‘The Other Paris’ review: Luc Sante on the City of Light’s dark side

All eyes are on Paris, as one of the world’s most beloved cities reels from the horrific attacks of Nov. 13. Whatever odes to its beauty Paris has inspired, the city has seen its share of conflict, often violent, unfold in the streets. Cries of “Aux Barricades!” echo through its history. Bohemians, vagabonds, con artists and sundry other nonconformists have also called Paris home.

This is the subject of Luc Sante’s new book, “The Other Paris.” Sante doesn’t describe the “demure white facades, discreet traffic, and well-mannered exchanges,” though the seedy lower-class worlds he pungently evokes here seem almost quaint when compared with the atrocities that unfolded this month.

By a remarkable act of conjuring, Sante brings to life the Paris of the poor, the marginal, and the downright strange during the 19th and 20th centuries — doing for Paris what he did for New York in his 1991 classic, “Low Life.” Sante’s references are obscure, and the material can be racy — there is an entire chapter on prostitution, for example — but this is a journey very much worth taking, and in its own peculiar way, a tribute to the City of Light.

Sante’s Paris is composed of myriad raffish neighborhoods (quartiers, in French). In the era before commuters, phones and screens, the quartiers were “ self-sufficient as country villages,” Sante writes. “Every parish had its eccentrics, its indigents, its clerics, its savants, its brawlers, its widows, its fixers, its elders, its hustlers, its busybodies. Most of them had known one another all their lives.” This is history as hyperlocal news.

Written with an intense level of detail, “The Other Paris” is lavishly illustrated with street scenes, paintings, photographs, movie posters, book covers and other media. Sante revels in data and taxonomies. Street names fascinate him: some are too lewd to note here, but there was once a Street of Bad Words, a Street of Lost Time, an Alley of Sighs and an Impasse of the Three Faces. As such detail accumulates, Sante’s account becomes less a history and more an incantation for a lost city.

Throughout, Sante’s eye wanders away from central Paris and onto the outlying areas, known collectively as “La Zone.” In the late 19th century, it was “sort of a tundra, empty grassland with the occasional lone tree, crossed by trails like deer runs, two-story buildings visible here and there on the far horizon.” Here, ragpickers plied their wares in open spaces, free of police harassment. Around 1900, several of these emporia became more formal markets, selling a vast profusion of junk and objects. (Some still exist: Montreuil, in the city’s eastern suburbs, is today a destination for flea market fiends.) The young Picasso haunted such places in search of old canvasses, which he cleaned and reused. Surrealist poets found inspiration in the bric-a-brac on sale.

A bewildering amount of economic activity unfolds in Sante’s chapters. Lower-class Parisians were nothing if not entrepreneurial. The oddest of jobs he details include a reveilleuse, a woman who woke those whose jobs started early in the morning. An ange gardien was “engaged by upscale wineshops and cabarets to walk drunks home.” Then there was a riboui, who “remade shoes, extending their lives by only about a week.” Almost every scrap of food and clothing was recycled — for the poor, using everything to hand was a necessity that created a whole sub-economy.

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Gangsters, naturally, fascinate Sante — their vernacular, their deeds, their swaggering comportment. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so-called apaches, with their distinctive tattoos, ill-fitting jackets and patched trousers, were known for their fighting prowess. A group of apprentices were told by an old hand, “A man uses a knife, not a revolver. Guns and such are fine for women.” Sante covers a multitude of gangster-inspired pulp novels, entertainments and magazines devoted to the criminal underworlds.

Money and bureauracrats, Sante writes, “have conspired to create the conditions for stasis, to sanitize the city to the point where there will be no surprises, no hazards, no spontaneous outbreaks, no weeds.” Paris today may be a cleaner, more orderly city, but it finds itself on the front lines of a conflict that has erupted out of the Middle East and come to Europe’s capitals. The City of Light now battles against altogether more sinister forces than those of gentrification.