ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: .
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Kao na slikama

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (October 18, 2016)
Language: English




A trip through Paris as it will never be again-dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian

Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris , Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world.Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses-from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps-Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city.

A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.






Luc Sante loves the lower depths, cutting his teeth a couple of decades ago with Lowlife, a book about crime and prostitution in bygone Manhattan. Now comes a book it feels as if he was born to write, about the underbelly of Paris, an extraordinary and sometimes appalling submersion in nostalgie de la boue and French social problems, which takes on an added gravity in the wake of recent tragic events.

There’s always been a rough edge to France’s refined culture, be it Devil’s Island, the Foreign Legion or the hardness of her criminals, often men so desperate that punishment was a form of recognition. In the words of the magnificent Céline, one of the really venomous toads of French letters, the guillotine was “the Prix Goncourt for murderers”. Sante notes that the Paris street gangs, or apaches, were truly “modern gangsters, which is to say that they were violent poseurs, fully attuned to the image they cut”, be it on the street or in the papers, and apache gangs included the Beauty Spots, who all had a mole tattooed under their lip.

Social conditions also produced disaffection in more organised forms, from the revolution to the Paris Commune, along with what was probably the world’s first manual of urban counterinsurgency, Marshal Bugeaud’s The War of Streets and Houses (1849).

There was a larger war of streets and houses carried out by Baron Haussmann from 1853, a “vast surgical enterprise” replacing old Paris with the 19th-century city as artwork that we have today. Sante has a soft spot for the more Gothic city Haussmann replaced, described by a contemporary as “these dark, muddy, pestilential streets, which one would believe inhabited by frogs, owls and bats”. Along with the medieval crudity of some of the vanished street names (Big Ass and Cunt Hair, for example, comparable in their way to London’s long-gone Gropecunt Lane), there is something more peculiarly French in the Impasse of the Three Faces, the Alley of Sighs and the Street of Lost Time.

Woman in bar, 1930s
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A woman in a bar in the 1930s. Photograph: Faber & Faber
The poverty and strange trades of 19th-century Paris (an indoor farmer keeping 52 goats in a flat, for example, or very minor aristocrats who scraped a living acknowledging other people’s illegitimate children) could almost be out of Dickens or Mayhew, but again there is something quintessentially French when Sante discusses the refinements of prostitution in houses such as Le Chabanais (although even these are not as surprising as the brothels for priests in the rue Saint-Sulpice) or the lives of the great chanteuses. Along with the inevitable Piaf, he has intriguing accounts of women such as Mistinguett, Damia and Fréhel (“Queen of the Apaches”).


Sante takes the Paris catacombs, with their thousands upon thousands of anonymous skulls, as an image of his project to commemorate countless unknown lives. It is a selective picture of an extreme and marginal city – Santeville, we could call it – but elegiac points emerge not only about Paris but great cities in general. There’s always been a sense that things are changing for the worse: even the advent of the accordion in French music was associated with knife crime, in contrast to the safer sound of the old musette, the traditional bagpipe-like instrument it replaced. At the same time, you’d have to be intoxicated with nostalgia, or historically oblivious, not to see that for most people there never were any “good old days” – and yet something has still been lost. Sante blames modern corporate life for a new blandness (“shopping mall, fast food, fake Irish pubs”) and opposes it with ideas from psychogeography and a 1981 Jacques Rivette film, Le Pont du Nord. He suggests in his conclusion that a city should be a setting for a labyrinthine game, but property prices, social exclusion and endless bad building are leaving fewer places to play it. The game is not quite over, but the rules have certainly changed.

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