A Walk Through Paris

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. -- Lauren Elkin * Guardian *
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. -- Edwin Heathcote * Financial Times *
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. -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Financial Times *
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. * New York Times *
The book is a thought-provoking read full of information that only a lifelong Parisian can know. * France Magazine *
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. -- Tom Gatti * New Statesman *
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. -- Andrew Hussey * New Statesman *
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. -- Hugh Macdonald * Sunday Herald *
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. -- Eugene Brennan * Washington Post *
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. -- Geoff Nicholson * LA Review of Books *
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. -- Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking