Aimee Boutin. City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris.
Temby, Owen
Aimee Boutin. City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris.
Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 208 pp.
Photographs. ISBN 978-0-252-03921-8, $95.00 cloth; 978-0-252-08078-4,
$25.00 paperback.
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Street peddling, and the noisy vocalization associated with it, was
declining in Paris during the nineteenth century. The city's
transformation, accelerated midcentury with Georges-Eugene
Haussmann's planning reforms under France's Second Empire
(1852-1870), had created a spacious urban environment less conducive to
hawking wares in public. The emergence of sedentary merchants and urban
elites intolerant of excessive noise made conditions more difficult for
street merchants. While these changes evidenced progress, the gradual
disappearance of one of the city's defining features elicited the
response of artists who collectively employed it as a focus for artistic
expression. The Cris de Paris, thus, was both an urban phenomenon
objectively occurring (and transforming) and a discourse among the urban
literati using it to express the experience of living in Paris.
In City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris, Aimee Boutin
undertakes an extensive assessment of the literature on the Cris de
Paris. Boutin is a professor of modern languages and linguistics at
Florida State University and a specialist in nineteenth-century French
literature. Her approach reflects this; poetry, songs, literary
guidebooks, figurines, photographs, and drawings comprise the analyzed
materials. Assembling and examining these disparate sources, Boutin
pieces together the Cris de Paris, highlighting salient representations
of the impoverished peddlers by the educated (albeit, in some cases
impoverished) artists and writers. Were the street cries elements of a
"city as concert" or harsh, strident intrusions on an
otherwise more peaceful bourgeois urban experience? Did they contribute
a fading quaintness to the modernizing city, or did the peddlers and
hawkers have seditious or criminal inclinations? Have the changes
eclipsed them or did they build the iconic city in which they live and
work? Questions of differentiation in social class reactions and
contemporaneous perceptions of a purported nuisance are mainstays of
social research on urban nuisances. In Boutin's text, they are not
questions for which certain answers are provided; rather, these
questions are points of nonconcurrence and contestation among authors
and artists in their portrayals of noisy peddlers.
Aptly, the reader's journey begins with a chapter introducing
the concept of the flaneur, a curious urban-dweller who explores the
city in search of interesting sights and sounds. Literature about
flaneurs and authored by them is covered in this and the following
chapters, including writing by Honore de Balzac, Auguste Lacroix, and
Victor Fournel. Boutin shows that flaneur-writing created a cultural
memory about an idealized Paris that resonated with readers feeling
nostalgic for the Paris rapidly disappearing as the Second Empire's
modernizations transformed the city's sonic environment. The
implications of these urban spatial changes are explored in another
chapter, along with other policy changes that made Paris inhospitable
for peddlers and hawkers relying on vocalization. Here we an alternative
understanding of peddler cries represented. This type of noise, and the
people making it, was associated with the poverty and criminality that
policymakers sought to address through mitigation and concealment.
Readers interested in urban nuisance policy history will find this
section particularly interesting. As Boutin explains, the
flaneur-writing tradition offered an anesthetized "mutely
picturesque" depiction of peddlers that failed to root their cries
in the broader (and disquieting) political-economic context (p. 21).
This distinction is explored in a subsequent chapter in which writings
on glaziers (window makers who, in this instance, solicited their
services through street cries) offering divergent representations of
their activities are analyzed. Here poems by Charles Baudeliare and
Arsene Houssaye are compared, as are efforts by musicians to document
the sound of the glazier's cry through musical notation. Following
up on Baudeliare's depiction of street cries as shrill, dissonant,
and sinister, Boutin then examines representation of peddlers by
Baudeliare's avant-garde poet followers who used the topic to
reflect on the social changes Paris was undergoing at the time.
Boutin points out that we can never know what Paris sounded like in
the nineteenth century because today we do not perceive noise in the
same way as the city's inhabitants did then, and because we have
only second-hand accounts. Yet, with this welcome contribution, we can
have a good sense of how it was perceived by the educated classes who
suffered it, lamented its diminution, or used it as a focal point to
describe the experience of living in Paris. This is useful information
for those of us interested in social responses to urban environmental
nuisances. As a specialist in urban air pollution policy history, I did
not expect to thoroughly enjoy and benefit from an in-depth exploration
of French literature. It is a challenging read, to be sure. Readers
without competence in the French language and without knowledge of
French literature and history will be doubly disadvantaged. But those
with the patience to read carefully and consult external sources on the
French language and the historical places and people presented in the
book will be rewarded with an enlightening experience.
Owen Temby
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
