Les années folles: Piaf and Joyce's 'crazy' Paris of the 1920s brought back to life

In 1926, James Joyce was working on his novel Finnegans Wake while living in a spacious apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris with his partner, Nora Barnacle, and their two adult children, Giorgio and Lucia.

- Kim Willsher

Joyce's neighbours in the elegant stone building at 2 Square de Robiac included a Syrian family whose three children had an English nanny called Jessie, Russian émigrés, an Egyptian industrialist, and the US writers William and Elizabeth Placida Mahl.

The details are part of a new exhibition that paints a portrait of Paris when it was a hub for artists, intellectuals and young unattached men and women during the decade that became known as les années folles (the crazy years or roaring 20s).

Curators at the Musée Carnavalet have drawn on work by researchers from France's National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) using artificial intelligence to create a database of the 8m individual handwritten entries from the censuses of 1926, 1931 and 1936.

The result is an almost comprehensive list of those recorded as living in the 80 districts of Paris's 20 arrondissements at a time when the population of the city reached 2.9 million people. Only the details of those in prisons, hospitals or religious institutions have not been released.