Paris: the Secret History by Andrew Hussey

From sedition to stagnation?

A few weeks ago, a new film, with the decidedly banal title Paris, je t'aime, opened in the French capital. My French teacher - a true cinéphile - warned me off it. "C'est nul," she said, using the argot for "rubbish", "avec toutes les tendances 'Amélie Poulain'" - Jean-Pierre Jeunet's hit film with Audrey Tautou, which portrayed Paris as a hyper-surreal, hyper-charming picture postcard.

Well, I didn't listen to my teacher's advice and caught an afternoon screening of the film. Alas, she was absolutely right. The movie is made up of 20 or so "short stories" by assorted French and international directors, set in the city's disparate arrondissements.

Besides the generally poor narrative quality of these courts métrages, what struck me was how all of the film-makers (with a few exceptions such as Walter Salles, Olivier Assayas and Alexander Payne) couldn't help but fall for the city's visual grandeur. There was establishing shot after establishing shot of some grand boulevard, or the shimmering waters of the Seine, or (that perennial favourite) Paris by night.

Why is it that we so embrace the romantic cliché that is Paris... a cliché that extends beyond the visual into the realm of the social? Read the novels of Diane Johnson (such as Le Divorce) or the essays of Adam Gopnik (to name two of my compatriots who have written lushly about contemporary life here), and you find yourself sucked into a richly material world where people form a committee to save a Rive Gauche brasserie, where you learn how to make the perfect cassoulet, and where everyone has a jardin secret.

But to live la vie quotidienne parisienne is not to exist in some Woody Allen fantasia, in which everyone discusses Foucault au Flore. My area - the Sixth - may have a square honouring Beauvoir and Sartre, but it has long since lost its "Quartier Intello" credentials, and been transformed into a beau monde playground of designer shops and astronomic property prices.

Yes, the small independent cinemas showing seasons of obscure Finnish films still exist, but they are under threat from the multiplexes. And yes, this is still a city where writers are taken very seriously, but there is much talk in the world of French books about a lack of vitality in the current literary scene.

"Tout stagne" (everything is stagnant) is a comment I hear frequently from Parisian friends, who often enviously point to London's chaotic and boisterous multiculturalism as an exemplar of dynamic metropolitan life. Try to defend the city - pointing out that it still has great zest and cultural import - and you will be told of Paris's shrinking role in the world.

Then there is the knowledge that Paris is socially stratified, with an invisible (but still evident) cordon sanitaire that keeps indigence hidden away in the grim immigrant quarters of les banlieues... out of sight for the rest of the population in les grands arrondissements until, as was seen several months ago, their frustrations explode.

But, for Andrew Hussey, Paris's manifold contemporary contradictions have been repeated throughout its complex history. More tellingly, he also understands that Paris is a city of façades (note how the hidden courtyard is a cornerstone of its urban design), and one that "seduces without mercy".

That three-word statement brilliantly elucidates, for me, the city's dangerous allure. Beneath its romantic veneer lies a coolly logical view of temporal existence, free from quixotic illusions.

As Hussey himself notes, "Parisians are not sentimental. They believe that the world is ruled by an ironic theory rather than by God... Yes, love is central to both myth and reality in Paris, but so, too, are food, drink, religion, money, war and sex... The old whore's spell is also a deadly curse".

Hussey - an English writer resident in the French capital - has set himself an audacious task: telling the story of Paris from its Celtic origins to its current self-doubt. Being inevitably wary of one-volume encapsulations of such a vast subject, I worried that his book might tumble into James A Michener terrain, engaging in the sort of stodgy "from the dawn of time" overview that is mired in detail. But Hussey proves himself to be an unapologetically opinionated and quirky writer. I warm to anyone who talks about his hangovers in the course of a historical study. He has a great eye for the thematic constants in Parisian life, and, as such, his book is bound to infuriate the sort of academics and all-purpose pedants who prefer dry analysis to the telling anecdote, let alone an "erudite raconteur" style of narration.

Yes, any chronicle of a city from 250BC to the present is, by its very nature, selective. But once the book finds its stride - starting with the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, an ethnic-cleansing of the Protestant population that "established a Europe-wide reputation for Paris as a capital of treason and murder" - Hussey proves himself to be a brilliantly engaging guide to the city's many intrigues.

His historical canvas is vast, and he is very much intent on covering every major political, artistic and architectural development that has informed or changed the city. It's a tightrope act: trying to provide, say, a lucid précis of the activities of the Paris Commune, then detail the wholesale physical reinvention of the city at the hands of Baron Haussmann, while also attempting to address the social complexities with which Balzac and Zola grappled in their fiction.

There are times when Hussey could stand accused of being a bitty generalist (a mere 26 pages doesn't do justice to the Nazi Occupation), and his final chapters on modern Paris come across as rushed and lacking in the critical intelligence that informs so much else about this book.

Still, by taking a macro approach to Paris history (and one constantly enhanced by an on-the-money observation or quirky sketch), he does manage to both entertain and inform. So, high marks to Hussey for his ambition; for his comprehension that nothing is ever as it seems in Paris, as the city has always been a "carnival of light and terror"; and for reminding us that, according to André Malraux, the Place Dauphine really does look like a vagina.

In April, Douglas Kennedy was appointed Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His new novel, 'Temptation', is published by Hutchinson in October