Palais-Royal by Richard Sennett (Knopf: $17.95; 281 pp.)

Richard Sennett’s historical novel, set in Paris in the Age of Romanticism, uses technical, artistic and socio-political questions about architecture to suggest a new kind of fictionalized history of the city. In this account, the life of a city flows paradoxically from the reciprocal destruction of its people and its buildings.

In 1828, English architect Frederick Courtland is engaged in building one of the new iron and glass structures, this one a commercial gallery in that hub of Right Bank activity, the Palais-Royal. In place of the vulgar, precarious wooden structures with which the popular multitudes have defaced the elegant Palais-Royal, he constructs the very latest in architectural beauty and comfort. But to do so, he must evict and displace the people who consider the old structures the “real,” “authentic” historical city, and who live and work there. While Frederick exults over the benefits of his project, he must also confess: “The public outcry against our plan upsets our master (architect) greatly; even the fashionable papers depict him as bent over the drafting board, a bloody sword in his hand in place of a pen.” Thus cities gain their aesthetic and historical value for future generations only against the bitter resistance of the present inhabitants--who will inevitably come back to overrun and undermine the architect’s pristine and orderly structures.

But this theme, so promising at the beginning of the book, fades out and reappears only at the end, when Frederick’s brother Charles returns to the Paris of 1868, renovated by Baron Haussmann. Charles reports: “The very heart of the old Paris had been ripped from the body of the city, the twisted streets annihilated, replaced by long, straight boulevards. . . . The buildings lining them have been disciplined to a uniformity of six storeys.” This cityscape, which stirs the Parisians of the 1860s to “resistance,” and makes Charles lament the “modernity of an ugly utility,” is precisely the Paris that by 1987 has been scarred and battered by several generations of Parisians, and that for us has the seemingly authentic patina of history and romance.

Unfortunately, neither this theme nor any other theme is developed into a gripping plot. Frederick falls in love with the French actress Anne Mercure; he becomes involved with her circle of actors, singers, poets, writers and politicians, where fictional figures mingle with historical figures; Charles gives up the priesthood and edits a noted agnostic journal, and the characters grow old and disillusioned.

This lack of plot is in part compensated for by vivid portrayals of this tumultuous era’s cultural and political events, like the battle surrounding Victor Hugo’s Romantic play “Hernani,” and the Revolution of 1830. They are all recounted through letters and diaries, in which Charles analyzes the philosophical significance, while Anne provides witty, ironic commentary. Woven into these events are discussions of 19th-Century art, architecture, theater, music, poetry, theology and finance, all overlaid with a wealth of detail about food, fashion, daily life, even about the correct method of building a barricade in time of revolution. But while Sennett’s characters inhabit Balzac’s Paris, they lack the demonic energy that involves the characters of “The Human Comedy” in dangerous, complex intrigue, and in even more dangerous, complex interrelations with each other.

“Palais-Royal” works not as a novel but as a series of intelligent, informative and delightfully readable essays that combine analyses of Romantic and Victorian culture with accounts of social history. Author of two previous novels and several works of nonfiction, Sennett has written on subjects that range all the way from a treatise on the “Hidden Injuries of Class” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) to an article on how to give the perfect contemporary version of an Edwardian dinner party (Vogue, December, 1986). A scholar of vast erudition, and a stylist of great charm, he is fully at home in 19th-Century Paris and fully at ease with his inexhaustible store of interdisciplinary knowledge. “Palais-Royal” becomes a vehicle that gracefully weaves this erudition into accessible and entertaining reading.