Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne<br></br>Paris, Capital of the World by Patrice Higonnet trans. Arthur Goldhammer

For better or worse, you can't have Paris without the Parisians, says David Coward

Mozart thought that Parisians were "asses" and Mark Twain said "Paris is damnable". But, on the whole, Paris has had rave reviews. For Chateaubriand it was quite simply "the capital of the civilised world". Rio or New York may be bigger and London can still offer delightful anonymity. But Paris has kept its human scale and it offers classier delights: talk, lunch and style.

Mozart was right, though: Parisians can spoil the effect. Alistair Horne gently chides that most devout of adopted Parisians, the historian Richard Cobb, for muttering in a moment of exasperation: "France is wonderful: pity about the French." He understands, but he refuses to apply the sentiment to Parisians, and insists that their city is "exciting" – maybe too exciting at times, he adds. London can boast a fire, a plague and one measly regicide; Paris has had several revolutions (one "rather big"), lots of king-killings, sieges, occupations and more than its fair share of civil wars.

Horne's Paris is the sum of its history. He starts at the beginning, when Roman Lutetia was inhabited by the Parisii, reaches 1180 by page 19 and thereafter leads us on a bracing tour of 800 years of turbulence. He is a lucid, thoughtful guide to the slow emergence of Paris as a rather paradoxical capital city. It was never France's commercial or industrial heart. It was more the political hub of the national wheel that turned at a speed dictated not by gradients but by the centre.

Accordingly, Horne concentrates on its political, religious, institutional, diplomatic, economic and military affairs. He gives full weight to the link between power struggles and the embellishment of the city, from Notre Dame, which celebrated an age of faith, to the Eiffel Tower and the Tour Montparnasse, which fix their era. Horne's heroes are, consequently, the modernisers and men of vision – Saint-Louis, Louis XIV, Napoleon III, de Gaulle – who gave Paris its pride and the monuments on which to hang it.

Yet Horne's Paris, city of events and architecture, is oddly underpopulated. The social-history quotient is low. We do not learn how Parisians lived, what they read, thought, or ate and drank. Nor is the reputation of Paris as a city of culture vindicated, for the coverage is superficial. The embattled Enlightenment, for instance, is neutralised as "gentle reasoning" and Thirties cinema, an undoubted glory, is summarily dismissed.

Horne offers the view from the corridors of power. We never discover who the Parisians were, how they made their city, or why they have been for so long the nation's awkward squad. Instead, after this or that upheaval, we hear that "life soon returned to normal" and are left to assume that Parisians gently nodded off until the next time.

Puzzling, too, is the significance of his Seven Ages. If something Shakespearean is intended, then Paris has been in its dotage for a generation, for his portrait breaks off in 1968. Since then, Paris and Parisians have been coping with the death of ideology, multiculturalism, the youth rebellion, decentralisation, its first mayors since 1789, the rise of popular culture and the city's makeover as a theme park for tourists. Horne's book is an observant, astute, highly readable history of the events that made Paris. But it does rather leave out its inhabitants.

Patrice Higonnet is much less interested in events and Parisians than in myths. He, too, reproves Cobb, calling him "a dyed-in-the-wool empiricist". Now, this is about as rude to the Anglo-Saxon as a French intellectual can get, and Paris, Capital of World, splendidly translated by the indefatigable Arthur Goldhammer, puts us right. "Like it or not," Higonnet observes sternly, "we are all disciples of Michel Foucault".

Pragmatists will gulp and may prefer to reflect on the fey theory of "telluric radiations", once advanced by Marcel Pagnol to explain why Paris is the cleverest place on earth. Whoever is in charge of the ray-gun seems to have turned it off in the mid-Eighties, when all the little workshops in Saint Germain that manufactured several theories a week closed. Only intellectuals outside France are now paid-up Foucauldians. The domestic breed is now interventionist and uncharacteristically empirical.

In the event, fears of French cleverness are misplaced, for Higonnet's basic argument is clear and backed by a wealth of evidence. He begins in 1750, when Paris acquired its definitive status as the political and administrative capital of France. Feudal authority faded, and was replaced by a Paris-driven faith in change and progress.

From then on, the capital was the centre of all that was modern. Where its men of science, culture and politics led, the 19th century followed. By 1890, "modernity" had been achieved and this, after 1960 and the structuralist revolution, turned into our current condition of postmodernity. This analysis has the merit of having, like Ancient Gaul or the hors d'oeuvres/steak-frites/ dessert of the traditional menu, a properly French, tripartite structure. It also enables Higonnet to show that the period from the Revolution of 1789 to the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s produced all the myths that the 20th century exploited, adapted and replayed as lesser, softer, inauthentic "phantasmagorias".

Higonnet proceeds thematically through Paris as the capital of the Self, of Revolution, Crime, Sex, Alienation, Pleasure and the Great Exhibition syndrome. An unobtrusively learned master of ceremonies, he draws on a vast knowledge of the culture and history of the 19th century. He misses very little: gastronomy and cafés, Haussmann's urban facelift, museums and stations, the Parisienne, "le tout Paris", modernism and its enemies – chief among them Baudelaire, for whom progress was "a doctrine for Belgians". His Paris is a "text" to be deciphered, and his reading fixes the Great War as the limit of the "authentic" myths of Paris.

But he, too, closes his account early, in 1945. That leaves us to speculate that existentialists and the generation of 1968 were the lite-offspring of an older bohemianism, that sports fans are the warriors of a less beastly nationalism, or Parisian chic is an extension of Belle Epoque elegance.

Even so, Higonnet's high-octane thesis of an "inauthentic" but powerful mythic residue is seductive. Paris has been living off its "phantasmagorias" for three generations, and he concedes that it will never again be the capital of the civilised world. But it could still have a role. He concludes with a post-Maastricht scenario that is not quite as impertinent as it first sounds: a European might yet be "a person for whom Paris is the capital of Europe". Why not? After all, Bogart reminded Bergman in Casablanca that although their future was now behind them, "We'll always have Paris."

David Coward's 'A History of French Literature' was published this year by Blackwell