NONFICTION : THE VANISHING CHILDREN OF PARIS: Rumor and Politics Before the French Revolution <i> by Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, translated by Claudia Mieville (Harvard: $19.95; 146 pp.).</i>

This charming story ostensibly takes us back to 1750 Paris to explore how a rumor buzzed through the town that the police were kidnaping the children of poor people--in order to send them off to populate the colonies, some said; to provide fresh blood to cure the king’s leprosy, others reported. (As always, the truth was more mundane: Officers were abusing sweeping powers of arrest they had been given to control vagrancy.)

Ultimately, though, this superbly translated little book proves more revealing about the ethos in which it was composed: 1988 Paris. Exemplifying the way modern French historians are rebelling against the “scientific” empiricism of their predecessors, Farge and Revel organize their findings according to the narrative principles of fiction. There can be no more accurate way, they suggest, of depicting “lucid, yet inscrutable” Paris, “a saturated space, a tangled web of human beings, embedded but constantly shifting and elusive.”

Ironically, though, for all their cautionary words, the authors end up exchanging one set of certitudes for another. Disputing the common notion that the uprisings were a mass rebellion that ultimately led to the French Revolution, they assert that the French were not rising up against the idea of monarchy, only against Louis XV, the flaccid monarch then in power. The authors’ portraits of Louis--a “languid man who . . . trailed his melancholy from one chateau to another”--are nevertheless so wonderfully vivid that we are inclined to overlook their transparent agenda.