NEW IN PAPERBACK:
THE INVENTION OF PARIS: A HISTORY IN FOOTSTEPS
BY ERIC HAZAN
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“Excavating the multilayered history of the city’s landmarks in meticulous detail, Hazan’s opinionated guide also contains plenty of romance and spleen, providing an antidote to the usual guidebook bromides.” – Benjamin Evans, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
“Hazan has tossed aside the tourist brochures and unearthed a radical, hidden history of Paris at street level. Hazan’s range of cultural, literary and historical references is convincingly detailed; his grasp of radical politics is intellectually stimulating; and his revelations about how ordinary French lives dealt with tough conditions bring resonance to the “spirit of place and the spirit of time” in which complex urban issues rise and fall.” TIMES
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A tour through the streets and history of the French capital under the guidance of radical Parisian author and publisher Eric Hazan, THE INVENTION OF PARIS introduces 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 – from Balzac to Baudelaire, Blanqui to Proust, and Manet to Rousseau.
In the 140th year since the Paris Commune, this history in footsteps vividly evokes Paris’ radical tradition, interrogating what it means to be dans la rue in the wake of recent student protests and the rise of the right in the French political sphere. Examining how the capital’s urban development resembling the growth rings of trees has impacted class relations by concentrating wealth and activity at the centre, Hazan traces the internal boundaries of the city, and investigates how movement across them has become a political action. Through illuminating past Parisian political struggles, Hazan contextualizes contemporary debates of globalization versus nationalism in a tradition of city centre versus periphery, with the recent tension in the banlieue challenging the assumption that revolutionary Paris only exists on the barricades of the past.
Illustrated with photographs and maps, including a new map of central Paris that reveals the radical history of the capital’s most well-known and frequently visited tourist icons, this is a subversive guide to Paris with a difference for the engaged traveller to walking in the footsteps of the Communards, the ‘68ers and the Jacobins, excavating the layers of battle-scarred and revolutionary history – and painting the town Red.
THE INVENTION OF PARIS provides a traveller’s guide to the forgotten byways of the capital’s vibrant and bloody past, revealing the city in striking new colours.
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ERIC HAZAN is the founder of the publisher La Fabrique, and the author of several books, including NOTES ON THE OCCUPATION. He has lived in Paris, France, all his life.
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FURTHER PRAISE FOR THE INVENTION OF PARIS:
“Eric Hazan’s evocation of the hidden histories of Paris is all the more timely in the twenty-first century as the city grows denser and more complex. This book is both a political and aesthetic delight, uncovering the real mysteries of Paris.” Andrew Hussey
“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, GUARDIAN
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/17/paris-history-eric-hazan-review
“Hazan wants to rescue individual moments from general forgetting and key sites from the bland homogenisation 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
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n08/julian-barnes/a-city-of-sand-and-puddles
“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
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/search-lost-paris/
“[Hazan] stalks the capital, fulminating about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' artistic and political rebellions.” – BOOKFORUM
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ISBN: 978 1 84467 705 4 / $19.95 / £9.99 / $25.00 CAN / Paperback / 400 pages
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To read an extract commemorating the 140th anniversary of the fall of the Paris Commune visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/560-verso-commemorates-the-140th-anniversary-of-the-fall-of-the-paris-commune
For more information about THE INVENTION OF PARIS or to buy the book visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/971-the-invention-of-paris
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