Graham Robb’s Parisians is a strange book indeed. It is ostentatiously clever, dizzyingly mannered, and idiosyncratic on the one hand, but also far-reachingly researched, deeply experienced, and evocatively summoned up on the other. It is like those trick drawings of cubes that in the twinkling of an eye go from convex to concave and back again. One moment the book reaches out to you in its incisiveness and panoramic fascination, the next it raises your eyebrows with its game-playing, mystifications, and one-upmanship, though the good easily outweighs the questionable.
Robb has published highly regarded biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud. He also wrote Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century and The Discovery of France, about four years’ worth of exploring his favorite country by bicycle, which won several important prizes. But Parisians may be his most spectacular work yet.
In twenty sizable chapters he gives us pictures of Paris from 1750 to the present, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Nicolas Sarkozy. In each, one or more famous—or at least noteworthy—Parisians are portrayed against the background of their milieu. There are ample quotations, but Robb is the ubiquitous narrator, up close and uncannily personal with the principal people involved. Robb’s narrative also digresses, roaming freely to encompass equally absorbing sidelights and marginal figures. Much of it is historical reconstruction; the sources are documented in the imposing bibliography. But much of it is also Robb filling in, from his invention and interpretation, minuscule details of action and
