Blaszkiewicz 2020 - Listening To The Old City JM Article

Listening to the Old
City: Street Cries and

Urbanization in Paris,
ca. 1860
J A C E K BL AS ZK I E W I C Z
Street hawkers—itinerant salespeople who ped-

dled anything from produce to scrap metal—populated Paris’s streets
from at least the thirteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
They advertised their products by shouting to attract passersby and lure
customers away from the indoor markets and boutiques. Guidebooks
123
referred to these outdoor merchants by a variety of names; whereas the
most common was the French word colporteur (peddler), others included
petits métiers (small-scale tradespeople), industries nomads (nomadic indus-
trials), gagne-petits (those of low income), marchands ambulants (traveling
merchants), crieurs (hawkers), camelots (news hawkers), or more broadly,
the crieurs de Paris. Hawkers provided a wide variety of goods and services:
the marchand de journaux shouted the day’s headlines, the marchande des
fraises advertised the freshness of her raspberries, and the marchand des
contre-marques—the nineteenth century’s ticket scalper—announced the
low price of admission for that night’s theater performance. The mar-
chand de robinets, who sold faucets and taps, was especially known for
using percussion and brass instruments, which musically mimicked the
clanging sounds made by his merchandise as he walked. Paris’s street
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2016 meeting

of the American Musicological Society in Vancouver. For their
help at various stages of this article’s completion, I would like to
thank Gabrielle Cornish, Robert Doran, Jonathan Hicks, Elaine
Kelly, Ralph Locke, Megan Steigerwald Ille, Holly Watkins, and the
anonymous reviewers. All translations from French are mine
unless otherwise noted.
The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp. 123–157, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2020
by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permis-
sions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/
JM.2020.37.2.123
t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y
hawkers were an active and ubiquitous element of the city’s economy,

and their cries—at times melodious, at times raucous—formed a distinct
part of Paris’s everyday soundscape.
Paris’s hawkers began to face hard times during the Second French
Empire (1852–70). Urbanization became a priority for the recently self-
crowned emperor Napoléon III, who in 1853 appointed Georges-Eugène
“Baron” Haussmann to oversee the largest network of public works pro-
jects in the city’s history. During his nearly two-decade tenure as Prefect
of the Seine, Haussmann ordered the mass demolition of working-class
neighborhoods in the central arrondissements, the expansion of boule-
vards that cut through those recently demolished neighborhoods, the
annexation of outer districts into the city of Paris, as well as an expansive
system of parks, gardens, and sewers.1 Though Haussmann credited him-
self for ushering the French capital out of its medieval past and into
modernity, his xenophobia, greed, reckless consumption of state funds,
and exploitation of human labor eventually led to his downfall. Despite
these misdeeds—or because of them—Haussmann remains embedded in
Parisian cultural memory as a defining figure of nineteenth-century
modernity. His exploits prompted a generation of twentieth-century
124 Marxist-humanists, from Walter Benjamin to David Harvey, to trace urban
speculative capitalism back to Second Empire Paris.2
I contend that the nostalgia around the cris de Paris (cries of Paris)
extended into broader criticism of Haussmann and the discriminatory
mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably
altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silenc-
ing the working-class communities that made their living with their
voices. When Haussmann “bludgeoned the city into modernity,” as Har-
vey wrote, hawkers faced stricter zoning laws, and the liminal spaces in
1
The network of urbanization projects, which became known as Haussmannization,
involved three réseaux, or “networks.” The first network, carried out between 1854 and 1858,
created a grande croisée: the rue de Rivoli and the boulevards Sébastopol and Saint-Michel
were elongated to create a perpendicular axis. The second network involved, among other
projects, the expansion of the boulevards stemming from the Place du Château d’Eau (now
Place de la République), broadening four key arteries: the Avenues Magenta, Richard
Lenoire (which paved over the Canal Saint-Martin), Voltaire (then christened as Prince-
Eugène after the emperor’s son), and the rue Turbigo. The third network called for the
elongation of the rue Lafayette and the Boulevard Saint-Germain and saw the commission
of Garnier’s Paris Opéra. In 1860 Haussmann annexed the outer communes, which
included the villages of Montmartre, Belleville, and Ménilomontant, thus expanding
the number of Paris arrondissements from twelve to twenty. For a comprehensive overview
of Haussmann’s réseaux, see Jean des Cars and Pierre Pinon, Paris: Haussmann (Paris:
Publications du Pavillon d’Arsenal, 1991), esp. 74–84; and David P. Jordan, Transforming
Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995), esp. 115–34.
2
Two noteworthy examples are Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1983), esp. 131–72; and David Harvey, Paris,
Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2005).
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which they dwelled vanished from the map.3 A proliferation of books,

