Gazing out of the window of a smart hotel on the Bowery, a street once known as Manhattan’s Skid Row, Luc Sante is getting gently high on memory. “Over there, next to the flophouse hotel, is where Nan Goldin lived and worked. Forty years ago there were still lots of vacant lofts here that had been burlesque and vaudeville theatres during the era when storefronts were saloons. There were bars solely inhabited by bums, their heads down on the counter. At night they’d be lined up outside the missions and Salvation Army hostels – veterans from world war two, from the Korean war, from the Vietnam war. At night, trash fires would be lit in oil drums …”  The Belgian-born Sante is one of America’s most admired cultural topographers. He made his name with two books that exhumed half-forgotten, almost shameful New Yorks: Low Life (1991), a portrait of late 19th and early 20th-century tricksters, tenement dwellers, street-corner scammers and waterfront posses that celebrated the city as “a creature, a mentality, a disease, a threat”; and Evidence (1992), a collection of mysterious and sometimes haunting photographs of suicides and homicide victims from 1914 to 1918. In both works the proletarian metropolis was less a place of outcasts, of shivering masses awaiting the beneficence of social reformers, so much as a theatre populated by ragged-trousered existentialists and shapeshifters. Fans included Martin Scorsese, who later hired Sante as a historical consultant for his 2002 film Gangs of New York.  Now, with his new book The Other Paris, he has moved on to a subaltern city that he sees as the antidote to America. “During the jazz age, when there was prohibition here, poor people went to Mexico, but for anybody with money, Paris was where you could drink yourself into a stupor and not risk breaking the law. Paris was licentious. It was the capital of ass. America still has this Puritan backbone, still this Calvinist restraint: Paris is the inverse of that.” Today, Sante says, the Paris that most Americans know is a fashion magazine-curated mausoleum of “gracious living, style, wonderful belle-epoque curlicues, fine dining, shabby chic, topiary-clipped poodles”.  Sante’s Paris, already on its way out by the 1950s, teems with balladeers and immigrants, pickpockets and political exiles, prostitutes and clochards, squatters and Situationists. It features washerwomen wringing their laundry on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, 19th-century gangs who, excited by James Fenimore Cooper’s depictions of Native Americans, named themselves “Apaches”. These men and women may have been materially poor but, Sante argues, they were imaginatively free and creatively rich in “their neighbourhoods as well as their use of time, their scavenger economy, their cooperative defences, their refusal to behave, their ability to drop out of sight, their key to the unclaimed, the scorned, the common property of the streets”.  Sante rejects the charge that this is a romanticised vision. “How can you be promoting the life of the poor in the 19th century when so many of them didn’t eat every day? Well yeah, it’s bad, but is it really any worse than the situation today when everybody’s fed but you have an incredible percentage of New Yorkers who live in the shelter system – including people who have regular jobs? In the Paris I write about, people ran businesses to make a living, not to make a profit. Cafes, bars: they’re no longer public institutions or part of a community. There’s no possibility for eccentric self-determination amongst the shopkeepers.”  The heroes of The Other Paris are not so much Balzac and Zola as largely forgotten walker writers such as Jean-Paul Clébert, Robert Giraud and Louis Chevalier. “They kept their ears to the ground, were quick to sense changes in popular culture, almost like photographers rather than writers.” Like them, Sante’s preference is for impressionist details rather than historical panoramas. “A lot of my favourite American writers are from the 1930s to the 60s. James Agee, Joseph Mitchell, AJ Liebling, Meyer Berger: they relied on their intuitions, didn’t follow any who-what-where rules of reporting, frequently portrayed a contrary viewpoint. They all over-identified with their subjects. There’s never the slightest pretence of objectivity.”  The only time you hear the term 'working class' is in describing those people who are going to vote for Donald Trump  Sante was born in 1954 in Verviers which he describes as “a small industrial city in south-east Belgium. It was the birthplace and residence of all of my male ancestors going back to at least the 13th century. This all ended in the 1950s when the textile industries closed: that long, long continuum was snapped by the machinations of international capitalism. We emigrated.”  In New Jersey, where he spent his adolescence, his identity was still partly shaped by class. “Both my father and grandfather left school at the age of 14 but were avid autodidacts who read all their lives. These days the only time you ever hear the term ‘working class’ is in describing those people who are going to vote for Donald Trump and Ben Carson. They’re assumed to be anti-intellectual, rightwing and xenophobic. But this is not the working class of my ascendance.”  The teenage Sante was drawn to surrealism. “I commuted to high school in Manhattan and would sometimes cut class, wander down the West Side through what was still a very industrial area of New York, looking for the dream landscapes of Rimbaud and Lautréamont.” Soon after arriving at Columbia he met future film director and lifelong friend Jim Jarmusch, with whom he shared a passion for the New York School of poetry, experimental cinema, and attending punk and loft-jazz shows downtown.  “We’d read that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs had played around with some scientific equipment from Columbia University,” Jarmusch recalls. It was “some kind of strobe light that they claimed, by placing eidetic pulses on the outside of your eyelids, could cause states of hallucination and trance. We found out how to check out this machine and experimented with … not fantastic results! In a way though, Luc channels ghosts: he’s able to imagine and mentally reconstruct events and places from the past and weave them into stories. He can cross influences like Blaise Cendrars and JG Ballard with James M Cain and Raymond Roussel.”  New York in the late 1970s and 80s, though economically battered, was a fertile place for young writers and artists. Sante’s friend Adele Bertei, a member of post-punk band the Contortions and an actor in films such as Born in Flames (1983), says “We did all feel like cultural émigrés. It was as if we had this dystopic playground to ourselves to make whatever we wanted out of it. Luc was part archaeologist, part kid in a candy store. It was just like fin-de-siècle Paris. We were working from almost an extension of our nervous systems. It was all very raw and visceral. What was most exciting was the cross-collaborative feel of it.”  This era’s New York – cheap, open to chance-taking and to hybrid projects, its countercultural energies not so co-opted by the advertising and real estate industries as it would soon become – was good to Sante. Having already gone on a university-town poetry tour with Jarmusch, he wrote lyrics for their post-No Wave band the Del-Byzanteens, as well as playing drums for the Flags, an outfit whose only live show consisted of them playing the same song – dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “All Wi Doin’ Is Defendin’ ” – three times in a row.  He worked at the Strand bookshop, where he edited an artists’ magazine that initially promoted the store workers’ unionisation battle. He was a regular at CBGB and legendary disco club the Loft, and hung out downtown with such people as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kathy Acker. There the streets were free archives, manna to any scavenger-bricoleur with a penchant for the 19th century, full of old books, handbills and ancient ephemera being discarded by landlords. Much of the material that Sante harvested – exquisitely picturesque minor literature – would later find its way into Low Life.  If New York celebrates amnesia, perpetual transformation, accelerated obsolescence – and offers newcomers a blank slate, a chance to be born again – then Sante offers a mordantly heretical vision of the city. For him it’s full of layers and depths, of echoes and eerie reverberations, of occult whispers. “The tech crowd thinks that we can’t afford the past to be sitting on our shoulders. It’s a burden, a dead weight. We’ve got to innovate constantly. We have to … disrupt. But the 20th century is littered with valuable stuff – writers, ideas, daily certainties – that gets discarded and that needs to be picked up and looked at again.”  His undying relish for little guys thinking and acting big, for texture and tonality, for the black comedies and rough-edged circus of city life is present in every page of The Other Paris; it’s complemented by a political critique of the ways in which Paris – like New York, like so many global cities – has been tamed by capitalism. Its final paragraph reads: “The history of Paris teaches us that beauty is a by-product of danger, that liberty is at best a consequence of neglect, that wisdom is entwined with decay. Any Paris of the future that is neither a frozen artefact nor an inhabited holding company will perforce involve fear, dirt, sloth, ruin, and accident. It will entail the continual experience of uncertainty, because the only certainty is death.”  How does he feel about that passage in the wake of the recent Paris attacks? “A lot of Americans have the impression that Paris is the capital of liberalism,” Sante declares. “While there’s something to that, there’s also a force of almost equal strength – the French right – which has been around since the reaction to the French Revolution. France has come awfully close to fascism on numerous occasions and it can happen at any time. But fascism is also what happens when you sacrifice everything for safety and security. When people are so terrified … they are going to be tempted to cash in all their chips: that’s when you lose the flavour of life.  “I lived in New York when crime was in the streets much more than today. What you gonna do? Stay at home? I did a lot of walking alone in the middle of the night in those years. Goodness knows I could have been killed. But I was not about to sacrifice my freedom for the experience of not worrying about unknown forces.”  Sante, never one for slogans or the pieties of the left or right, pauses for a moment. “Look, I wanted to render the experience of a working class which is submerged now in Paris. The people in my book are now mostly in housing projects. The actual streets are all gone. Terrorism may last some time and of course it is tragic ...”  Another pause. “My book is a kind of love letter to the city as it was and before it got overtaken by money. Money, for me, may not immediately kill people in the way terrorism does, but it does certainly change the fabric of daily life in much deeper and more insidious ways. The terrorist may be defeated in 50 or 20 or 10 years, but money is going to be much harder to defeat.”  • To order The Other Paris for £20 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
The books interview: The cultural historian on 19th-century New York lowlife, jazz age Paris and how cities are tamed by capitalism