Keith Reader was Visiting Emeritus Professor at the University of London Institute in Paris. His previous books include 'The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier' (LUP, 2011), 'French Cinema : A Student’s Guide' (Longman, 2003) and 'The Papin Sisters' (OUP, 2001).

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter One’The poor and the well-to-do lived side by side in the same street’ : The Marais before the French RevolutionChapter Two ‘Grass grows, a passer-by is an event, and everybody knows everybody else’: the Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary PeriodChapter Three‘This is why the Jews had their ghetto there’ : the Marais in the pre-Second War twentieth centuryChapter Four‘The Occupation robbed them of their childhood, their adolescence’: the Marais in the war years and the Fourth RepublicChapter Five‘The inhabitants are taken into account’ (?): the conservation of the MaraisChapter Six‘A different kind of ghetto’ : the gay Marais comes to dominate its Jewish predecessor

'This book offers a rich and stimulating cultural topography of the Marais quarter of Paris, from the Middle Ages to the present day. The author nimbly synthesizes a wide range of historical research on the quarter. This in turn furnishes the context for the more original dimension of the project: the close reading of the ways in which the Marais figures in a range of cultural representations.'Douglas Smith, University College Dublin