Paris, the City of Light. The city of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of soft cheese and fresh baguettes. Or so tourist brochures would have you believe. In The Other Paris: The People’s City, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Luc Sante reveals the city’s hidden past, its seamy underside, one populated by working and criminal classes that, though virtually extinct today, have shaped Paris over the past two centuries.

The Other Paris is read by the author and will be available October 27th.

Publishers Weekly Magazine recently featured a full length author profile of Luc Sante. Here is a highlight:

As The Other Paris bluntly notes, “improving” a city usually means cordoning off its poor people and limiting their control over their neighborhoods and lives. “Look at the American equivalent: urban renewal,” Sante remarks. “In theory it was supposed to make life cleaner and more manageable, but in many cities it also knocked out historically black neighborhoods and their networks of mutual aid; they were never the same again, and suddenly people were living in these barracks.”

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