poetry, and musical works about hawkers reveals a middle-class drive to
thwart the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds.
This nostalgic counternarrative aligned the cris de Paris with the broader
idea of le vieux Paris (the old Paris), a concept that became the subject of
numerous memoirs, guidebooks, and sociological studies published dur-
ing the 1850s and 1860s.4 Yet the vieux Paris label did more than sell
books. The emergence of an imagined “old city” provided an ideological
check on the Second Empire’s utopian, capitalistic urbanism. In what
follows I present a range of musical imaginings of the cris de Paris, which
include tourist guidebooks, municipal records, reflective essays by Victor
Fournel, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Joseph
d’Ortigue, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and above all Jean-Georges Kastner, as
well as musical compositions ranging from café and parlor songs to a full-
fledged “street-cry symphony” by Kastner.
As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to the
empire’s notion of modernity by suggesting that urbanization would van-
quish any remaining echo of the “old city.” As Svetlana Boym explains,
“nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance
with one’s own fantasy.”5 First explored in Swiss physician Johannes 125
Hofer’s dissertation, “Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe”
(1688),6 nostalgia developed a multitude of connotations: a curable dis-
ease, a psychological state, a poetic topos, and a component of collective
memory. It is this last connotation that interests me here, specifically as
it was deployed in the 1850s as an alternative to the creative-destructive
ideas motivating Haussmannization. Boym notes that nostalgia is not
necessarily “anti-modern” but rather “off-modern,” by which she means
“a critique of both the modern fascination with newness and no less
modern reinvention of tradition.”7 Like “off-white,” off-modern signifies
a variation on the fundamental essence of a thing: different angle, same
idea. Although Haussmann sought to demolish the old urban places
that obstructed his utopian city plan, he ironically helped propagate
the notion of the “old city” in the process. The musical reception and
3
Harvey, Paris, 3.
4
A few examples of nineteenth-century books about le vieux Paris include Pierre
Zaccone, Les mystères du vieux Paris, 3 vols. (Paris: Gabriel Roux et Cassanet, 1854); Amédée
de Ponthieu, Légendes du vieux Paris (Paris: Bachelin-Deflorenne, 1867); and Victor Four-
nel, Les rues du vieux Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1879). On the genealogy of le vieux Paris as
an antimodern idea, see Ruth Fiori, L’Invention du vieux Paris: Naissance d’une conscience
patrimoniale dans la capital (Wavre: Mardaga, 2012).
5
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xiii.
6
Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel: Jacob Bertsch,
[1688]).
7
Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xvii.
representation of street cries in nineteenth-century France thus factors

into the broader “off-modernity” that constituted the idea of le vieux Paris.
The musicians discussed in this article were neither members of the
hawking community nor overt critics of the Second Empire regime. Nev-
ertheless, they deployed reflection, empathy, and humor to rediscover
a sense of localized community that Haussmann had obscured.
The subject of Parisian street cries has inspired recent work by liter-
ary historians but has largely eluded musicological study.8 As is well
established, the 1850s and 1860s were decades in which urbanization,
emerging cultures of capitalism, and shifting epistemologies of sensory
experience became catalysts for new formal structures in poetry and
painting—structures epitomized by the prose poems of Baudelaire and
the pastoral realism of Manet.9 In a recent study of literary responses to
the Parisian soundscape, Aimée Boutin shows how, over the course of the
nineteenth century, Paris’s hawking community yielded to imperial city
norms that privileged bourgeois demands for quiet.10 Although Boutin
convincingly argues that the gradual silencing of street cries at the hands
of police led to their being co-opted as “sound souvenirs” in literature, she
understandably takes the logocentric path of inquiry, eschewing discus-
126 sion of sound per se and instead presenting a comprehensive corpus of
published literary texts.11 By situating the cris de Paris into the broader
history of listening in Second Empire Paris, I depart from extant work
in three significant ways. First, whereas Boutin and others have moored
auditory culture to poetic and visual representations, this article flips the
8
Recent exceptions include Emily Laurance, “Georges Kastner’s Les Voix de Paris
(1857): A Study in Musical Flânerie,” in Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in
Europe, 1300–1918, ed. Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (London: Routledge, 2016), 53–75;
and Marica Bottaro, “Dalla strada alla sala da concerto: Jean-Georges Kastner e Félicien
David,” Gli spazi della musica 4 (2015): 66–99.
9
Famous examples of this well-trodden path of inquiry are T. J. Clark, The Painting of
Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985); Christopher
Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century: Writing the City (London: Wiley-Blackwell,
1995); and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Haussmann’s exploits continue to inspire
trade publications on urbanization as an ocular phenomenon. See Rupert Christiansen,
City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris (New York: Basic Books, 2018). On the cris de Paris in
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, see Daniel Karlin, Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs
and Cries, 1800–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 138–58.
10
Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana-Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2015).
11
Literary historian Brett Brehm has also written about Kastner’s contribution to
a new epistemology of listening in nineteenth-century Paris, but he does so to provide new
analyses of two poems by Mallarmé. Despite his identification of a humanistic “aural turn”
and his desire to “make a case for renewed interest” in Kastner, Brehm only addresses sound
insofar as it translates to the (silent) medium of poetry. See Brett Brehm, “Soundscapes of
Nineteenth-Century Paris: The Cries of Kastner and Mallarmé,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts
38 (2016): 263–74.
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perspective, shifting the focus away from the gaze and back onto the ear.12
It juxtaposes well-known poetry alongside forgotten songs and piano
pieces to propose a circular relationship between the working-class
hawker, the attentive bourgeoisie, and the sonic objects that related one
to the other. In other words, this article is as much a history of listening
to street cries as it is a reception history of the cries themselves. Second,
I analyze musical works that feature street hawkers not only as literary
characters but also as meaningful participants in the urban musical
ecosystem. Although, as Brett Brehm has posited, urbanization in
Indian, Chinese, and British cities tended to discourage noisy street
commerce for the sake of an idealized city image, the cris de Paris featured
in classist linguistic debates about what it meant to sound French.13
Finally, the cultural history presented in this article relies not only on
published literary texts but also on untapped archival documents that
situate hawkers as a police problem. Histories of pre-phonograph sound,
I argue, necessitate this juxtaposition of “discursive” urban artifacts—
published poems, essays, guidebooks, songs—with “practical,” archival
remnants of urban history, in my case unsorted boxes labeled “Les cris de
Paris” housed at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police (henceforth
APP) in Paris.14 These documents—many of which I cite here for the 127
first time—offer the missing link between the acoustic dimensions of the
cris de Paris and their forms of representation.
My broader aim is to suggest that urbanism provides a hermeneutic
framework for nineteenth-century music studies that is refreshingly
12
Although they do not home in on problems caused by urbanization, James H.
Johnson, Alain Corbin, Veit Erlmann, and others have argued for a new approach to
nineteenth-century studies that places listening—as both social act and intellectual idea—
as the central object of study. See James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Mean-
ing in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998); and Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For an overview of the myriad approaches to the
burgeoning field of historical sound studies, see Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson,
“Introduction,” in Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918, ed.
Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (London: Routledge, 2016), 1–13.
13
Here I am building on the work of Katherine Bergeron and Sindhumathi Revuluri,
who have both examined how French mélodie and folksong, respectively, played into
emerging ideologies of a unified linguistic and folkloristic French nationalism at the turn
of the twentieth century. See Katherine Bergeron, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle
E´poque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Sindhumathi Revuluri, “French Folk
Songs and the Invention of History,” Nineteenth-Century Music 39 (2016): 248–71.
14
In the absence of recorded sound, the historical musicologist’s best bet is to
embark on what Ana Marı́a Ochoa Gautier calls “an acoustically tuned exploration of the
written archive.” See Ana Marı́a Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in
Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 3–4. On the archive
as a curated space of memory, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen
Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. 166–82.
distinct from questions of nationalism and national identity. Tim Car-

