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Graham Robb

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris Hardcover – April 26, 2010

by Graham Robb (Author)

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The secrets of the City of Light, revealed in the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten―by the author of the acclaimed The Discovery of France.

This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten.

A young artillery lieutenant, strolling through the Palais-Royal, observes disapprovingly the courtesans plying their trade. A particular woman catches his eye; nature takes its course. Later that night Napoleon Bonaparte writes a meticulous account of his first sexual encounter. A well-dressed woman, fleeing the Louvre, takes a wrong turn and loses her way in the nameless streets of the Left Bank. For want of a map―there were no reliable ones at the time―Marie-Antoinette will go to the guillotine.

Baudelaire, the photographer Marville, Baron Haussmann, the real-life Mimi of La Boheme, Proust, Adolf Hitler touring the occupied capital in the company of his generals, Charles de Gaulle (who is suspected of having faked an assassination attempt in Notre Dame)―these and many more are Robb’s cast of characters, and the settings range from the quarries and catacombs beneath the streets to the grand monuments to the appalling suburbs ringing the city today. The result is a resonant, intimate history with the power of a great novel. 16 pages of illustrations

Print length

496 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

April 26, 2010
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.4 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10

0393067246
ISBN-13

978-0393067248
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Editorial Reviews

From Bookmarks Magazine

There is nothing traditional about Graham Robb's approach to history, and Parisians, like his previous works, reflects his exceptional creativity and wonderful writing. Robb introduces each personality as a mystery for readers to unravel, all the while evoking the sights and sounds of Paris. Although he narrates many of the sections from his characters' perspectives, he also presents each in different form; the tale of the student revolt, for example, takes the shape of a course outline, and the encounter between Sartre and Miles Davis is a screenplay set in a café. The only complaint? A plethora of detail. Yet, as a mosaic of a city, it is an embarrassment of riches, indeed.

From Booklist

In 1787, an obscure French artillery officer, awkward in manner and dress, wanders Parisian streets and has a brief encounter with a prostitute before returning to his modest lodgings. He is Napoleon Bonaparte. An architect examines the subterranean environs of Paris in the late eighteenth century and realizes that large portions of the city are in danger of collapsing into sinkholes. He is Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the “Man who Saved Paris.” On an evening in 1791, a foreign born woman and her guide explore Parisian streets on a clandestine search for an escape route from the city for herself and her family. She is Marie-Antoinette, and her confusion leads to delay, exposure, and death for the king and queen. Robb, a biographer who lives in Britain, has written extensively on France and has a long-term love affair with Paris. In this unique and thoroughly enjoyable work, he has presented aspects of both the geography and history of Paris through a series of vignettes built around the personal experiences of historical figures. He combines the genres of tourist guide and urban history. --Jay Freeman

Review

"[Robb] has proved himself to be one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet. In a better world his books would be best sellers everywhere....His book―argumentative, gallant, parked athwart oncoming historical traffic, as if on a dare―is as Parisian and as bracing as a freshly mixed Pernod and water."
― Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Robb, in employing the techniques of the novelist, animates his characters mainly for 'the pleasure of thinking about Paris.' That pleasure is also the reader's."
― Brenda Wineapple, The New York Times Book Review

"Ingenious...Marvelously entertaining, boundlessly energetic and original...This book is the sort of triumph that we have no right to expect to come from anyone in the steady way that Robb's masterly books come from him."
― Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph

"A superior historical guidebook for the unhurried traveler, and altogether a book to savor."
― The Independent

"Graham Robb's new book is so richly pleasurable that you feel it might emit a warm glow if you left it in a dark room. Essentially it is a collection of true stories, culled from Robb's insatiable historical reading and lit by his imagination. He has the passion of a naturalist displaying a wall of rare butterflies or a cabinet of exotic corals, but his specimens are all human and walked the streets of Paris at some point between the French revolution and now...[A] generous and humane book."
― John Carey, The Times [London]

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Discovery of France by Graham Robb:

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize

“Rid your mind of the idea―suggested by the title―that this is an ordinary book.”―Literary Review

“An exhilarating account of how the geographical entity that has become ‘France’ emerged out of the jumbled mosaic of its unconnected parts.”―The Independent

“Brilliant. Robb, who writes beautifully, . . . has accomplished quite a feat. He has reintroduced France to itself.”―New York Times

“Scintillating and resourceful.”―Harper’s

“For his meticulous research, [Robb] deserves a standing ovation . . . to paraphrase Proust, this is a priceless glimpse into history.”―Seattle Times

About the Author

Graham Robb is the author of three prize-winning biographies, each selected as New York Times Best Books. His books, including The Discovery of Middle Earth, Parisians, and The Discovery of France, have earned several awards. He lives on the Anglo-Scottish border.

