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 In 1900, Émile Zola climbed to the second platform of the Eiffel Tower, camera equipment in tow, so he could photograph Paris from every angle — because only photographs could record the panoramic city he had reconstructed in his novels. In 1940, Adolf Hitler, believing he too stood at the center of something, rose from the seat of his car as it slowly circled the Place de la Concorde before dawn; later, from the top of the Parvis du Sacré-­Coeur, he gaped at the city he had fantasized about since boyhood, when he studied street maps and dreamed of reconstructing Paris in the heart of Berlin.

Unlikely bedfellows though they are, Zola and Hitler are denizens of Graham Robb’s “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris,” a valentine to the City of Light. Robb is no stranger here. The acclaimed British author of biographies of Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud, he first experienced the city as a boy, when his parents treated him to a week’s holiday as a birthday present. But, as Robb learned, Paris is too volatile and complicated, too historically dynamic, to be illuminated by any one person’s life. His solution: to write, as he explains it, “a history of Paris recounted by many different voices,” a series of character studies arranged to commemorate the shifting streets and sundry plot lines that give meaning to the city.

Some of the figures in Robb’s Paris are familiar: Marie Antoinette, Baron Haussmann, Charles de Gaulle, even Nicolas Sarkozy. Some of Robb’s characters may be less well known — like Henry Murger, author of “La Vie de Bohème,” whom Robb satirizes as a proto-blogger dishing up “intimate slices of his life” and becoming, in effect, the “literary pimp” of his doomed mistress. Her unhappy life, the basis of his book, was his ticket out of the Latin Quarter and into a grand apartment on the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, a “new street with no history and a smooth asphalt surface,” as Robb pointedly notes, “built on wasteground at the point where the Right Bank rises up towards Montmartre.”

Though Americans may not have heard of the ingenious criminal Eugène-­François Vidocq, his portrait lies at the symbolic heart of Robb’s book. Employed by the police to track down other crooks, Vidocq spent 16 years as head of the Sûreté Brigade and then founded the Bureau of Universal Intelligence, a detective agency with a huge database of information on thousands of citizens. When the bureau closed in 1843, most of the documents vanished, as did the wily Vidocq. A master of surveillance and disguise, he turned up here and there, supposedly spying on Louis Napoleon even as he was advising him. After Vidocq died, his coffin was opened — to reveal not the master criminal but the body of an unknown woman.

To Robb, the disappearance of Vidocq’s body and of his extensive files, some of which landed in secondhand bookshops, represent the nature of Paris itself, whose very streets come and go. The city was built on sand and swamp and from plugged-up sinkholes. Only a man like Vidocq would know “how many obscure dramas were wiped from the history of Paris by demolition and urban renewal.”

No reliable map of Paris existed until the end of the 18th century. When Marie Antoinette fled the Tuileries in 1791, her carriage became lost as soon as it left the palace, turning right instead of left, crossing the Pont Royal to the dark lanes of the Left Bank. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in Paris carrying a map marked with nonexistent streets. By 1853, as Napoleon III, he had employed Georges-Eugène Haussmann to lay waste entire neighborhoods and construct open vistas with broad, leafy boulevards. Napoleon III “buried acres of history,” Robb writes. “A boulevard named after a battle obliterated the mementos of a million lives, and at the end of his reign, the Archives Nationales went up in flames.”

Yet Robb is less interested in Napoleon III than in Charles Marville, official photographer of the Louvre, who was commissioned to photograph the quartiers Haussmann would soon demolish. “It might be seen as an archaeology in reverse,” Robb wryly notes. “First the ­ruins, then the city that covers them up.” However, in Marville’s photographs the streets are empty. Perhaps long exposures would have reduced any movement to a blur; maybe that’s why he chose to take his pictures in the early morning. In any case, the people of Paris have eerily evaporated, just as Marville would. He sold his business and was never heard of again. “Every living city is a necropolis,” Robb writes, “a settling mountain of populations migrating downwards into the soil.” We retrieve what we can.

A  century later, the president of the French Republic, Georges Pompidou imagined a Paris of tall towers (to him, the spires of Notre-Dame were too short) made of high-tensile steel, along with a modern museum that would look like an oil refinery. While the Pompidou Center was being built, the historian Louis Chevalier wrote his masterpiece, “The Assassination of Paris,” in a room at the Hôtel de Ville above the one in which Haussmann remapped the city. Yet Chevalier did more than denounce the wreckers and planners. He reconstructed his beloved city from memory. “Left to itself, History would forget,” he explained. “But fortunately, there are novels — loaded with emotions, swarming with faces, and constructed with the sand and lime of language.”

Although Robb often narrates various sections from the point of view of his characters, inhabiting them and fudging, to a certain extent, the line between traditional history and make-believe, his characters don’t sound alike, which can be a hazard when a historian affects the pose of a novelist. Robb claims he wrote with “a flavor of the time in mind,” and insists he didn’t insert anything artificial into his stories. That “Parisians” required as much research as his earlier, more conventionally structured book “The Discovery of France” is evident on every page. Yet if “Parisians” resembles Simon Schama’s “Dead Certainties,” which is also about the limits of historical knowledge, Robb, in employing the techniques of the novelist, animates his characters mainly for “the pleasure of thinking about Paris.” That pleasure is also the reader’s.

The Pompidou family inhabited a town house on the Île Saint-Louis next to the building Baudelaire lived in as a young man. It’s no accident that Robb mentions this, for the poet and the novelist (as well as the historian and the photographer, the con man and the archivist) are the true protagonists of his always changing, ­always vibrant Paris.

Robb even imagines a Proust “acquainted with the law of modern life according to which one’s immediate surroundings remain a mystery while distant places seen in guidebooks and paintings are as familiar as old friends whose material presence is no longer required to maintain the friendship.” And so the miracles of modern life also include a novel, “À La Recherche du Temps Perdu,” that can’t be read between stops on the Métro and that, like Robb’s delightful mapping of Paris, captures living persons in time past, time passing and even time to come.

Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.” Her anthology, “Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing,” will be published next fall.

A version of this review appeared in print on May 2, 2010, on page BR19 of the Sunday Book Review.