WHEN earlier this year brainwashed hoodlums blew up bars, restaurants and a rock venue in the centre of Paris, killing 130 people, it was widely interpreted as an assault on western civilisation and our liberal way of life. The victims were doing what most of us like to do when we have down time: eat, drink, meet friends, listen to music, dance, canoodle, chill out. Their killers, we were led to believe, found this abhorrent and irreligious, and it’s possible they did. Who knows what passes through the deranged minds of bampots when they’re strapped in a suicide vest and are totting an AK47. It’s more likely, however, that far from disapproving of others enjoying themselves they felt envious of them. They wanted what we have and had come to realize that they, being losers, were unlikely to get it, hence their option for oblivion.

Much was made, too, of the fact that Paris was the locus for this massacre. This was understandable. For many centuries, as Luc Sante describes in The Other Paris, the French capital was the one place on the planet to which people flocked to escape persecution, to progress, to be themselves and behave as they pleased, pursuing their predilections, seeking out like-minded souls, making art. In Paris anything went and everyone was accepted for who they said they were. It offered a home to the weird and wonderful, the perverse and profane, the hopelessly addicted and the seriously deluded. Moreover, it was, as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and their fellow American expats discovered, an extraordinarily cheap place in which to live and work. For them, to be poor in Paris meant that they could enjoy a lifestyle that would have been impossible virtually anywhere else.

For the French, as Sante underlines, it was the Great Yen, sucking everything towards it like an elephantine Dyson. To make it in France it was necessary to shake the mud from your boots and chance your luck in the City of Light. It is one of the overwhelming themes of French literature, typified by Honoré de Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac who, in Old Goriot, discovers that whatever Parisian streets are paved with it is not with gold. Rastignac is from the provinces and gazes upon Paris as Neil Armstrong did the Moon. To him it is an alien, beautiful, almost incomprehensible place, as it was to his creator when he first arrived there with his family from Tours in 1814, the aim being for him to become a lawyer, like Rastignac.

Balzac is one of the dominant presences in this marvellous book. Like Sante, he was a flâneur, which is a great word for a seemingly quotidian pastime. Rambling, which may be the nearest English equivalent, fails to convey the full flavour of flâneuring. “Paris,” writes Sante, “invented the flâneur and continues to press all leisurely and attentive walkers into exercising that pursuit, which is an active and engaged form of interaction with the city, one that sharpens concentration and enlarges empathy and overrides mere tourism. The true flâneur takes in construction sites and dumps, exchanges greetings with bums and truck drivers and the women washing their sidewalks in the morning, consumes coffees and gros rouge at as many bus stop cafés as terrace-decked boulevard establishments, studies trash and graffiti and sidewalk displays and gutters and rooftops, devotes as much attention to the arcades filled with dentists’ offices or Indian restaurants as to the ones lined with antique shops, spends more time in Monoprix than at the Louvre.”

That, in a nutshell, is how I spent much of my time in Paris this past year. And it was how Proust and Balzac, Colette and Simenon, Bechet and Baldwin and countless other learned to love it. Balzac, when he was not evading creditors, had a tendency to stalk people as they went about their daily business, the better to know how and where they lived. His Paris was one of narrow winding streets on which the sun rarely shone. Making his way through them, he recalled, was like walking through cellars. It was so dark that even in summer residents had to put on lights by late afternoon. It was a Paris in which the demarcation between rich and poor was even starker than it is at present. Everyone who was anyone had a title, even Balzac added the ‘de’ to his name to make it sound more impressive. Paris has always been a city of poseurs and conmen, fakers and philosophers.

Belgian-born Sante, whose previous books include Low Life: Lives and Snares of Old New York, writes joyfully, but nevertheless this book is a lament for the city that seems to be evaporating. Like London, like New York, like Edinburgh, the essential character of Paris is relentlessly being eroded in face of rapacious developers and urban sanitization. As the world becomes ever more homogenized, places lose their uniqueness and become like everywhere else. The poor, meanwhile, are edged out, in the case of Paris to the sink estates known as the banlieues, whose population has been steadily rising for the past century and where trouble inevitably brews. Perhaps this will result in another revolution but whether the fabric itself will survive is another matter.

Sante, who knows it as well as Balzac and Hugo, takes us on a journey into its underworld, the city of night rather than light, when it throws off the cloak of respectability and becomes something more sinister and more interesting. It is then that the likes of Jacques Mesrine, for a while the most wanted man in France, come out of the shadows. Though he insisted in his memoirs that he had killed thirty-nine people he is still regarded by his fellow countrymen as a folk hero, especially by disenfranchised youths. Another night owl was Marcel Proust, who spent all day incarcerated in his cork-lined room, leaving his house in the wee small hours to explore the Paris he describes so brilliantly in Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a place where criminals come out to play and prostitutes ply their trade either on the streets or in bars or brothels. Lest we need any reminding it was to Paris that young men were sent to lose their virginity. Prostitution, remarks Sante, has so long been associated with Paris that you could be forgiven for thinking it had been invented there. Like the society of which they were a part, prostitutes came in all manner of classes, from those catering for the aristocracy to those who had to take their chances on mean and dark streets. One of the more upmarket establishments was Le Chabanais, near the Palais-Royal, which opened in 1878. Its “star boarder’, says Sante, was Edward VII, “who had a truly remarkable stirrup chair built to his specifications and kept on the premises for erotic configurations that can only be surmised”.

The Other Paris teems with such stories. Poetically written, it is lavishly and cleverly illustrated with grainy photographs, cartoons, posters, paintings, prints, book jackets and magazine covers. As a guide there is none better than Luc Sante. For even as he illuminates and educates and makes you want to hop aboard the first flight out to Charles de Gaulle, you can’t help but wonder what kind of Paris you will find when you arrive.