From The Washington Post

The French word flâneur refers to one who thoughtfully strolls the boulevards, appreciating, observing without destination or at least with no urgent need to arrive. Two elegant new books follow in the long tradition of Parisian flânerie. In "Yvon's Paris," Robert Stevens's exhibition-in-a-book, the French photographer Yvon (Pierre Yves Petit) comes across as the ideal flâneur, a loiterer who happens to have brought along his camera. The English writer Graham Robb presents an equally relaxed persona in "Parisians," like a weekend tour guide who never mentions that he happens to be a famous authority on the history of Paris.

"Yvon's Paris" offers dozens of glorious photographs, many filling two pages -- flat paper magically alive with moments stolen from time: flower sellers, bargemen, weary blinkered horses, a boating party in the Bois de Boulogne. Yvon's masterful framing and atmospheric perspective can turn the Palais du Luxembourg ghostly behind the garden trees or contrive a lively photo from the sight of a man perched atop an extendable ladder to water flowers in the Tuileries. In Yvon's peek down an alley in Montmartre, a struggling tree becomes a symbol of tenacity, but what matters is the touchable history of crumbling brick and the wrought iron lamp-post stenciled on the air. The photos seem to start between the wars and go into the 1950s -- Yvon lived from 1886 to 1969 -- but Stevens merely identifies sights and ignores dates, an omission that undermines the value of such a retrospective.

Obsessed with atmosphere and texture, Yvon avoided midday glare, choosing instead to capture fleeting moments at dawn and dusk or on rainy days. Oblique lighting caresses every marble muscle and lunar pockmark in the gargoyles that, from atop Notre Dame, contemplate flâneurs below on sinful Earth. These photos may remind you of Boris Kaufman's delicious cinematography in Jean Vigo's 1934 film "L'Atalante." "Poetic realism," the term often applied to that movie, also describes Yvon's photographs.

Robb's new book deserves the same label. Internationally acclaimed for "The Discovery of France" and his biographies of Rimbaud, Balzac and Hugo, he is an encyclopedia of French history. But this is no ordinary history book. Although the form varies -- one chapter, for example, is presented as a film script -- the book is a series of character portraits in chronological order, evolving into a rich and layered history of one of the great mythological cities of the world.

Robb's and Yvon's work stand congenially together. For one thing, Robb writes brilliantly about photography. In conjuring photographer Charles Marville, Robb could be describing Yvon: "He feels quite at home in a city devoid of people, at the hour when the sun shines for no one but himself and his assistant." Elsewhere Robb says of a photo, "Here at the dawn of the visible past, the buildings look almost radiant in their grime, as though they haven't yet learned how to pose for a camera."

I could not possibly have read Robb's novel-like opening chapter, about the young Napoleon's first arrival in Paris and his encounter with a prostitute, without turning the page immediately to see where Robb would take me next. When Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette try to flee their palace for refuge in Vincennes, Robb manages to make three different points with their experience of getting lost in the labyrinth of medieval streets: the royal family's disconnection from the lives of the not-yet-citizens around them, the unplanned organic growth of the ancient and literally unmapped city, and the cinematic ironies of history.

Robb's gift for analogy is pitch-perfect. He writes of Proust's initial disappointment with the théâtrophone, which permitted subscribers to listen to opera over the new telephone lines: "A live performance of Pelléas et Mélisande reached him like something precious that had been smashed and sullied by the post." This simile opens the way for Robb to inhabit Proust's imagination during moments of static: "Yet without that intermittency, the remote performance would have lost its power: his memory would not have been forced to rush about the orchestra pit, playing every instrument, until the musicians returned from nowhere."

Charles Dickens once complained that an essay lacked "the elegant play of fancy." Robb could never be accused of this shortcoming. His fancy plays across Parisian history, darting down every alley and into the minds of kings, novelists and painters.

One of Yvon's photos immortalized an early morning on the Place du Tertre in Montmartre. Both the man sweeping the gutter and the youngster watching him are blurry from movement, their features forgotten by time, while behind them the white-pastry façade of Sacré Coeur basilica stands tall and firm. Robb's words and Yvon's photographs beautifully remind us that our own fleeting lives are the motion lost in slow exposures.

Reviewed by Michael Sims
Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st Edition (April 26, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393067246
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393067248
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.87 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.4 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #322,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #750 in French History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
157 ratings

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Graham Robb

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Graham Robb, whose recent books include "The Discovery of France" and "Parisians," has published widely in French literature and history. His biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud have won critical acclaim and were selected as New York Times Editor’s Choices for best books of the year. Robb lives in Oxford, England.

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5 star		57%
4 star		20%
3 star		12%
2 star		6%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Panoramic view...