ter’s notion of “urban musicology” is a useful starting point, not least
because it acknowledges a distinctly civic collective identity whose con-
cerns and ideologies do not necessarily overlap with those of nationhood
or empire.15 For justifiable reasons, nationalism looms like a shadow over
French music history between 1789 and 1914; three revolutions, a hand-
ful of international conflicts, a civil war, and the onset of the First World
War all left their mark on French national consciousness and, by exten-
sion, on Francophone music historiography.16 But to pass all questions
of sonic identity and placemaking through the filter of nationalism
would be to overlook the emergence of the city as a distinct cultural
entity in the nineteenth century. French cities, after all, did not behave
like nations; they did not have their own anthems, holidays, or natural-
ized citizens. Freed from their medieval walls, their borders were no
longer defended by armies. In fact, Second Empire Paris’s borders only
became more porous as the nineteenth century progressed; as Harvey
has argued, the city effectively became a giant railroad hub to invite
interregional and international competition. For better or for worse, the
city needed to accommodate an expanding cosmopolitan, capitalistic
128 economy.17 By revisiting Parisian epistemologies of listening circa
1860, this article situates the cris de Paris as a key component of the city’s
capitalist urbanism.18
15
Tim Carter, “The Sound of Silence: Models for an Urban Musicology,” Urban
History 29 (2002): 8–18, at 10. Questions of sound and urban identity have informed
broader approaches to Early Modern cultural history. See Fiona Kisby, “Music in European
Cities and Towns to c. 1650: A Bibliographical Survey,” Urban History 29 (2002): 74–82; and
David Garrioch, “Sounds of the City: The Soundscape of Early Modern European Towns,”
Urban History 30 (2003): 5–25. Urbanism remains a relevant topic in early music studies. See
Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, eds., Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Alexander J. Fisher, Music, Piety, and
Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
16
Exemplary studies of music’s direct role in constructing French national identity
include Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de
Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sarah
Hibberd, French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009); and William Gibbons, Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century
Opera in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013). One of the
major exceptions to the Paris-centered approach to music studies is Katharine Ellis’s work
on regional opera houses around France. See Ellis, “Funding Grand Opera in Regional
France: Ideologies of the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Art and Ideology in European Opera:
Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton, ed. Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper, and Clive Brown
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 67–84; and Ellis, “Mireille’s Homecoming? Gounod,
Mistral, and the Midi,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (2012): 463–509.
17
Harvey, Paris, 110–11.
18
Two recent books have explored nineteenth-century music and urbanism on the
Iberian Peninsula, but such studies remain rare. See João Silva, Entertaining Lisbon: Music,
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A history of urban soundscapes asks how diverse musical communi-

