“After reading this book, you will have a deeper understanding of a people that the rest of the world has always envied. » The Washington Post Paris, city of the arts and elegance, of fragrant refinement, of romantic poetry? Who still believes in this surface cliché? The real Paris has been built over the centuries on something other than cotton wool: blood, mud and sperm. This is the thesis carefully and passionately demonstrated by Andrew Hussey, an iconoclastic scholar so in love with the French capital that he accepts all of its past vices. Scenes of debauchery, cannibalism, corruption, massacres, famines, prostitution, diseases and other festivities clog the foundations of this sublimely monstrous city. It needed an Englishman to scrutinize the novel of Paris without fuss, through the eyes of the common people, the lowlands, the dangerous classes and the insurgents. The Great History is however not neglected - we come across in this titanic story the greatest names, from Philippe le Bel to Catherine de Médicis -, but it shows its true face, cruel and crazy. Best-seller in Anglo-Saxon countries, here is a cheerfully dark look at the City of Light, which will be a landmark.