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2014

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Graham Robb is an Englishman who loves his France, and knows it well. I first read his The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography whose title begs the question: But wasn't it always just there? It was Frenchman (and the other European nationalities that "discovered" all those other places on the globe. Or, so they claimed. Robb convinced me that France too, was also "discovered," in terms of a concept, as well as a nation, and if memory serves me correctly, I retain the factoid that less than half the inhabitants of "the Hexagon," (Metropolitan France) spoke French sometime in the early 19th century. Robb acquired his French erudition a number of ways, with a most appealing one being riding a bike around the countryside, every chance he got. Thus, when I saw this work I knew it was a "must" read, and found it even more impressive that "Discovery."

It is a series of 20 vignettes, all, as the title would have it, concerning Parisians, or those who did some serious passing through. Robb's style varied among the vignettes, but one technique he used a few times I found impressive. Who is he talking about? He uses pronouns to tell the story, and drops a few hints as to the identity of the person along the way. In the first vignette, entitled "One Night at the Palais-Royal" which, regrettably, I have only known as a Metro stop, concerns Napoleon losing his virginity at the age of 18, thanks to some professional assistance. Only a couple pages before the end, when Robb mentioned his work on Corsica, did I suspect it was Napoleon. The one technique I thought was not working was the screenplay "Lovers of Saint-Germain-des-Prés." But I learned of Juliette Greco, a singer still with us at 87, her relationship with Miles Davis, and how she had been called "the muse of existentialism." The Café de Flore, and Hotel La Louisiane were scripted in, and resonated to one who has been accused of having his mouth stuffed full of Sartre (but only in my wild and crazy youth.)

As my subject title indicates, it is a panoramic view of Paris, aptly conveyed by the cover: the famous, and the not so famous. "The Man Who Saved Paris" concerns the engineer, Charles-Axel Guillaumot, who in the late 1700's, resolved the subsidence problems in the city (some were rather dramatic) since the city was built, rather haphazardly, on old quarries and mines. There was the story of Vidocq, a criminal who became the head cop at the Surete, and still played both sides. Charles Marville was the first photographer of Paris, preceding the better known Eugene Atget by 30 years. Robb traces the photographic history of the square, Saint-Andres-des-Arts, not far from where Boul Mich hits the Seine. Baudelaire and Jack Kerouac were one-time residents. The author also tells the story of Henry Munger, who wrote "La Vie de Bohemie," and his muse, a 25 year old "flower girl." "The Notre-Dame Equation" was a Pychonesque romp, featuring an intriguing mixture of religious symbolism at Notre Dame cathedral, obscure alchemist tracks, and some very hard science from the Curies, and the atomic bomb. Whew!

There are a couple of stories about the Nazi occupation, including the deportation of Jews through Drancy, and another on Hitler's one and only visit to France, before there was even a ceasefire. Did DeGaulle fake an assassination attempt on himself immediately after the Nazi occupation is one intriguing question raised in another story, and there seems to be no question that Mitterrand DID fake one against himself, in 1962, the subject of yet another story. The story of the soixante-huitards, the student revolt of 1968 is also deftly handled in another vignette. Literature also provides the basis for stories on Madame Zola and Marcel Proust. The latter once said that he did not write novels that could be read "between one (Metro) station and the next." A bit of British understatement, that. Then Robb describes how Metro riders would be so engrossed in his novels that they would miss their Metro stop. Could that have been possible in the pre-Twitter age?

The most heartbreaking was the one that touched me personally, and is entitled "Sarko, Bouna, and Zyed." It concerns life in the "banlieue" the suburbs that ring Paris with dreadful high-rise where so many immigrants are "stored." The latter names in the title were immigrant kids, with their heads full of images of Zidane and Thierry Henry, coming home from soccer, taking a short-cut, chased by the police, and sought refuge in an electrical high-tension substation where they electrocuted themselves, setting off riots that rocked France. Sarko is Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of Interior, and later, for five years, the President of France. He went to the banlieue, and used THAT word, a word that I had learned only five years earlier. My daughter, age 15 at the time, in a boarding school at Sophia Antipolis, was attacked, along with some fellow students, in a "town v. gown" sort of affair. She later had to testify in Court concerning the incident. She told me on the phone that the perpetrators were the "racaille." A word I had to look up, and stored away, with a fair translation being "scum." The same explosive word Sarko used, and may have earned him the Presidency. Robb tells the story well.

More lightheartedly, for a bicyclist, he ends with a story about "cols" (passes through the mountains or hills), and his efforts to have the Club of 100 Cols have its "Ethics, Reflection and Proposal Committee" recognize a "col" in Paris. All the stories come with an impressive bibliography, that Robb has mastered well. He has also written several biographies, on Balzac, Hugo, Mallarme, and Rimbaud that now appear must reads. 6-stars for this essential work for any Francophile.