ties inhabited and imagined their city. It also requires an analysis of the
regulations, prejudices, and insecurities that permeated written accounts
of everyday life. In other words, “urban musicology” balances real and
fictionalized accounts of city life and gives equal weight to the biases and
inherited traditions of diverse urban communities.19 Indeed, Paris’s musi-
cal elite betrayed a long-standing preoccupation with the voices of haw-
kers, making the city’s soundscape a subject of both musical and moral
discourse. In the eighteenth century, Grétry, Mercier, and Rameau wrote
of the ubiquity of hawkers in discussions of vocal pedagogy, public health,
and the future of operatic composition. The nineteenth century brought
a more imaginative, romanticized attitude toward the city’s urban sub-
cultures. In the literate, middle-class imagination, the boulevard was not
only a venue for political dissent and capitalistic flânerie but also a sacred
site populated by ghostly figures of the past. Indeed, hawkers under
Haussmann were inadvertently performing what Gavin Steingo would call
“immaterial musical labor”: a production system that valued affective
responses to urban pictorialism over the actual goods being sold. Steingo
warns that immaterial labor could conflate social relationships and eco-
nomic production. Yet immaterial labor’s double edge nevertheless offers 129
hermeneutic opportunities to recover nineteenth-century audible street
culture from its perpetual underdog status.20 The bourgeoisie’s fascina-
tion with the cris de Paris—an aestheticized hearing of sonic labor—thus
represented an attempt to “echolocate” the modern city through the
working class.21 Under Haussmann, the practice of hawking became an
aesthetic end, not an economic means.
The Second Empire regime’s own “echolocation” of the French
capital—manifest through patterns of demolition, private speculation,
and monumental construction—sparked a reframing of street com-
merce as a major casualty of Haussmannization. An activity considered
at once melodious and cacophonous, quirky and dangerous, the prac-
tice of street hawking embodied the city’s “urban ethos,” to borrow an
-
Theater, and Modern Life in the Late 19th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016);
and Samuel Llano, Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850–1930
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
19
Ethnomusicologist Marié Abe shows how the revival of nineteenth-century modes
of sonic street advertising in Japan forged a heterogenous and relational model of the
Japanese street as a space of dynamic sociability. See Marié Abe, Resonances of Chindon-ya:
Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2018).
20
See Gavin Steingo, “Musical Economies of the Elusive Metropolis,” in Audible
Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 246–66.
21
See Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender, eds., Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), esp. xi–xxv.
expression from Adam Krims.22 From a musicological perspective, no

other nineteenth-century city—not even London—was so central to the
cultural identity of the rest of the country. London, for that matter, had
its own storied tradition of auditory street commerce. Seemingly
immune to turn-of-the-century changes in taste, the so-called “Cries of
London” had become a marketable trope between the 1700s and the
1800s, spawning popular engravings—such as those by William Hog-
varth and Williams Marshall Craig—and polyphonic musical works—
such as those by Thomas Weelkes and Orlando Gibbons.23 Their peak
in popularity, it seems, came in the 1700s. As Nicholas Mathew writes,
the proliferation of songs, images, and other fashionable rehearings of
the London streetscape was “one of the stylized ways in which Lon-
doners aestheticized (and eroticized) urban experience—by discrimi-
nating, extracting, and refining those sonic dimensions of London’s
street life that lent themselves to tasteful citation.”24 Although
nineteenth-century industrialization affected hawkers in both London
and Paris, there is scant historical evidence that the “Cries of London”
held the same mystique as the cris de Paris. This, I contend, was largely
because Haussmann’s persona was so deeply embedded into Parisian
130 public works that it was impossible to separate public works from the
ideologies of the Second Empire. As obstacles to Haussmannization,
Paris’s hawkers became convenient heroes of what Boym would call the
“off-modern” strand of civic discourse. Nostalgia became a cultural cur-
rency of modernity. By transcribing urban noise into more marketable
media such as guidebooks, prints, and sheet music (artifacts akin to
what Andrea Bohlman has recently dubbed “sound documents”), writ-
ers, illustrators, and composers appropriated an “outdoor” urban phe-
nomenon—one strongly associated with the beleaguered laboring class
who for decades lived and worked in central Paris—and transferred it
into the newly constructed bourgeois interior spaces.25
22
Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (London: Routledge, 2007), esp. 1–26.
23
As John Milsom has recently posited, the origins of the “Cries of London” topos are
shrouded in mystery. There is no reliable contextual evidence to indicate why English
composers like Weelkes, Gibbons, and Dering set street cries to music in the first place. See
John Milsom, “Oyez! Fresh Thoughts about the ‘Cries of London’ Repertory,” in Beyond
Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern,
Candace Bailey, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2017), 67–78.
24
Nicholas Mathew, “Interesting Haydn: On Attention’s Materials,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 71 (2018): 655–701, at 662.
25
See Andrea F. Bohlman, “Solidarity, Song, and the Sound Document,” Journal of
Musicology 33 (2016): 232–69. On music and the geography of Second Empire salons, see
Nicole Vilkner, “Sounding Streets: Music and Urban Change in Paris, 1830–1870” (PhD
diss., Rutgers University, 2016), esp. 70–104.
blaszkiewicz
figure 1. The “before” shot: view of the Île de la Cité from the Tour
Saint-Jacques. Photograph by Charles Soulier, early 1860s.
Library of Congress
131
Gutting the Center
By Haussmann’s own estimation, 13 percent of the city was leveled between

