La Bête de Belleville

Author ‘Petite anglaise’ has been busy this week selling her book entitled, very sharply, Petite anglaise. It’s a sentimentalization of the once-tough district of Paris known as Belleville.

Catherine Sanderson has been blogging about her life in Paris since 2004, and the story she tells is how much she loved France, was determined to live there, and lived with a Frenchman for seven years (he was Mr Frog, the offspring is Tadpole – not bad, eh?). Then there was an Englishman from Rennes, then there wasn’t. She worked as a secretary, blogged from work, lost her job, won the legal case, and got the money. As a Top Blogger, she gets a £500,000 two-book advance. Now she sits writing her second book, a novel, when she can drag herself away from ‘curling up’ in a café with the morning’s Libé.

The London Sunday papers have been full of extracts and PR, which in the Observer meant Cathy selling her bourgeoise-bohémienne lifestyle by directing us to all the acceptable local cafés and restaurants. Cue photos of ‘petite’ (as she coyly blogsigns herself – it should be La petite anglaise, but when charm is your thing, who cares about the French language?), reading a book about ‘secret’ Paris, with a French ‘character’ in the background – he looked more interesting than her, frankly, and the photographer seemed to think so too, so the blogsite has a pic of him also.

The trouble with all this bo-bo stuff – “and I am one”, Cathy sweetly says – is that Belleville has an interesting history that has got lost here. At war with central Paris, it was for centuries a working-class district, tough, left-wing, and difficult. Walking down rue de Belleville was, even twenty or thirty years ago, an edgy experience. M. Apache recalls a different kind of café – full of les beurs, the local Arab-descended ex-North African population. There is not much sign of such people in la petite’s blogworld, though when Tadpole goes to school, she has friends with Arab names.

La petite seems to be more interested in the local Chinese population – passive, manageable, charming, and not political at all.

In her launch-party video-blog (by “Frog with a blog” – can’t we get away from this joke?) we see the militant middle classes pleased to have a rising star of their own to cling to.

Circa 1900, M. Apache’s forebears would retreat to Belleville after a trip down to the grands boulevards for a little biffing and thieving. In the early 1920s the Surrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton wandered the streets of Paris, transforming it in their imaginations into something rich and strange. Particularly significant was the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the park in the dix-neuvième with its square lake, central rock and unexpected Belvedere, its waterfall and bridges. For Aragon it was “This great oasis in a popular district, a shady zone where the prevailing atmosphere is distinctly murderous”, as he wrote in 1924’s Paris Peasant.

(He and his friends pass by rue Fessart – which reminds me of Béatriz’s sexy pun, recommending l’art des fesses – [Vivienne and Béatriz, where are you now? – long gone from rue des Ânnelets.])

For Aragon, Buttes-Chaumont was “a volcano of appearances”, but in the reduced sensibility of la petite it has lost its past and is simply a place from which you get a lovely view of Paris. It is her favourite Paris park, she says, and “everything about it is artificial”. True, but that seems to be all she has to say.

Petite anglaise is Cath’s blog rewritten as autobiography, as an amatory drama in which she loses Mr Frog because she loves her blog more. That (again) seems to be all she has to say. The book has been shamelessly fixed, in a downwards direction.

Both blog and book are bonk-free, though ‘the Boy’ is said to be useful in bed. It’s a common writing trick – exaggerating the minor crises of daily life, with lots of little cliff-hangers along the way.

On page one the child Tadpole starts crying on a “hairpin crescendo”. Do they have copyeditors at Michael Joseph? (Yes – see blog for 17.08.07.) On the final page, “Sometimes I feel I own this city”. This is the same Brit modesty about France that gave us Peter Mayle’s ghastly books on the Luberon. (La petite is nice, not ghastly.)

To Cath’s credit, she reminds us that in the 1871 Commune, the last barricades to fall were in Belleville. But it’s not enough.

Her taste in music and films shows she’s not nearly as dim as the autobiography makes her out to be. (See MySpace for the sparky cultural profile.)

M. Apache is sure she knows Cocteau’s film La Belle et la bête. Well….

Come on, Cath – let’s have less Belle and more Bête!