The Other Paris

The Paris Luc Sante loves, like the old, dirty, and dangerous New York he exhumed in his marvelous history Low Life, is not the one you can glimpse from the Eiffel Tower or in the corporate boutiques of the Champs-Élysées. It's the Paris of the poor, the criminal, the rebellious, the Paris of dozens of self-sufficient neighborhoods bulldozed by Hausmann's wide, uniform boulevards. It's a Paris that, he argues, can hardly be found at all anymore in today's sanitized city, but he takes delicious pleasure in piecing it together from old photographs, handbills, diaries, police records, and an imagination that revels in the weird, rough, intimate improvisations of a sublime, lost metropolis.