Vice, Crime and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld, by Dominique Kalifa

Anglophone researchers and teachers will welcome this English translation of Dominique Kalifa’s Les Bas-fonds: Histoire d’un imaginaire. The core of the book is the topic on which Kalifa has published fifteen previous books, and many more articles—nineteenth-century crime and mass culture—but Kalifa embraces a long time frame that takes the story of the birth of the underworld back to the medieval period and traces its gradual effacement into the late twentieth century. There is much here that will be familiar to specialists: the idea of the hierarchical counter-society with its picturesque slang, the comparisons contemporaries made between the underworld and the ‘New World’and with Africa, the ‘disguised princes’ and other voluntary slummers who engaged in the racy tourism of the ‘Grand Dukes’ Tour’of dive bars and dodgy quarters.