Lorànt Deutsch

Métronome was sold under the ingenious gimmick of using Paris' ubiquitous metro stations as markers for the city's history. Vienna's metro stations are about 500 meters distant from each other. Parisian metro stations, however, rarely are beyond 100 meters of a peer. Often, it is quicker and easier to walk to the next station than to enter the metro. There are many tales of tourists being sent on long metro trips only to emerge barely a few hundred meters from their point of destination. Apart from their density, Parisian metro stations also have highly memorable names of famous men (Kléber, Victor Hugo, Pasteur, Jean Jaurès, ...) and battles past (Wagram, Sébastopol, Bir-Hakeim, ...).

Unfortunately, Deutsch chose the metronome as his guiding principle. Every century receives its own chapter which dooms the book to a tale of distant path about a Paris that no longer exists. The global city of Paris was built in the 19th and 20th century. Even the metro system, to which Deutsch's marketing pays so much tribute has to be inserted into the overtaxed chapter of the 20th century. The failing of the book's structure was already apparent in the four part documentary presented by the author. The first three parts, notable by the constant bad hair days of the Parisians, deal with the time period up to 1500. The final part thus has the impossible task of presenting five hundred years of modern Paris. This could have been a much better book. Robert Hughes' Barcelona justly condenses the first 1,000 years of the city's existence into only a few pages. While Paris certainly had a richer early history, a similar approach would have created happier readers.… (more)