History: Everyone who knows the city at all has their own Paris. It might be the brash ritziness of the Champs Elysées or the quiet hilly streets of the Quartier Latin or the fabulous museums or even the bleak joys of Pigalle - or simply some obscure quartier where the corner bistro and boulangerie are the tops.
For Andrew Hussey, the City of Light, of Love, of la vie en rose, masks a bracing reality of violence and turbulence that have made the place as much as Haussmann did or the Sun King.
For him, blood seeps up through the paves - the cobblestones so often torn up and used as weapons - of the charming streets and the Paris character is as steely and ruthless as it is elegant and intellectual. In this sweeping and pithy history he focuses on people often characterised as "the mob" - the workers, revolutionaries, outsiders, criminals, artists - who in conventional histories are more likely to appear as footnotes. Ravaillac, the man who assassinated Henri IV, is to him nearly as interesting as the king himself.
His attempts to portray early Parisians such as the Franks as flamboyant gourmands not unlike their modern counterparts are, it must be said, a little laboured. And he describes a 17th- or 18th century Paris in which murder, robbery, prostitution and starvation were part of everyday life as if it were unique and not just like the London, Rome or even Dublin of the time. But once arrived at the French Revolution he really gets into his stride.
This revolution, the most audacious, most outrageous of them all, gave Paris a starring, if scandalous, place in world consciousness. The willingness to go jusqu'au bout in smashing old moralities and old values, the violence, the regicide, suggested there was a visceral difference, a lethal quality in the Parisian character. Hussey reminds us that the storming of Versailles was incited by a housewife who was so enraged by the bad meat sold to her by a butcher that she led the march to the palace.
The return to order after the revolution found it a very different place, representing for generations to come "a new idea of what humanity could be". Monarchy would never be the same again. That the Pantheon, the church of the patron saint of Paris, was turned into a temple to the greatness of man, is still significant. And the École Normale, nursery to the French establishment, still has the date of its foundation, 17 Brumaire, year III, inscribed over the door.
The École represents the rational strain, the Paris that aspires to and often achieves, beauty and order and progress. But beside it the blood and guts - that perhaps were as necessary to it as the barbarians were to the Romans - continued to spill. The pave throwers did not go away. After the Commune of 1870, 20,000 Communards were executed in such sublime surrounds as the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Parc Monceau. Given the tendency of Parisians to violence and revolt, presented here as a continuum interspersed with the lesser activities of eating, drinking and the pleasures of the flesh, their passivity in the face of the Nazi invasion is something of a mystery. But Paris is always unpredictable.
"Ruthless", "callous" - one has only to read a novel or two of Zola's to understand what Hussey means. Nearer our own time he notes that the plight of the Jews awaiting transport to the deathcamps in the train station at Drancy was quite visible to the residents of the highrise apartments around. In 1961, dozens, perhaps hundreds - the number is not known - of Algerians were killed by police and thrown in the Seine.
The tradition of baiting the establishment - post-revolution this became the bourgeoisie - provides a lighter note. Libertinism, anarchism both violent and absurd, and artist-revolutionaries from the Bousingos in the 1830s to the Surrealists and the Situationists of the 20th century, are well-documented. In fact, some illustrious names were surprisingly ruthless. The abstract poet, Mallarmé, and the writer, Mirbeau, defended the anarchist-murderer, Ravachol, on the grounds of his admirable aim of eliminating bourgeois morality. Dior - not that he was particularly ruthless - aroused sudden revolutionary fury in women at the market in Montmartre when he went there to photograph his New Look. They "flew at the models, ripping the clothes to shreds in anger and disgust".
Compendious and colourful, this overview of Parisian fury can be a little slipshod. A reader could assume, for instance, that Napoleon died in 1840. But it's often brilliant and generally brave. And it's good to know that Hussey will have none of the depressing argument that modern Paris is little more than a vast museum and tourist resort. True, the workers have been exiled to the banlieues by high prices and since 1968 the paves have been tarmacked over around the Sorbonne. Superficially it may look more "bonne femme" than "belle dame". But the new immigrants will keep the old Paris alive, he says. It's just as edgy and unpredictable and beautiful as it ever was.
Anne Haverty has just completed a term as writer-in-residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais at the Irish College in Paris. Her novel, The Free and Easy, was published earlier this year by Chatto & Windus
Paris: The Secret History By Andrew Hussey. Penguin Viking, 485pp. £25