The Other Paris

A trip through Paris as it will never be again--dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian

Paris, the City of Light. The city of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of soft cheese and fresh baguettes. Or so tourist brochures would have you believe. InThe Other Paris, Luc Sante reveals the city's hidden past, its seamy underside--one populated by working and criminal classes that, though virtually extinct today, have shaped Paris over the past two centuries.
Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses--from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps--Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris; through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians; through the massive garbage dump at Montfaucon, active until 1849, in which, "at any given time the carcasses of 12,000 horses . . . were left to rot."
A wildly lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, of the reporters, realiste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution,The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bon vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and days of the forgotten poor.

Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. His other books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, andKill All Your Darlings. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. He has contributed to The New York Review of Bookssince 1981, and has written for many other magazines. He is the visiting professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College and lives in Ulster County, New York.