Product Description

Paris arouses strong emotions. In its long and vast history, it has been variously represented as a prison, a paradise and a vision of hell. It has also been characterised as a beautiful woman, a sorceress and a demon. As Andrew Hussey shows in this remarkable book, literature is an accurate reflection of daily life: Paris really is made up of violently different spaces and multiple personalities, always at odds with each other and often in noisy collision. It has been like this for nearly two thousand years. Like Peter Ackroyd's biography of London, Andrew Hussey's book on Paris makes no claim to be a definitive history. Instead, it is an account of the city's history from the point of those who experienced its citizenry. The city itself is like a palimpsest: the very stones and street names allude to its often violent and turbulent past. It is a city of secret adventures, of hidden meanings which, on journeys from royal palaces to bars, brothels and opium dens, this book uncovers. Covering two thousand years of Paris' history, this is a sweeping, vivid portrait of an endlessly fascinating city.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #299148 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

Simon Sebag-Montefiore
‘Outrageously readable, impressively researched, shockingly violent alternative history of Paris . . . A fascinating riot of a book’

David Starkey
‘Fascinating . . . A vivid sans-culottes history, from the street up. Hussey reveals the City of Light’s myriad dark secrets’

Jason Burke, The Observer
'Magnificent and entertaining . . . More than 400 acute, riveting pages full of thousands of colourful characters, references, details and colours'

Customer Reviews

Paris: The Secret History - Andrew Hussey
In short, this a 'Horrible History' for adults. It is not history in the academic sense. It's more like biography, and owes much to Peter Ackroyd's biography of London. Hussey doesn't deal in causes, trends or ideas; his currency is anecdotes. This a big book of gory and sexy titbits from Parisian history, sorted into chronological order.

The subject matter should make for light reading, but somehow, despite the breakneck pace of the anecdotes, something goes wrong. The small print, long paragraphs, and dry, humourless prose drag the book down. Furthermore, I'm no expert on the history of Paris, but when I did know a little bit about a period I noticed factual inaccuracies. For example, Danton was with the Cordeliers Club (not the Jacobin Club), and there was only one Committee of Public Safety in the Revolution, not many.

For these reasons, this book arguably gives you less value than a Horrible History. Hussey has sacrificed depth for breathless narrative in the hope of reaching out to a wide audience, but the stream of details feels laboured and aimless. Unlike the city, 'Paris: The Secret History' fails to capture the imagination, and is barely more fun than reading academic history.

not all it claims to be
I found this a very disappointing book. There's little that's truly 'secret' about it, and not much historical method either. It reads like a journalist's book,full of vague, general assertions without hard references to back them up. Colin Jones' 'Paris', though a tougher read, covers the same ground with much greater detail and rigour. I came away wondering why the book had been written, when the author seems to dislike so much about Paris.

Great light read
I took this to Paris on my last visit. It's not an academic read, nor does it set out to be one. This is a great light read highly entertaining, especially if you are intending visiting the city as it brings a perspective to this long established and highly entertaining metropolis.