Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History, Bloomsbury, 2007

Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History, Bloomsbury, 2007
ISBN-13 978-1-59691-323-3

One can easily recommend some book because of its solid judgment and few errors. It is another matter altogether to be fascinated by the book despite its obvious failings. And this book is fascinating indeed. This is a popular history of Paris as a living being, mostly chronological, but unsystematic and anecdotal; I could not tear myself from it for several days. This was also probably the only book in so many years I read in an (almost) consecutive fashion: from the beginning to an end.

Hussey’s book contains many lapses of judgment. For instance, its author does not seem to care about modern architecture preferring old slums with “character” and other sentimental stuff; as another Parisian, probably Charles Nodier once quipped: “During the times of Voltaire even educated people thought that a gazebo in a fake Greco-Roman style had style, while the Notre Dame did not.” He obviously does not think much of scientists and engineers as well because the contributions of Parisians to scientific or technical progress are practically absent from the book. Not so of homosexuals whose progress is specifically outlined in every other chapter; and similar to the Jews, who are mentioned only as nameless targets of persecution, while their cultural and economic contributions to the city are omitted. Without a slightest tint of disapproval Hussey provides a lengthy quote of XIX Century American journalist who uses a racial slur to describe an Afro-American transplant to Paris. Slightly less troubling is his routine tutelage of young, sexually active women as “whores.”

The author shares strange French adoration of L.-F. Séline though the man was an utter shit as personally repugnant as his Nazi views were inhumane; Jean Genet is rashly called the “enemy of all authority” (obviously not the Gestapo, association with which he flaunted long before it became safe again). Marquis de Gallifet is nicknamed by him a “sadistic dandy” for the dapper General’s role as a butcher of Paris Commune in 1871. Forgotten is the General’s achievement, as a French Minister of War, in creating professional and de-politicized French Army. Finally, the seat of Yaroslav the Wise, the Grand Prince of the Kievan Rus and Henry I father-in-law is called “an old Ukrainian city” about as accurately as it would be to call J. Caesar “an Italian dictator” or Cleopatra “an Arab princess.”

Yet, for all its defects, “Paris” is a wonderful read.