IN THIS DELIGHTFUL and enterprising book, Andrew Hussey describes Paris, on more than one occasion, as an “old whore”. No other city on earth, with the possible exception of Venice, so richly deserves the appellation. Old whores can be of either sex. They have their comic, as well as their pathetic, aspects. And they can tell many stories. Paris was, until relatively recent times, a quagmire — a place of stench and dirt and degradation. It was a continuously violent, as well as a seedy, city. In Hussey’s account “its history has largely been forged in hardship by its inhabitants”. That is why those inhabitants have been characteristically described as rebels and insurrectionaries. The word “Parisian” is synonymous with “agitator”. The citizens are also considered to be unsentimental, hard-headed and guileful.
From the earliest times Paris has been a city of extremes. It was a city of extreme poverty and widespread paganism, of continual savagery and bitter unrest. It has been under siege by various invaders, from the Magyars and Norsemen of the 9th century to the Germans of the 20th century.
In the 11th century it was a “stinking labyrinth” packed with prostitutes and criminals. Yet within this early Paris, too, there was a passion for life and display. The distant progeny of the Gallic tribe, the first settlers, wore bright clothes and golden trinkets. The preoccupation with fashion has not changed. It was still a native pace, a tribal place that uniquely acquired its identity from its fierce new urban identity rather than from a defined territory. Paris has always been a state of mind.
The construction of Notre Dame began in the last decades of the 12th century but, although it took 200 years to complete, it quickly became the sign or token of the city’s new role as a place of worship and of monastic learning. Monuments of elegance and grace rose up among what were still filthy and dangerous streets. Among these were the precincts of the university.
The Sorbonne was established in the middle of the 13th century, and rapidly became the central place of European scholarship. It imbued the city with its enduring reputation for theoretical enquiry and debate. London did not possess a university until the 19th century. That is why Paris, rather than London, has become famous for its intellectuals and intellectual pursuits. The French city is still the capital of theory. There is another legacy. The first students’ riot in Paris occurred in 1229.
Another central point in this history is that Paris always came under the sovereign’s direct authority. Paris was the king’s domain. The police were his cohorts, in a space apart from the judiciary, and thus a defining element of Parisian life. Hence the policing system, according to Hussey, “has been, and continues to be, equally concerned with prescriptive measures, intervention and surveillance”.
The 14th century was described as “the satanic century”, replete with war, disease, violence and famine. When the plague came it was memorably described by one French historian as “a kick aimed at a human anthill”. The fatal events of the period triggered a series of riots among the citizens of Paris, put down with increasing ferocity by the king’s troops. Massacre followed massacre. Paris was a city of massacre. Fifteen citizens were, on average, killed each night.
As the capital of intellectual debate the city also became the arena for ideological and religious quarrels of every kind. The most celebrated of them culminated in the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when, in the summer of 1572, many thousands of Protestants were killed by Roman Catholics in a blood frenzy. “Kill them all,” the king said, “so that none shall reproach me for it.” The Seine was swollen with bodies. Paris “acquired notoriety as a satanic place of limitless slaughter”. It was a reputation it never wholly lost. It was widely believed that the Devil appeared to his Parisian followers and, in a world of beggars and thieves, he had certainly found his proper kingdom. Throughout the 16th century there were decades of civil war, sieges and famines.
That is why Paris has always been in part a nervous and unhappy place. That may account for its present air of gloom and deliquescence. It may also explain the fact that, according to Hussey, occultism and paganism “were, and continue to be, two of the deepest veins of historical knowledge in the city”. Even in the “grand siècle”, or great 17th century, “Paris was still filthy, disease-ridden, a good place to be stabbed or raped, or to starve to death”.
As the public city grew more majestic and monumental, so the private quarters sank ever further into squalor and misery. And then the dark side triumphed at the Revolution. Paris then became once more a city of blood, and all the violence and famine and danger of the old city returned.
They never stopped. In the 19th century it was said that, if you stamped on a city pavement, congealed blood would rise to the surface. The citizens were trapped in history as nightmare, a cycle of insurrection and counter-insurrection like a wheel of fire. It seemed to be what Hussey calls “an unending civil war” between rich and poor and bourgeoisie, students and police and criminals. Crisis and revolution came naturally to the city. It was built for barricades. Paris became “the world capital of revolution”, a symbolic status that it has never forfeited.
There was one giant transition, however, when in 1853 Georges-Eugène Haussmann was given permission to tear down most of old Paris to make way for wide interlinking boulevards and avenues. The “demolition artist”, as he called himself, at a stroke severed Paris from its material history. That is why many of its streets still seem so bereft of life and energy. Yet its spiritual history remained intact. It was still the city of fire and the city of death. The Commune of 1871 was responsible for more urban slaughter than at any other time in the city’s history. In mass executions some 20,000 Parisians were killed by their compatriots. The old forces had been diverted but not halted.
Yet Haussmann’s plan seemed in certain respects to have been successful. By the early 20th century Paris had become a model of modernity. It was an operational success. It worked. It had become what Hussey calls “the world capital of pleasure” as well as “the world capital of ideas and ideologies”, a testing ground for pursuits from surrealism to existentialism. But it was also defined by endless conflict and trauma. In that spirit, Hussey traces its modern history, from the German occupation to the various student revolts of recent years. Paris will never be able to escape its demons.
This book is endlessly informative and entertaining, with a story on every page. There are times when Hussey seems overwhelmed by his subject, but there are few chroniclers of Paris who would not be overburdened by the symbolic and historic significance of the city. So much rich material is difficult to control, let alone to master, but Hussey has given it a fluent and appropriate shape. He has afforded the city definition and, more importantly, given it a character. He has helped its myth to endure.
