The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 22 March 2009
by Alistair Horne
You can stand on le Petit Pont that spans the Seine and look up at the towers of Notre Dame and down at the water that flows between the stone embankments. You can look at the magnificent jumble of facades that, nevertheless, form a cohesive whole of historic charm and elegance. And, you can ask yourself if you feel the span of history of that site. You can do this in any place. Humans have set foot on just about every square inch of this planet by now. Historic cities evoke that feeling, though, perhaps more than other places. And, every city has a history, most of them elaborate, eventful and each illustrative, in its own perspective, of the global history that surrounded it. One book that brilliantly succeeds at spanning one city's experience is Burrows and Wallace's Gotham. The city of Paris, France (as opposed to Paris, Idaho or Paris, Texas, though those places have their own histories), is celebrated in history and literature and, next to Rome, has a solid claim to be the Capitol of Europe, if not the world. There are thousands of books about Paris, the city, and maybe a million books about the various dramatic events in history that took place there, or are at least tied to the City of Light. Alistair Horne, British historian, scholar and Francophile has written several fairly specific books of French and British history. Here, as he states himself in the introduction, he collects various stories and themes in the history of Paris into a more or less idiosyncratic series of seven ages.
The seven periods each span from twenty to over three hundred years of history but, taken together, span nearly all of the thousand-year history of the city. It would be an impossibly ambitious book (compare the exhaustive detail of the much shorter history that is Gotham) if Horne planned to be complete, but this is a personal and idiosyncratic view of Parisian history that makes for an extremely engaging and fascinating read. We read of the earliest founding of the city and pass through its history in the lives of some of its most significant and powerful leaders, from Philippe-Auguste through the Napoleons and wrapping up with DeGaulle in 1968. As impossible as it is to encapsulate all of Parisian history in one book, it would be impossible to encapsulate this book in the span of a short summary here. Horne's approach, though, is sensitive and even compassionate. Along the way, in the midst of great events, he describes how the city fabric itself evolves at the hands of great builders and destroyers (sometimes both wrapped in one person). He describes city life, too, and evokes for the reader much of what it must have felt like to live through various periods of the city's history. Imagine, for example, an ancient and beautiful city of light that had, effectively, no sewers. Imagine life under the occupation in World War 2, and the necessities of life that made the whole population collaborators in their subjugation. Imagine witnessing the assassination of a medieval monarch or the execution of the assassin. Horne, no doubt, is in love with his subject. It shines through on every page. The book is sweeping in its expanse, but also oddly intimate. It's a brilliant overview of the history of the City of Light, an expensive, beautiful, frustrating and shining capitol.