1851 and 1859.26 Yet of all these demolition projects, the one that made
the most notable impact on the city’s image was the near-leveling of the
Paris’s Île de la Cité (fig. 1). Best known today as the island on which the
Cathédrale Notre-Dame stands, the Île de la Cité had been Paris’s central
working-class district since the Carolingian eighth century. Haussmann,
however, conceived of the island not as a residential neighborhood but as
a thoroughfare between the Left and Right Banks. By the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the residential population on the island had
dropped from 15,000 to 5,000, reflecting Haussmann’s broader campaign
to reconfigure inner Paris as an exclusively bourgeois space.27
Demolition continued through the latter half of the 1860s. The Pre-
fecture of the Seine issued a decree on May 22, 1865, to raze the entire
26
That is, 13 percent of what was then Paris, namely arrondissements one through
twelve. See Eric Fournier, Paris en ruines: Du Paris haussmannien au Paris communard (Paris:
Imago, 2008), 22.
27
Colin Jones, Paris, Biography of a City (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 356–57.
eastern part of the Île. The hundreds of little buildings that dotted the Île
were replaced by three monumental governmental edifices: the new hos-
pital (Hôtel-Dieu), the police headquarters (Caserne de la Cité), and the
municipal court (Tribunal de commerce). In addition to taking down
some hundred residential buildings and shops, the demolitions also
claimed churches and historic buildings such as the largest orphanage
in Paris at the time, the hospice des Enfants-Trouvés.28
Though devastating to workers, demolition prompted massive urban
speculation and subsequently padded the pockets of Parisian elites—
a phenomenon famously documented in Émile Zola’s 1872 novel, La
curée. Members of Paris’s literary community, however, were ambivalent.
This was, after all, the generation of Henri Murger’s bohème, a complicated
social class that was intellectually wealthy but financially poor, at once
regarded as exotic and quintessentially Parisian.29 As more new boule-
vards and buildings emerged from the rubble, writers situated le vieux
Paris as an integral part of la vie de bohème (Bohemian life); “from
year to year,” Patrice Higonnet poetically observed, “more and more
Parisians . . . began to weep for old Paris, with its placarded walls and
noise-filled streets.”30 Between 1850 and 1870 dozens of mass-produced
132 publications revisited the subject of Parisian history as a conflict between
past and future. The engraver Léopold Flameng (1831–1911) published
a bimonthly periodical entitled Paris qui s’en va, Paris qui vient (The Paris
that is disappearing, the Paris to come), which featured illustrations and
articles about historic Parisian sites. On the title page of each issue,
Flameng prophesied the fate of Paris’s landmarks: “those intersections,
those public spaces frequented by generations [of Parisians]. In a few
years, it will all be gone! A new city will have sprung up like magic: no
ruins, no landmarks, not even a humble inscription to explain what was
where!”31 Shorter pamphlets and essays also expressed remorse while
obliquely critiquing the government’s cavalier approach to urban
renewal. In 1860 the archaeologist and historian Adolphe Berty
(1818–67) published a street-by-street historical overview of the Île de la
Cité. Berty explained that the leveling of the old Hôtel-Dieu prompted
him to undertake a history of a neighborhood that would soon vanish:
“The disappearance of an old monument makes it urgent to preserve its
28
Pierre Pinon, Paris détruit: Du vandalisme architectural aux grandes opérations d’urba-
nisme (Paris: Parigramme, 2011), 162.
29
The classic study is Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries
of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
30
Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 89.
31
Paris qui s’en va, Paris qui vient: Publication littéraire et artistique, ed. Léopold Flameng
(Paris: Alfred Cadart, 1859).
blaszkiewicz
memory; when a city undergoes radical transformation, it makes sense to

try to see the city as it once was.”32
The cris de Paris were as dear to literati as were the crumbling build-
ings of the Île de la Cité. Yet it was not just demolition that disrupted
street commerce; the new public works projects coincided with new
modes of policing that ushered in stricter regulations and increased
surveillance of the streets. As we will see, this increased policing of street
vendors only intensified middle-class fascination with the sonic relics of
a mythical vieux Paris. As objects of transcription, ethnographic explora-
tion, caricature, and criticism, the cris de Paris featured prominently in
debates about whether urban modernity could coexist with urban cul-
tural preservation. Furthermore, growing nostalgia for the “old city”
during the 1860s led to a reframing of street hawkers from perpetually
menacing Others to disenfranchised Parisians. These conflicted atti-
tudes of what it meant to be “Parisian” encapsulated broader nationalis-
tic and colonial notions of French identity. As Jann Pasler explains, there
was little consensus regarding a singular notion of “Frenchness” during
the nineteenth century. This precipitated the widespread use of terms
such as race and outre-mer as generalized indicators of musical and cultural
difference.33 It is thus striking that these issues of vilifying/lionizing 133
Others were also apparent within Paris’s city limits. The perceived disap-
pearance of the cris de Paris—and of le vieux Paris as a whole—was thus
symptomatic of an “invented tradition” of the nineteenth-century Pari-
sian imagination, which took visual and sonic artifacts from everyday life
and instilled in them a historical, even legendary, significance.34
Hawkers in Poetry and Song
As Boutin, Brehm, and others have shown, nineteenth-century poets

