Parisians by Graham Robb
A new account of Paris strips away illusions of elegance to reveal the rebel hearts of its citizens, says Andrew Hussey

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
by Graham Robb
480pp, Picador

 The Observer, Sunday 11 April 2010

First-time visitors to Paris always remark that it must be one of the most well designed and well ordered cities in the world. They note the straight boulevards, down which an entire army can march in line, and the squares and parks that have been designed with such exquisitely geometric precision. A glimpse into Parisian history reveals that this is an illusion: beneath the surface of calm elegance this has always been a seething city, frequently visited by riot and bloodshed.
This is largely because of the mutinous spirit of the Parisians themselves. The true Parisian is distinguished by his or her gouaille, a slang word meaning a kind of combative wit. When visitors report on the notorious rudeness of Parisians, they have usually had an encounter with this unlovely part of the Parisian character. It is no accident that "Parisian" has long been synonymous in the French provincial imagination with "agitator". As far back as the middle ages, Parisians were described as trublions ("disturbers of the peace") or maillotins ("war-hammers"). The word maillotin was taken from the heavy lead mallets, or maillets, which angry rebels used in the 14th century to smash statues and heads: usually of money-lenders and tax officials. The tradition still stands: in 2005, Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, earned notoriety for calling the rioters in the Parisian suburbs racaille ("scum"). In fact, he was using one of the oldest words in the French language – a word which would have been recognised as a badge of honour by any of these earlier Parisian rebels.
Like countless historians before him, Graham Robb begins this book by lamenting the fact that the agitated history of Paris is so rich and dense as to make giving a full account all but impossible. Wisely, he does not even attempt this. Instead, displaying the inventiveness that marked his previous books on France (most notably his recent bestseller The Discovery of France), he sets out to tell the history of the city, from 1750 to the present day, as a series of stories, all based on fact and including tales from adulterers, policemen, murderers, prostitutes, revolutionaries, poets, soldiers and spies. His aim is to reveal the personality of the city.
All the great convulsions of Parisian history are here – the Terror, the Commune, the Occupation, May '68 – but Robb eschews any grand overarching narrative. He tells his stories through a monument, a place, or a personality, from unexpected and unusual perspectives. This is not as disordered or unreadable as it sounds. As the apparently random narratives begin to connect, a kind of mapping of Paris past and present emerges, all shaped by real human experiences in the city.

When we meet Napoleon, for example, he is a callow and proud lieutenant who also still happens to be a virgin. He had his first sexual experience in Paris with a prostitute after a visit to the Palais-Royal, then at the height of its career as what one prudish Englishman described as a "vortex of dissipation". Napoleon was so ashamed of this experience that whenever he was in that part of the city, much later as a general or emperor, he always insisted that the Palais-Royal be emptied out and the brothels purged. Robb displays here a novelist's eye for the telling detail – in this case the hubristic gap between Napoleon's vision of himself and the reality of the world around him. It was this, one is left to understand, that would lead to his downfall.
The full review can be read at The Guardian online.