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Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris Paperback – Illustrated, April 11, 2011

4.2 out of 5 stars 231

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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

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Editorial Reviews

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

"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

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.

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
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 out of 5 stars 231

About the author

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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.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
231 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2014
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.
16 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2017
I bought this anticipation of a trip to Paris and ended up reading it after I returned. It was a much more compelling read than the synopsis suggests. Beautifully written, fascinating content from a whole range of eras in Paris history right up to the present. I loved it! Would read more by this author.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2011
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.
11 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2010
Mr. Robb is an excellent writer, and several of the chapters of this book are thrilling to read. The chapters on Zola's wife, Proust, Napoleon, 19th Century Parisian crime are easy and joyful to read. But that is less than half the book. I understand what Mr. Robb wanted to do - to employ vastly different styles in one book. A great idea and wonderfully ambitious. My experience with several of these chapters was frustration and, to my dismay, confusion. It is rare that I don't finish a book, but I let this one go with just two chapters to go. He lost me.
6 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2022
Arrived on time. Excellent read!
Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2014
Imagine an erudite Paul Harvey creating a series of "The Rest of the Story" exclusively about Paris. That is this book in the nutshell. Highly readable. Laudable scholarship for the general reader. For anyone interested in Paris or France in general, what's not to like? (Robb's The Discovery of France is also not to be missed.)
Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2011
If you love Paris and its history, you will love this book. It is stories of people who had significant effect on Paris through the past few hundred years. Photos are not great but certainly add a lot to see just how certain areas have changed. Well researched and entertaining - if you love Paris.
Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2019
Excellent series of stories about the “City of Light”. Highly recommend for those visiting for first time as it gives a great feel for the city. Prose is often confusing with many French phrases and quotes but highly readable.

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Antonio Carlos
3.0 out of 5 stars Altos e baixos
Reviewed in Brazil on August 24, 2021
Alguns temas interessantes. Outros, incrivelmente aborrecidos.
One person found this helpful
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Lynne Greeley
5.0 out of 5 stars Another Adventure
Reviewed in France on February 4, 2023
Graham Robb is a unique historian who makes the unnoticed details of the past into new histories from completely different perspectives. His writing is captivating, and apart from what I found to be a failed attempt at a mocked film script, his subjects, all thoroughly researched and documented, read more like fiction when they are actually fact. Whenever I finish one of his books, I want to read it again for the pure pleasure of discovery. His latest, France: An Adventure History, is even a more polished gem.
Chatcolat
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on May 4, 2016
I haven't read it yet! The audio book is apparently excellant.
Edgar Sanchez-Wilke
5.0 out of 5 stars A little known Paris...
Reviewed in Germany on December 6, 2012
The little secrets that hide behind the very frequented corners of the city of light... a book for those that crave a little spin on the city's history.
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Gs-trentham
5.0 out of 5 stars Paris for lovers - and would-be lovers
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 25, 2010
One of my books of the year: delight from first page to last.

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.
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