From RFI: Paris, city of murder, plots,

From RFI:

Paris, city of murder, plots, revolution and ... a mountain pass?

By Molly Guinness

Who lost his virginity in Paris's Palais Royal in 1787? How many hunchbacks lived on the rue Fossard in 1841? And was there a disembowelling in the catacombs? British author Graham Robb takes an adventurous look at the French capital, while dedicated Parisian Eric Hazan defends its radical traditions and its psychogeography.

The first person to recognise the destructive power of nuclear energy was an alchemist. Charles de Gaulle survived about 30 assassination attempts. Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI might well have escaped the guillotine if she hadn’t managed to get lost in Paris a couple of streets from her palace. And there is a mountain in Paris.

In Parisians. An Adventure History of Paris, Graham Robb has chosen his favourite stories from the city, ranging from 1750 to the present. It’s full of extraordinary information.

Robb has obviously really enjoyed himself. Sections have chapters in descending order, or with symbols instead of numbers. One is a film script. Another reads like a melancholy novella.

At one point, he reconstructs a story from a fictionalised version of an archivist’s account of a dictated deathbed confession taken down by an elderly priest in 1828.

Many historians might steer clear of such a web, but this kind of thing is just a spur to Robb, a man who has calculated the likely number of hunchbacks residing on the rue Fossard in 1841 (13) and the number of prostitutes in Paris in 1787 who came from Nantes (53). The story, which starts with a cobbler and a grimy café near Les Halles and may or may not have involved a disembowelling in the catacombs, is well worth the reconstruction.

It does mean sometimes you can feel a bit nervous about how much to believe. But Robb is nothing if not thorough. The reasonable way in which he stripped the layers of mythology from the figure of Arthur Rimbaud in his 2000 biography of the poet indicates that you’re in safe enough hands to wholeheartedly enter into each tale.

“As far as anyone knew, the head had last been seen in the attics of the École de Médicine,” is a typical opening sentence. Robb often doesn’t reveal who he is talking about till near the end of the story. It would be unfair to spoil the first story by revealing here the identity of the serious young lieutenant “of conduct most regular” who lost his virginity in 1787 after a visit to the Palais Royal, an “amazing bazaar of economic and erotic activity”.

Like a novelist, Robb doesn’t impose himself into the book or advance arguments. Baron Haussmann, who cut through Paris in the 19th century, is one of France’s most controversial figures. The Haussmann section is told as if through Haussmann’s thought processes.

“He is prepared to sacrifice his reputation, which is besmirched every day by liberals and socialists, by nostalgic bohemians, and even by his own social equals, who find the inconvenience of moving house too heavy a price to pay for the most beautiful city in the world.”

Robb doesn’t enter the fray to defend or besmirch Haussmann, only to describe the extraordinary transformation the baron effected on the city. Even Hitler doesn’t come off too badly.

The detached approach lasts till the last chapter, when Robb himself enters the book in a way that almost calls into question his sanity. He finds a reference in a book to a col, a mountain pass, in Paris itself. He cycles up it and immediately writes to the Club des Cent Cols, a cyclists’ organisation that awards a certificate to any cyclist who has crossed 100 different cols, provided it is for personal pleasure and not in the spirit of competition. Alas, the club refuses to ratify the Parisian col.

“This col has never been accepted,” comes the reply. Robb takes some comfort, though. “At least his message left a glimmer of hope. ‘This col …’ Its existence was not explicitly denied.” His campaign for his col continues after this setback with a single-mindedness that hovers on the fringes of lunacy.

In The Invention of Paris. A History in Footsteps, Eric Hazan invokes the spirit of Paris with ardent indignation. Paris is a city to walk in. It’s OK to talk about flânerie with a straight face. That’s because it’s not to do with wearing a beret and pulling unconvincingly on a Gauloise. It’s a duty.

The concept of the imaginative appreciation of a place, psychogeography, was introduced in the 1950s as an antidote to the capitalist presentation of the world.

“Flânerie is a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; flânerie is life,” according to Balzac, quoted by Hazan.

With The Invention of Paris under your arm, you can flâne around parts of the city that have long since been destroyed or changed beyond recognition (and one gets the feeling that Hazan sometimes has trouble recognising his city thanks to Haussmann's 1852 operations).

Hazan argues that the history of Paris is a constant battle between the spirit of time and the spirit of place. He recounts how builders trying to cut a road through the middle of the Sentier quarter were beaten up by the local residents. They threatened to kill those responsible for the plan.

“What a time!” says Hazan wistfully.

He writes in biting fury about the museumification of the centre of Paris. It’s hard to look at the Champs Elysées in the same way after he compares it to the duty-free mall of an international airport. Recently, authorities have been trying to cover over the city’s railway tracks.

“What disasters do we need in order to keep the Paris railways open to the sky?” cries Hazan.

His tour through the streets is a call to arms. Hazan expects every Parisian to do their duty to memory. His Paris is red, volatile and dangerous. Time after time, Paris’s gutters ran with blood and the “insurgent city was transformed into a charnel house”.

A mysterious horseman appearing with the Liberty or Death red flag of the republicans at the funeral of General Lamarque, was enough to spark off a revolution in 1832.

The Invention of Paris was published in French in 2002, three years before riots broke out in the working-class outskirts and Paris was encircled by a ring of burning tyres. The revolt and the fires spread to hundreds of cities in France and a state of emergency was declared.

“After 30 years of torpor, 30 years in which its centre has been renovated-museumified and its periphery ravaged in silence, Paris is seeking to reawaken,” he wrote in 2002.

After 2005, it looks as if Hazan can rest easy. The fiery spirit of this place is alive.