Paris: The Secret History, by Andrew Hussey. Panguin UK, 2007

Etienne Marcel, Jacques Bonsergent, Louise Michel, Colonel Fabien— ever stared at the names on a metro map and casually wondered who all these people could be who have lent their names, but sadly, not the memory of their deeds, to metro stops all over Paris?

If you're anything like Parisist, you have, and, if you're anything like Parisist, you will delight in having these and other obscure details of our fair city brought to light. In Paris: the Secret History, Andrew Hussey, head of the French department at the British Institute (the University of London's Paris campus), leads a carnivalesque march through history that stops here and there to chuckle, ogle, and speculate.

His overarching goal is to overturn the prevailing mythology of Paris to reveal its dirty, gritty underbelly. As Corneille had it, Paris is " 'a whole town, built with pomp, and which seems to have come, as a miracle, from a rotten old ditch.'" This is the operating similie of Hussey's book, in which he aims to tell the story of Paris from the point of view of its "dangerous classes,' he writes, whose accounts "contradict and oppose official history." Now, to be clear, Hussey is trained in cultural studies, a mesmerizing interdisciplinary branch of academic endeavor which examines the production of meaning in a given culture, particularly through its popular culture, records of everyday life, and detritus. History is written by the victors, as they say, and so cultural history is written about the underdog. For anyone familiar with cultural studies, Hussey's approach is nothing new. But for a general audience, this way of looking at the city may be fresh and edgy.

Hussey takes his cue from Walter Benajmin, that historian of Parisian psychogeography, whose idea it was that the secrets of the nineteenth century were "to be found in tracing the movement and meaning of places and objects in the city against the unfolding background of everyday life in Paris. It was in the interplay between ordinary people and the city that was being created around them," Hussey writes, "that the past, present and future could be glimpsed as a continuum." Describing the contents of Louis Mercier's Le Tableau de Paris he in fact provides an excellent summary of his own work:

"Ranging over topics as diverse as the higher politics of Parisian law-making, where to buy the best (and least expensive) clothes for men and women, where to overhear the best conversations, the disposal of corpses, the art of the pickpocket (and why Parisian pickpockets display more guile and craft than their London counterparts), the fetid air of the city, the poverty of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, water-sellers, spies, prisons, body snatchers and the anatomists who fund them, street hustlers and charlatans, the best places to walk, fireworks, filles publiques, the police (cruel, lazy, scared and corrupt), tobacco, beggars, hospitals, the erotic life of the crowd at the opera, and the best time and place to grow mushrooms" (182).

The book is chock-full of folklore and fascinating historical tidbits: the invention of public transportation in 1654, depictions of the lowlifes who thrived in the dark corners of the medieval city, giving Parisians a black reputation throughout the provinces, where they were referred to as "trublions ('disturbers of the peace') or maillotins ('war-hammers')," gruesome stories of the putrid cemetery of the Saints-Innocents, quite near to what is now Les Halles, whose soil was said to be so potent it could eat up a corpse in a matter of days, and the original names of the streets around Saint Denis—how much has Paris lost in rechristening rue de la Pute-y-Muse ("Idling Tart Street") as rue du Petit-Muse, or rue Trousse-Nonain (Hussey has this as "Tumble-Nun Street," although trousser is a bit more crass that this translation would imply), which became, simply rue Beaubourg. Other streets disappeared altogether: rue du Gratte-Cul and rue du Poil-au-Con will regrettably never again feature on anyone's mailing address.

And Hussey has a superb sense of what is inimitably bizarre and wonderful about Paris. Who knew that whores stopped working and dispensed their favors for free to honor the great Victor Hugo, or that Galliéni's men took taxis to the Battle of the Marne in 1914 and were charged full fare by the wily cab drivers? Or that the Place Dauphine on the Right Bank is known as the "clitoris of Paris"? Hussey's prose captures the ironies of his topic, when he treats such small corners of larger events, but the segues from one epoch to another are sketched out largely through hyperbole, as if to highlight the difference in stature between the cultural historian's anecdote and the traditional historian's major event: he introduces the French Revolution as that conflict which "would change the world for ever"; gearing up for the advent of Napoleon, he reflects that no one suspected in 1800 that France would become "the epicenter of a military and political drama that would engulf Europe in its entirety and change the world for ever," and so on.

One fascinating thread of the narrative is the evolution of the city's physical landscape, from the wooden structures clustered on Ile de la Cité, to Philippe Auguste's thirteenth century walls (bits of which still remain around the city, notably in the Jardins Saint-Paul in the Marais), to the Portes Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, built on the site of the traditional toll gates into the city by Louis XIV, the tradition of the containment of Paris within its present shape, the evolution of the périphérique, and the social impact the building of the périphérique and the housing developments outside of it would have on the défavorisés of Paris.

Arriving in the nineteenth century, Hussey looks around at Haussmann's "long, dull boulevards" and sees in them the death of "the spontaneous life of the streets." These renovations, Hussey admits, did wonders for the city's sanitation and street-lighting system, but represent "a new form of modernity in which urban spectacle took predominance over individual style" (267). Second Empire architecture is, in Hussey's view, mediocre; the Avenue de l'Opéra is "magnificent and inhuman," and he finds paradox in the contrast between the "external severity" and "internal opulence" of these buildings, which he argues reflects the instability at the heart of Louis-Napoleon's government. This is perhaps taking the analysis too far. A more reasonable argument (which Hussey echoes but did not himself think up) is that the Haussmannization of Paris was designed not only to improve the flow of traffic and commerce throughout the city, but also "to ease the passage of troops and guns in times of insurrection."

Throughout the narrative, Hussey interjects observations from his vantage point in early 21st century Paris, but it is in the final section of the book that these observations pay off. Hussey, who is the author of books on Guy Debord and Georges Bataille, provides a brilliant account of Paris from the 1960s to the present, halting just before the 2005 suburban riots. This last section of the book is a real departure from traditional histories of Paris, and it is here that he is most successful at peeling away the romantic veneer that is regularly applied to the City of Light. His passages on the 1970s and 80s punk movement reveal much more about the conflicts at the soul of the Parisian than the feel-good yéyé music of the 60s.

The cultural studies methodology does leave room for further research in the same vein; how exactly did such a dirty, dangerous city get to be so important? How exactly was the myth of Paris constructed? Hussey brushes past these subjects on his way through to the present (the book weighs in at 435 pages, which is quite long enough), but the construction of the myth of Paris is well worth investigating.

At times this reading of the city gets out of hand, as Hussey gets caught up in his own irreverence. He occasionally veers completely off-track, making mistakes that careful editing (or at least, a re-reading) out to have caught out: for example, as Hussey would have it, Adrienne Monnier was the proprietor of Shakespeare and Co: and the publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses. In fact, Hussey has confused Monnier with her partner, Sylvia Beach. Monnier ran the bookstore down the road, Aux Amis du Livre. But on the whole, this is a well-paced, eminently useful and entertaining book. And we do hope you don't need it to know the origins of metro stations Alexandre Dumas, Jaurès, and Voltaire.