The Paris abused by cliched tourist and travel-guide descriptions gains no purchase on Luc Sante’s magnificent and filthy urban rockface. Here is a scruff-neck city of sewers, gas works and dumps. Belgian-born Sante draws on literary and socio-historical research to present a gritty Paris of ordinary people. He homes in on an underclass of thieves, whores, pimps, alcoholics and the homeless. Not for him the dreary Paris of wealth or Europe’s one-time capital of diplomacy. His excavation is a loving one: he cherishes the things that time and progress have eroded and generally detests whatever structures – social or cement – have replaced them. Sante’s Paris is a city of lost, subterranean rivers, twisting backstreets and sweating, guilty people whose world was destroyed by Haussmann’s straight lines. A brilliant book ultimately about the scruff appeal of any city.
