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Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris Paperback – Illustrated, April 11, 2011
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The New York Times bestseller: 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 full-color illustrations
- Print length476 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateApril 11, 2011
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
- ISBN-100393339734
- ISBN-13978-0393339734
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Editorial Reviews
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― 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
"Robb’s stylish and stylized tale of the town turns you into a sightseer, visiting the past, uncovering what time has hidden and observing anew what’s there. It’s a tantalizing tour. Robb wanders but is never lost."
― Newsday
"With his profound knowledge of Paris . . . Robb reveals a city of not only lights but darkness, which, though discovered, remains unknowable and alluring."
― Publishers Weekly
"A creative montage of how history, individuals, and geography intersected at key moments in Paris."
― Library Journal
"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]
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 11, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 476 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0393339734
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393339734
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #632,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #974 in French History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

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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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.
Top reviews from other countries
Graham Robb's series of essays about Paris past and present are everything that most guide books are not: idiosyncratic, informative, amusing, provocative in the sense that the reader is provoked to explore, and (not least) beautifully written.
Who, for example, has read a book entitled L'Infection de Paris about the former village of Bondy where much of the city's sewage was dumped, the odour returning the foul stench whence it came? "According to the book," Robb writes, "the unregistered workers who made a living from the city's waste were 'a transient population of foreigners, mostly Germans and Luxembourgois of dubious origin' ... It was unclear whether the threat to Paris was believed to come from its own excrement or from the alien population that processed it." Immigration seen as something other than a cold statistic.
If you want to know what happened when Marie Antionette turned left when she should have turned right, what Adolf Hitler saw on a private tour of Paris in June 1940, how Marcel Proust discovered the Métro, or the record time for a lap of the Pérépherique - all this and much more is here.
There is, too, an assumption of a reader who is curious and moderately intelligent, allowing the author to unravel his tales one teasing step at a time. How rewarding guide books would be if every city had its own Graham Robb.