drew on the cris de Paris to gauge urbanization’s effects on everyday life
in the city.35 Yet a literary reception history of the cris de Paris would be
incomplete without comparing the well-known poems with the now-
forgotten chansons populaires that captured the streetscape in both word
and sound. Indeed, it is impossible to discuss poetic depictions of the
Parisian street without citing Charles Baudelaire. In his 1862 prose poem
32
Adolphe Berty, Les trois ı̂lots de la Cité: Compris entre les rues de la Licorne, aux Fèves, de
la Lanterne, du Haut-moulin et de Glatigny (Paris: Didier et Cie., 1860), 8.
33
See Jann Pasler, “Theorizing Race in Nineteenth-Century France: Music as
Emblem of Identity,” Musical Quarterly 89 (2006): 459–504.
34
See Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of
Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 1–14.
35
Boutin, City of Noise; and Brehm, “Soundscapes of Nineteenth-Century Paris.”
“Le mauvais vitrier” (The bad glazier), Baudelaire places the narrator in
direct contact with the abrasive cries of a window cleaner. Baudelaire’s
“discordant” soundscape paints a grim picture of inner-city life. Midway
into the poem, Baudelaire recounts the meeting:
The first person I noticed in the street was a glazier whose cry, piercing,
discordant, came up to me through the oppressive and dirty Parisian
atmosphere. Impossible for me to say why this poor fellow roused in me
a hatred as sudden as despotic.
“—Hey there!” and I yelled for him to come up, meanwhile reflecting,
not without amusement, that, my room being on the sixth floor and the
stairs very narrow, the man would find it difficult to effect his ascent, to
maneuver at certain spots the corners of his fragile merchandise.36
Here, Baudelaire chooses against transcribing the glazier’s shrill cry into
prose. Rather, as Boutin has recently observed, the poem captures “the
sensation of sound as a mental construct and the behaviors sounds elicit”
in the reader.37 From the safety of the window, Baudelaire’s narrator
summons the hawker with an unceremonious “Hey there!”—as if the
134 glazier’s very presence resists empathy.
We find a more sympathetic tone in an 1855 Parisian café song enti-
tled “Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons!” (Scraps for sale! Rags!), with words
and music by Léon Peuchot.38 The song is an ode to the chiffonnier (rag-
picker), one of the oldest street trades in Paris. The chiffonnier was paid by
the city’s sanitation department to pick up scraps of metal, wood, rags,
clothing, paper, and other residue off the streets, selling the more useful
items for a profit. A crucial component of Paris’s urban ecology, the
chiffonnier at once cleaned the streets and provided raw materials to inde-
pendent contractors and secondhand boutiques. An illustration pub-
lished along with the song’s text and music demonstrates why the
ragpicker was, by many contemporary accounts, the most destitute of the
petits métiers (fig. 2). The twisted fingers of her left hand are shown hold-
ing some recently acquired rags. Her haggard dress and undone bonnet
are a stark contrast to the gawking bourgeois onlooker behind her, as if
to highlight the middle class’s condescending fascination with street
culture. The song was also published with a preface, in which Peuchot
describes the ragpicker’s cry in terms that anticipate Baudelaire: “Scraps
36
Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose, trans. Keith Waldrop (Mid-
dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 16.
37
Boutin, City of Noise, 101.
38
The song is published in Paris en chansons, sous la direction de Conte (Paris: P. H.
Krabbe, 1855), “Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons!” is in the sixteenth section of separately
paginated songs.
blaszkiewicz
figure 2. Image accompanying “Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons!” in Paris en

chansons, sous la direction de Conte (Paris: P. H. Krabbe, 1855)
135
for sale! Rags! Surely, those who have lived in Paris are familiar with this
piercing yet plaintive cry. After a few seconds, it begins to attack the
eardrum in a very unpleasant way.”39 The “piercing yet plaintive” cry, as
well as the clanking pieces of scrap metal, pervaded the Parisian sound-
scape long enough to acquire aesthetic contemplation.
In the first verse of “Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons!” the narrator regards
the ragpicker, “Madame Ourlier,” with both chagrin and empathy: she is
so old as to be deemed “eternal,” and yet her services remain valuable.
As the narrator leaves, we hear the ragpicker resume her cry:
39
“Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons! Assurément, pour peu qu’on ait habité Paris, on
connaı̂t ce cri à la fois strident et plaintif, qui, se prolongeant pendant quelques secondes,
vient frapper le tympan d’une manière si peu agréable.”
Look at that old hag,

