The Invention of Paris

A History in Footsteps

Eric Hazan (Author), David Fernbach (Translator)

A radical guide to Paris through art, literature and revolution.

The Invention of Paris is a tour through the streets and history of the French capital under the guidance of radical Parisian author and publisher Eric Hazan.

Hazan reveals a city whose squares echo with the riots, rebellions and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining the raconteur’s ear for a story with a historian’s command of the facts, he introduces an incomparable cast of characters: the literati, the philosophers and the artists—Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, Flaubert, Hugo, Maney, and Proust, of course; but also Doisneau, Nerval and Rousseau.

It is a Paris dyed a deep red in its convictions. It is haunted and vitalized by the history of the barricades, which Hazan retells in rich detail. The Invention of Paris opens a window on the forgotten byways of the capital’s vibrant and bloody past, revealing the city in striking new colors.

Book Details

Paperback
June 2011
ISBN 978-1-84467-705-4
5.6 × 8.3 in / 400 pages
Territory Rights: USA and Dependencies and the Philippines.

Endorsements & Reviews

“[F]ew will be able to resist... Hazan's brick-by-brick account of the city's history of strife and political posturing is riveting.” — Publishers Weekly

“[Hazan] stalks the capital, fulminating about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' artistic and political rebellions.” — Bookforum

“One of the greatest books about the city anyone has written in decades, towering over a crowded field, passionate and lyrical and sweeping and immediate.” — New York Review of Books

“Amid the intellectual murkiness of the European scene, a few bright flames are burning: as witness the work of Eric Hazan.” — New Left Review

“Do you want to be happy? Buy this book and take a stroll.” — Les Inrockuptibles

“This is a wondrous book, either to be read at home with a decent map, or carried about sur place through areas no tourists bother with.” — Adam Thorpe, The Guardian

“Hazan wants to rescue individual moments from general forgetting and key sites from the bland homogenization of international city development; he is also a passionate left-wing historian seeking to rescue the truth of Paris’s revolutionary past.” — Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

“Hazan is all business. He trudges through Paris street by street, quoting what Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire or Kafka said about a particular spot, pointing out where barricades were once erected and thieves gathered for drinks.” — Donald Morrison, Financial Times

“With its astonishing breadth of reference and incredible detail, this is a must for all lovers of Paris.” — Kevin Rushby, author of Paradise: A History of the Idea that Rules the World