impressive "act of homage" to Paris.