Preface to Bezons à travers les âges

Céline begins from a simple observation: the Paris suburbs are ignored. Paris receives history, romance, monuments and literature. The industrial suburbs surrounding it are treated as ugly places people pass through without seeing.

Bezons, to Céline, represents that neglected territory. Factories, poverty, pollution, labour and wartime bombing have made the modern suburb difficult to romanticise.

That is precisely why he values Serouille's work. The local historian has recovered the older Bezons hidden beneath industrial modernity: its landscapes, bridge, fairs, historical figures and accumulated memories.

Céline opens with the neglected condition of the Parisian suburb. He describes a landscape subordinated to industry and to the needs of Paris. The inhabitants work and suffer largely outside the cultural imagination of the capital.

Then he introduces Serouille. The historian's achievement is to recover the town from this apparent historical emptiness.

Old Bezons emerges: fairs, roads, noble families, political events, wars and the bridge.

The bridge becomes a physical record of repetition. At times it carries festivities and commerce. At other times armies cross it or destroy it.

The preface therefore makes local history into a larger argument: places regarded as historically insignificant are often simply places whose histories nobody has bothered to tell.