I feel very sad this evening. A great writer and agitator, Éric Hazan, has died. I never met Hazan, and now I never will. But I felt powerfully that I had a sense of him from his books. This is something one quite often feels about authors whose work one likes, but I felt it with regard to Hazan strongly.
Maybe 15 years ago, I noticed a book, probably in the Verso catalogue, that intrigued me. The Invention of Paris. I got a copy and gave a copy to someone else. The someone else never read it, but no matter. I read it, or I started reading it - probably on an early visit to Paris. Sometime around 2010, I began to visit the city often. My dear friends R and R booked me into a little hotel on the north side of the Butte of Montmartre, not far from their own tiny apartment on the delightfully named Rue Cyrano de Bergerac, and I met them and ambled around parts of the city.
R and R's chaperoning was important to me, because though I was fascinated by French culture and intellectual life, I was deeply embarrassed at the inadequacy of my French. I was raised by a intensely Francophile mother, who even after years away from France was fluent in the language and read in the literature avidly. My dear mother, so gentle and forgiving in most ways, was snobbish about French pronunciation, and would correct me and others around her for infractions on the beauty of the language. So it may be that it's to her I owe my fear of using my French. But then I reached middle age, and while I didn't have a crisis and I didn't buy a Porsche, I took myself in hand in various ways. One of these was reminding myself of the obvious fact that the only way to improve my French was to use it, and to plunge into the country and the language without fear. So, though visits to Paris might be a fairly gentle or even genteel immersion, I pushed myself to visit and explore the city. And fell in love with it, of course. R and R were cicerones to me at the start of that process. Éric Hazan and The Invention of Paris were and will remain the guide and map of my love.
I had long been enamoured of French culture and intrigued by Parisian intellectual culture - the existentialists, the poststructuralists, French Marxism, the jousts of writers and activists. I had read a bit of this stuff in English. I had also been slowly working my way through the most famous nineteenth century French novelists - Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola and, particularly, Balzac. I loved them all. I still do. I've read other French writers but these are my favourites. I'd also encountered great non-French writers who could write brilliantly about the city - Walter Benjamin, in particular, but also the wonderful English Marxist geographer, still with us, David Harvey. Harvey's epic tome, Paris: Capital of Modernity, is a great account of the city and its development.
But none of these books quite caught my heart as L'Invention de Paris. Once I started reading it, with its chapters spiralling out from the old city core to the barren wilderness of the périphérique, I was completely entranced. Paris must be one of the most written-about places on earth, and I make no claim to having read more than half an iota of that literature. But I still want to say that Hazan's masterpiece is the best book ever written about the metropolis. It is detailed, it is erudite, it is salty and pithy at times, it is furious and denunciatory at others. Hazan has no compunction about describing certain developments of Paris as stupid or crude or vulgar or just shitty. He is completely trenchant in his account. Unsurprisingly, the book ends with a long account of 'Red Paris', the Paris of revolution and barricade (Hazan wrote a short brilliant book on the history of barricades), the Paris of the northeast, of Belleville and the industrial side of the city, now the part of the city of the immigrant communities, insofar as they have a toehold inside the ring road and beyond the banlieues.
Over about a decade, until stopped by the Covid crisis, I visited Paris every year, sometimes twice a year. I found a lovely little hotel in Montmartre that I kept returning to. I went often just after Christmas, when the city was maybe a little quieter than in midsummer. I walked as much as I could. I followed routes set out by Hazan across the city, in later books. But always I carried The Invention of Paris with me. I enjoyed it so much that I would smile for sheer happiness when reading it alone on the metro, for sheer pleasure at the writing. I was not using the book as a guidebook, though one could do so. It's not written as a guide, but as a psychogeographical history of Paris. But revisiting it, with a good map spread out on the table, is a pleasure too, even when at home in Dublin.
Hazan was a remarkable man. Trained as a heart surgeon, he quit the medical profession in his fifties and became a writer and publisher. His company, La Fabrique, now stands as a pre-eminent, though small, publisher of the French left, such as remains of that left. Hazan and his books, and his colleagues at La Fabrique, remain a beacon. I write this tonight, when the French right has won sweeping gains in the European elections and President Macron has called a snap general election. To say that Hazan would have had strong opinions about this would be a feeble understatement - he'd be firing off acrid but acute commentary: clever, committed, utterly fearless.
Here is Tariq Ali's obituary to Hazan, from the Verso website:
Self-quotation is usually an unattractive and pompous trait. But I will allow myself to post in some past blogposts that discuss Hazan:
Reading and Walking in Paris - The incomparable Eric Hazan
Better Fewer, But Better - Walking and Reading in Paris
At the Mur des Fédérés - remembering the Paris Commune
Conor
