The people and the place

Where to begin? Graham Robb, like all dedicated Francophiles, begins early, when his enlightened parents made him a present of a trip to Paris and sent him off with a map and a voucher for a free gift at the Galeries Lafayette. For a week, and then two weeks, and then six months, he did what all visitors do: he walked the length of the city, he bought books, he sat in cafés and listened to the conversations of strangers. This apprenticeship made him the historian and biographer he is today, and this book is a form of homage to Paris and to those who choose to see it as their home.

To adapt Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum, one is not born a Parisian, one becomes one. Many of the characters in this chronicle were not born in Paris: all they had in common was the language and the agility that denotes the true Frenchman. As of right, Robb’s survey, which runs from the 18th century to the present day, begins with Napoleon, as a young lieutenant, lodging at the Hotel de Cherbourg and enjoying the freedom of the Palais Royal. It is arguably Napoleon who is the tutelary genius of Paris, and whose vision of the world without ambiguities was responsible, many years after his death, for Baron Haussmann’s great boulevards which replaced the secretive streets so conducive to conspiracy and violence.

This is the method that informs the book, to twin a personality with an architectural construct, a person with a place. Thus a topical history is established in which people and places play an equal part. This makes for an ever-expanding canvas in which the author is completely at ease, although the reader may protest at the proliferation of anecdote, rather like a novice arriving in the city for the first time.