Dominique Kalifa is professor of History at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. He is a specialist of the history of crime, social control, and mass culture in 19th and early 20th France and Europe. He is the author of several books including L’Encre et le sang. Récits de crimes et société à la Belle Époque (Fayard, 1995), Crime et culture au XIXe siècle (Perrin, 2005), and Les Bas-fonds. Histoire d’un imaginaire (Seuil, 2013).Dominique Kalifa is professor of history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, where he is the director of the Center for Nineteenth-Century History. His many books include La véritable histoire de la “Belle Époque” (2017).

Venita Datta, author of Heroes and Legends of Fin-de-Siècle France: Gender, Politics, and National Identity:
This is a lively and fun read. More than tracing the evolution of living conditions of the poor and indigent, Vice, Crime, and Poverty also represents an important contribution to the histoire des mentalités, telling us how different eras viewed the poor in terms of social changes at those times. The transnational aspect greatly enhances this study, making it a significant contribution to the field by offering insights into both European and American history.

Edward Berenson, author of Europe in the Modern World:
Dominique Kalifa is one of the best French cultural historians of his generation and a worthy successor to Alain Corbin at the Sorbonne. Vice, Crime, and Poverty examines the urban ‘underworld,’ not in the twentieth-century sense of organized crime but as an imaginary shaped discursively in the nineteenth century by a widespread if morbid fascination with the apparent dangers of urban life.