i just finished Graham Robb’s Parisians, An Adventure History of Paris. It’s an unusual book which narrates key moments in Parisian history from the 18th century to today through vignettes told in an unconventional style. In some cases: Marie-Antoinette getting lost fleeing the Louvre and missing the rest of the royal family in a wrong turn, or a retelling of Napoleon’s diary of his first sexual encounter, the narrative conceals who exactly it’s subject is until their role in history has to be clarified and describes their relationship to Paris in a novel way. In others, the story juxtaposes interesting characters and subjects, say a photographer with an evolving French street scene. or Marcel Proust with the Metro.
As an adventure history per se, it’s not successful. Alberto Santos-Dumont is too absent for it really to be an adventure history of Paris. And some of the episodes, especially ones which try to cover large modern French topics, May 1968 or the suburbs of Paris today, are less successful than stories which focus on a smaller aspect of history that was previously unfamiliar. But there’s a lot of rewarding and fascinating material, much of it new to this reader. There’s the story of Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the inspector of quarries who created the vast underground catacombs and tunnels systems which hold up the city, a city originally built on and at risk of falling into the shaky rubble of the stone yards which it was literally mined out of. In a fitting end, his final resting place is among the huge deposits of skeletal remains in the municipal ossuary he created. There’s Fulcanelli, the 20th century alchemist who was hunted by the Nazis and Allies after essentially predicting the Atom bomb. There’s even Francois Mitterand, not as the older President, but as a younger, ambitious politician faking an assassination attempt on himself.
Where the book is enormously successful is in it’s ability to relate very personal lives and ambitions to the much larger hero behind each scene, the city itself. It cannot be a comprehensive book because it tells its story through individual lives, but it really left me wishing for more to fill in the gaps.