The Other Paris

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. In The Other Paris: The People's City, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 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 …