That eternal Madame Ourlier,
Who clears out my workshop
Of old rags and scraps.
Alas, scavenger covered in filth!
Your skills have much value.
Ah! Leave those rags and scraps,
Go sell some fried potatoes.
I honorably leave you be.
Scraps for sale! Rags!
Clothes, hats, ribbons!40
Whereas each verse revolves around the ragpicker and her trade, the
refrain serves as a musical transcription of the “strident and plaintive” cry
itself (ex. 1). Here the piano accompaniment reduces to a single chord on
each downbeat, and the singer is instructed to “almost speak.” Fermatas
over the words “ferraille” and “vendre,” coupled with the expressive mark-
ing crié, likely encouraged the singer to bellow in their best “outdoor”
voice. Given the second-person perspective of the verses, is this outcry
an instance of the singer ventriloquizing, or even mocking, the hawker?
136 Or does the song capture the hawker’s own perspective as she gazes into
a mirror and delivers a self-disparaging judgment? The social codes
embedded in Peuchot’s preface, cover image, text, and score expose the
bourgeoisie’s preoccupation with the Parisian Other: in this case, differ-
ence was inscribed not through place but through privilege. An unlikely
pairing, Baudelaire’s poem and Peuchot’s song both feature a narrator’s
interaction with a solitary hawker. This mode of representation—placing
narrators into direct contact with hawkers—marked a drastic break with
previous practices; the ubiquity of vendors in pre-1800 Paris made them an
easy target for satirical, exoticized treatment of the city’s gritty underbelly.
Street Cries in le vieux Paris
Poets had mined the cris de Paris for their lyrical potential since the
Middle Ages, but these depictions tended to treat street merchants as
a homogenous unit. One of the earliest literary representations of street
peddlers is found in Guillaume de la Villeneuve’s thirteenth-century
poem “Les crieries de Paris.”41 Villeneuve’s Paris resonates with the
40
Mais, voyez donc cette antiquaille, / Cette éternelle m’ame Ourlier, / Qui vient
ravaler mon métier / De vieux chiffons et de ferraille. / Sale fricoteuse! allons donc! / Ton
métier a tant de mérite! / Ah! laisse ferraille et chiffons, / Vends ta pomme de terre frite. /
De cet honneur, je me tiens quitte. / Ferraille à vendre! chiffons! / Habits, chapeaux, galons!
41
The poem was published in the original Old French with a modern French
translation in the nineteenth century. See Georges-Adrien Crapelet, ed., Proverbes et dictons
blaszkiewicz
example 1. Peuchot, “Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons!”
137
sounds of hawkers selling a wide variety of goods: produce, bread, fish,

cheese, as well as odds and ends. Lines that describe the ubiquity of the
cries—heard in the streets from morning until night—are interspersed
with direct quotations of the cries themselves. Villeneuve’s poem, as
Emma Dillon has observed, captured the spontaneous and ephemeral
nature of street commerce.42 Like the perishable products they adver-
tised, the hawkers’ cries had short shelf lives, with one voice blending
into another and leaving the listener with a dizzying number of products
from which to choose. Villeneuve’s image of Paris as a perennial space of
noisy energy translated rather easily into the realm of polyphonic music;
two examples, the Montpellier Codex motet On parole a batre / A Paris /
Frese nouvele and Clément Janequin’s Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris, remain
favorites in early music history courses for their crafty contrapuntal de-
pictions of the urban soundscape.43
-
populaires, avec les dits du mercier et des marchands, et les crieries de Paris, aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles
(Paris: Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1831), 135–46.
42
Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York:
Oxford University Press 2012), 77–81. See also Boutin, City of Noise, 37–38.
43
Although he does not share any musical details, Vincent Milliot has argued that
the repetitive style and simple versification of Villeneuve’s and Janequin’s criers made the
Within musical communities in the late eighteenth century, the cris

de Paris featured in serious arguments about class definition, morality,
and the aural experience of urban life. One major point of contestation
involved musical pedagogy: namely, whether sustained exposure to the
cris could do harm to the cultivated ear. In 1760, Rameau had insisted
that singers could learn from listening to street hawkers: “Listen to those
who sing street cries,” Rameau writes. “Nothing will be better proof of the
effectiveness of nature.”44 Rameau believed that a beautiful and natural
vocal tone is not born from inspiration or learnedness but rather from
the singer’s corporeal awareness. The street hawker, therefore, repre-
sents the human singing body in its most natural and uninhibited state,
and as a result, is able to produce tones that are agreeable to the ear.45 As
if to refute Rameau, Grétry used the street hawker as a scapegoat to warn
singers at the Opéra that poorly articulated consonants and arcane,
provincial vocabulary can obstruct the understanding of the words. As
a result, Grétry mishears the intended messages. “Listen to the street
criers,” Grétry wrote in his 1789 Mémoires, “you cannot find ten that you
would be able to comprehend. From my room, I hear three cries: Parjure,
iras-tu? [Perjury, are you going?] I hear another one: i, a, u. Another one
138 yells: Belles pêches [lovely peaches]. But these belles pêches are actually
mousetraps; i, a, u, are actually bundles of wood, and parjure, iras-tu? are
actually old clothes for sale.”46
Grétry’s warning articulated the rift between the cultivated elite who
patronized the Opéra and the uneducated workers who populated the
streets. But Enlightenment-era writers also tied street cries to shifting
epistemologies of urban acoustics—as if overpopulation obfuscated both
aural and geographic navigation through the city.47 In his multivolume
Tableau de Paris (1781–88), Louis-Sébastien Mercier worries that newly
-
text easy to memorize and thus accessible to an illiterate urban population. See Vincent
Milliot, Les cris de Paris, ou, le peuple travesti: Les représentations des petits métiers parisiens
(XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 141. For an extended
comparison of Janequin’s and Villeneuve’s treatments of the cris de Paris trope, see
Laurent Vissière, “Les cris de Paris: Naissance d’un genre littéraire et musicale (XIIIe–
XIVe siècles),” in Clément Janequin: Un musicien au milieu des poètes, ed. Olivier Halévy,
Isabelle His, and Jean Vignes (Paris: Publications de la Société Française de Musicologie,
2013), 87–116.
44
Jean-Philippe Rameau, Code de la musique pratique, ou méthodes pour apprendre la
musique . . . avec de nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (Paris: Imprimerie royale,
1760), 167.
45
This passage is also referenced in Milliot, Les cris de Paris, 283.
46
André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, 3 vols. (Brussels: A.
Wahlen, 1829), 2:228.
47
This presumption of a link between clarity and class predates Alexander von
Humboldt’s racialized analyses of vocalization in Colombia. See Ochoa Gautier, Aurality,
31–76.
blaszkiewicz
arrived foreigners will immediately associate the incessant noise with the
chaotic medieval plan of Paris’s inner districts:
No, there isn’t a city in the world where criers’ voices are sharper and
more piercing. You hear their voices soaring above the roofs. Their
throats overpower the noise of the streets. It is impossible for a for-
eigner to comprehend any one of them. . . . All of these discordant
cries form an ensemble; one is completely confused because one can’t
understand.48
For Mercier, street cries were distasteful—even dangerous—because they