10 people found this helpful

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A. Dario Lopez

Tough read

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2019

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I think Mr. Robb is a great writer and he surely knows about Parisian history or at least he's a master researcher on the subject. I do also like the concept of being presented with a different story through Parisian years and centuries based on the lives of certain characters. I did however found the book very hard to read, sometimes I would get lost in the narrative without really understanding the point of the story. I thought the description of Hitler visiting Paris was fascinating, it was almost as if I was there, I never knew that his visit happened as it is told in the book, but truly fascinating. I found the story about Miles Davis, Sartre and Juliette Greco insufferable, pedantic and without a point in being told in the form of a film script.

2 people found this helpful

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Jay Dickson

Tales of the city

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2011

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The biographer of Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac, Graham Robb is about the best qualified English-language writer imaginable to present this history in snapshots of Paris which takes the form of nineteen vignettes, many of which are told in different styles, from the lives of important historical and literary personages. It starts with Napoleon's first visit to the city (to his lose his virginity with a prostitute before mobilizing with the army), and proceeds through characters as disparate as Marie Antoinette, the original of the Count of Monte Cristo, Vidocq, the Zolas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles de Gaulle, and even Hitler (an enthusiastic fan of the city for years before he visits the conquered metropolis for the first time). The stories are often elegantly told and usually surprising. It is true that some work less well than others (though one, written as a kind of closet screenplay, is pretty much a flop); and Robb relies too often near the beginning on the weary trick of withholding the identity of an important historical figure toward late in the story (which Paul Rudnick in the New York Times once called the "And that child grew up to become... Helen Hayes" gimmick). But most of the stories are quite graceful, with important undertold stories about the building and unbuilding of modern Paris, from the bolstering of the weakening tunnels under the city by means of the creation of the Catacombs in the late eighteenth century to Marville's photographic documentation of the neighborhoods about to be swept away by the grand avenues of Baron de Haussmann. And some are genuinely touching, such as the lovely little story of Madame Zola's forgiveness of her husband's philanderings. It's hard to imagine what kind of enjoyment anyone would take in this if he or she first didn't have some basic understanding of late 18th and 19th and 20th century French history, which Robb consistently assumes in his readers: although I did pretty well with everything up until 1968, the later chapters made reference to developments in very recent French history and Parisian planning of which I was pretty ignorant. (There's also no glossary for the plethora of French terms Robb uses, nor a map of the city, nor a final catalogue of characters, all of which would have been quite helpful.) This book works best for people who know France and French fairly well.

8 people found this helpful

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bex v

Not a fan.

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2012

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I bought this book to take on my trip to Paris. I'm sure some people would like the style of writing, but I found it really annoying. Each chapter tells an interesting story, but it doesn't reveal who the subject is until the end. It's all very faux-mysterious.. "There was a woman who would change the face of Paris history by making one wrong turn" blah blah, but they don't get to the point of the story until the end of the chapter. All of the stories they chose were interesting, but they manufactured suspense was annoying. I would have been more interested to know I was reading about Napoleon on the first page of the chapter and then told the story in a straight-forward way. Some people my enjoy this method of telling a story, but I found it very irritating. I read a little over half of it and then left it in the hostel.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Vynca

Good concept bad execution

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2018

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I know Parisian history quite well but this book is confusing. The stories mostly begins without the actual name of the character nor the time. They only give a small hint of the actual events which makes the book confusing. While the concept of remodelling historical events into fiction like TV or movie drama, the execution does not live up to the true events that happened in real places that you can still find in paris today.

3 people found this helpful

Rebecca

Tragically twee

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2014

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Such a sad letdown after his gripping 'Discovery of France', Graham Robb has produced a book which stumbles along, repeating many rather obvious facts about famous Frenchpersons in a slightly fey 'guess who this person is' style that is simply frustrating. I don't want history as regurgitated pap, I want to hear new and intriguing facts. None were forthcoming and eventually I gave up hope of reading anything either new or entertaining. I bought this as an ebook, didn't finish it (unlike his first book, which I have re-read,and would recommend to everyone) and have deleted it from my kindle.

5 people found this helpful

Kerrypickle

Enjoyable if idiosyncratic view of the evolution of Paris.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2014

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I like others bought this on the strength of having read and enjoyed The Making of France.
The style of writing which varies from anecdotal to factual confused me at first.
That being said it was full of information, which whilst not necessarily applicable to todays Paris makes for interesting reading if you have been or intend going there.

2 people found this helpful

Jill

A great companion

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 28, 2014

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I took this book to Paris and read it aloud to my partner there. It is full of unexpected stories and really very interesting. One or two chapters I found a bit heavy going (one in the form of a script) but probably I am missing references and other people wouldn't be puzzled.

One person found this helpful

Huw Williams

Graham Robb writes about France like noone else

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 4, 2017

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Graham Robb writes about France like noone else, with wit, erudition and an all-encompassing love of his subject. This book is a delightful and entertaining follow up to his previous gem "The Discovery of France".

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