Description: Vice, Crime, and Poverty traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Dominique Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience.
Brief description: Dominique Kalifa is professor of History at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. He is a specialist of the history of crime, social control, and mass culture in 19th and early 20th France and Europe. He is the author of several books including L'Encre et le sang. Récits de crimes et société à la Belle Époque (Fayard, 1995), Crime et culture au XIXe siècle (Perrin, 2005), and Les Bas-fonds. Histoire d'un imaginaire (Seuil, 2013).
Review Quotes: Kalifa is the leading historian still teaching and writing about modern French history in France. In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, he shows how the lowest of the lower classes came to be represented by, or analogized with, indigenous colonized peoples. He offers interesting reflections on the successors of the inhabitants of the bas-fonds and the emergence of new designations for them, along with the internationalization of crime. Yet again, Kalifa provides much to discuss.--John Merriman, author of Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree that Gripped Belle Epoque Paris