A Walk Through Paris: A Radical Exploration

Eric Hazan, author of the acclaimed The Invention of Paris, leads us by the hand in this walk from Ivry to Saint-Denis, passing such familiar landmarks as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pompidou Centre, the Gare du Nord and Montmartre, as well as little-known alleyways and arcades. Filled with historical anecdotes, geographical observations and literary references, Hazan's walk guides us through an unknown Paris. He shows us how, through planning and modernisation, the city's revolutionary past has been erased in order to enforce a reactionary future; but by walking and observation, he shows us how we can regain our knowledge of the radical past of the city of Robespierre, the Commune, Sartre and the May '68 uprising. And by drawing on his own life story, as surgeon, publisher and social critic, Hazan vividly illustrates a radical life lived in the city of revolution.

About the Author :
Eric Hazan is the founder of the publisher La Fabrique and the author of several books, including the celebrated The Invention of Paris. He has lived in Paris all his life.

Review :
An ardent student of the anatomy of the city, Hazan is a keen observer with a remarkable memory: despite his limitations, he has written an unmissable account of Paris's unique and defiant physiognomy. Fifty years after the demonstrations and strikes of May 1968, it seems right to include a book that traces the history of radicalism, protest and attempted erasures in the City of Light. Hazan takes us on a very French journey through the French capital's intellectual as well as urban and architectural history, illuminating forgotten markers of radical struggle alongside the architectures of empire, representation and modernity. The writer and publisher Eric Hazan, who was born on the Left Bank in 1936, vividly evokes the atmosphere of the time in his new book, A Walk Through Paris. This is not a guidebook... [Hasan] sees the beauty, of course, and sniffs at some recent attempts at "architecture," but he's most dedicated to uncovering the spots where revolutionary blood has been scrubbed from the cornerstones of pre- and post-Haussmannian buildings - the spirit of revolt the city's planners still try to keep at bay. The book is a thought-provoking read full of information that only a lifelong Parisian can know. Riots were a fact of 20th-century life, too, and the anniversary of the civil unrest of Paris in May 1968 is marked by Eric Hazan, who revisits the key sites in A Walk Through Paris. The book is rich, dense and allusive and Hazan is remarkably good company, endlessly digressive and serious about his politics, but always good humoured and, most importantly, still in love with the city. Hazan has written one great book about Paris. This is merely excellent. He has a languorous style that disguises a serious purpose. Thus he can point out where Baudelaire was born, where Picasso painted Guernica and where Nerval committed suicide almost in the style of a practised conductor on an open-top bus while pursuing more original thoughts. In tracing a continuity of resistance and its presence within the contradictions of the contemporary city, Hazan makes a compelling argument that 'the people have not lost the battle of Paris'. This book similarly brings the solitary act of reading and the social experience of urban life into constant dialogue. Passages from Balzac, Baudelaire and André Breton come to mind at different street corners, verbal illuminations reflecting the ambience of a particular locale. In these enlightened pages, Hazan deftly guides the reader through a Paris where history and literature animate the lived experience of the present. Hazan is much concernced with riot, insurrection, protest, and revolution. He is, naturally, on the side of the proletariat. A Walk Through Paris is sometimes a work of urbanism, sometimes a subversive history book, sometimes a kind of tourist guide. Eric Hazan's elegant, characteristically learned account of his journey through contemporary Paris, written in a tone both intimate and authoritative, is at once a companionably unhurried evocation of the city's rich, radical past and-at a time when capital is dramatically reorganising its topography-a bracingly urgent intervention in debates about the city's future. As André Breton might have observed, there really are no lost steps here.