Ah, Paris. City of Light. Crucible of democracy. Fountainhead of fine cuisine, elegant architecture, stylish women. And — as Andrew Hussey notes in his sprawling and energetic new biography of the burg — a cesspool of crime, prostitution, wanton slaughter and appalling sanitation. Paris may be the world's favorite city, but few of the 25 million annual visitors realize that its handsome streets are paved with blood and merde.

Hussey, a British lecturer in French literature, spares none of those humors. For most of its 20 centuries, he writes in Paris: The Secret History, the city was little more than a muddy island in the Seine River notorious for depravity and rebellion. In the 1400s, nearly

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) one-third of its 250,000 residents supported themselves by begging, according to one estimate, and an average of 15 freshly murdered corpses turned up on the streets every morning.

Parisians were plagued by famine, Seine-borne diseases and a long menu of military disasters at which they were little more than bystanders. A 1590 siege by the future Henri IV, for instance, killed an estimated 100,000 residents and drove many to cannibalism. Paris, writes Hussey, has long been "a good place to be stabbed or raped, or to starve to death."

So were a lot of cities. But as one of France's few metropolises without a charter, Paris had little control over its affairs. Instead, it was ruled directly by some of history's most hapless monarchs. Charles VI (1388-1422) was so batty that he avoided contact with Parisians, or anyone, because he thought he was made of glass and would shatter. Henry III (1574-1589) imprisoned his jester in the Bastille for suggesting that there were poor people in Paris.

No wonder Parisians are so prickly. As in the great 1789 revolution and the lesser-known 1830 rebellion against Charles X — featuring 4,054 barricades made with 800,000 handy Parisian cobblestones — the locals like to vent. A university town since the early Middle Ages, Paris hosted the world's first student protest, a 1229 strike over the price of wine, as well as its most famous: the May 1968 événements that mixed serious grievances with street theater. That formula was on display in the widely publicized Paris upheavals of the past year, says Hussey, though the cobblestones were gone. The government covered most of them with tarmac shortly after the 1968 riots.

Thick as a cobblestone at 500-plus pages, Paris: The Secret History is being promoted as an answer to Peter Ackroyd's successful 2000 London: The Biography. Much like that hefty volume, Paris teems with characters straight out of a novel by Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo or Emile Zola, who are themselves among the book's colorful players. So is the scheming Catherine de Médicis, who in the late 1500s sent a basket of fruit to a crosstown rival; the man fed an apple to his dog, which died on the spot.

Some of Paris' figures are still making waves. Consider Michel Houellebecq, France's most notorious novelist. Hussey, who also covers sports for Britain's Observer, shares a beer and a televised football match with the sex-obsessed writer and finds him to be a closet prude. As the historian paraphrases the novelist: "Total sexual freedom is not only impossible but comes at a very high price."

Like all lovers of Paris, Hussey frets about its future. Encircled by hideous postwar housing blocks and losing its flavorful working class to rising prices, central Paris is in danger of becoming an "empty museum" for tourists and the rich. But Hussey also traces the 20th century migration of young artists and intellectuals from Montmartre to Montparnasse to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and now to some previously "marginal" arrondissements, and he sees potential for continued vitality.

The history of Paris is a conflict between the authorities and "the dreamer, the dissident, the subversive, the agitator," concludes Hussey. "Paris still offers all the delicious and exhausting extremes of modern life." Pity about the cobblestones.

• DONALD MORRISON
• A biography of Paris depicts it as a seedy, violent town, yet with hope for the future