Arthur Goldhammer
The city hall of Siena, Italy, features a series of frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. One, titled Allegory of Good Government, represents the virtues thought to promote a healthy civic order, while another, an allegory of bad government, castigates vices such as avarice, pride, and vainglory, which were held to contribute to the misery of the populace. Luc Sante’s The Other Paris aims to stand this representation of the city on its head. For Sante, the civic order that Lorenzetti praised is an artificial construct imposed on the “wild” city by “the exigencies of money and the proclivities of bureaucrats—as terrified Years ago, I taught a course on the French Revolution. At the end of one class, an earnest student posed a question about something that clearly troubled her. Being Korean, she wondered what this ruckus in eighteenth-century France had to do with her. Why study it in such exhaustive detail? Was France really that important? And why should what happened there 225 years ago matter to a young woman from half a world away? 
As I sit down to write this review of a book about persistent French cultural pathologies, Paris has just witnessed a mass march against the government of Socialist president François Hollande. On this self-styled “Day of Wrath,” one contingent of demonstrators sang a Holocaust-mocking ditty titled “Shoah-nanas,” made popular by the comedian Dieudonné; recently, France’s minister of the interior banned Dieudonné’s one-man show Le mur as an affront to “human dignity” for its allegedly anti-Semitic content. Dieudonné’s defenders sometimes claim that his performances are not anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist. The Paris demonstrators made it clear, however, that they have little