represented a social class that dominated the soundscape with incom-
prehensible language. By documenting his negative sensory experience
of street noise, Mercier distances himself from the hawkers that surround
him in the street. The main reason why hawkers are “unable” to vocalize
properly, he contends, is their lack of refined, homegrown, Parisian
urbanity: “the common people are excessively noisy by nature. One hears
their hoarse, sharp, and muffled cries from every corner.”49 It is crucial
that Mercier does not mention specific racial or ethnic origins in this
passage. Rather, the hawkers’ “natural” vocality permanently marked 139
their status as a marginal urban community.
By the mid-nineteenth century, street cries became a subject covered
in travel literature. Pamphlets and guidebooks offer a glimpse into the
complex reception of street cries and how they were often synonymous
with noise of the industrialized city in general. An 1840 booklet titled Les
embarras de Paris: Quel horrible fracas, quel tumultes, quel cris (The annoy-
ances of Paris: What horrible noise, what commotion, what cries) details
the frustration caused by the onslaught of loud outdoor commerce.50
The author—one Lanterelu, who adopted the unequivocally modern
pen name J. C. M. le Flâneur—describes how his eyes and ears are over-
whelmed by the streetscape:
Cage welders, produce vendors, ambulant glaziers, newspaper vendors,

barking dogs, barrel organs, street musicians on every corner, all of
these distract you while attacking your eardrum. . . . It’s a perpetual con-
cert, rather pleasant if one is lucky enough to already be deaf, but at
least we [the rest of us] can keep hoping to attain that state.51
48
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (A Amsterdam [Neuchâtel]: [Société ty-
pographique de Neuchâtel], 1783), 5:67.
49
Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 6:192.
50
Lanterelu (J. C. M. le Flâneur), Les embarras de Paris: Quel horrible fracas, quel tumulte,
quel cris (Paris: Chez l’Editeur, 1840).
51
Lanterelu (J. C. M. le Flâneur), Les embarras de Paris, 10.
Lanterelu’s account of the street’s “deafening” noise anticipates Antoine

Le Roux de Lincy’s description of the rue Saint Martin in an 1855 tourist
guidebook.52 In preparation for the Exposition Universelle in Paris that
year, Haussmannization had already pushed much open-air commerce
out of the central arrondissements, but the rue Saint-Martin remained
a popular venue for street markets, fairs, and itinerant hawkers. De Lincy
notes that the noisy shouts of street hawkers from morning to afternoon,
amplified by the perpetual din of carriages, could be a potential terror
for uninitiated foreigners:
Soon, as in previous centuries, these little merchants appear, each with

a particular cry that is incomprehensible to those not accustomed to it.
These cries are barely muffled by the deafeningly noisy carriages of all
kinds; their increasing numbers block traffic until midday. Woe to the
foreigner if chance or business leads him to this street.53
As Lanterelu and de Lincy warned, to be a nineteenth-century urbanite

was to be made figuratively numb from sensory overload. The noisiness
of the city was thus deemed a moral public health crisis. The Second
Empire police were more than happy to step in, implementing a series of
140 decrees that not only curtailed criers but also prepared the street for
Haussmann’s streamlined plan for the French capital.
Peddlers and the Police
Between roughly 1850 and 1900 a series of police decrees systematically

increased the surveillance of marchands des comestibles—those who sold
meat, produce, fish, etc.—as well as those who peddled écrits, such as
daily newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. Police regulations on what
and how things ought to be sold made it systematically more difficult to
obtain commercial licenses, gradually stripping the street cry of the com-
municative power it once possessed.
On October 6, 1851, the Second Republic government of the soon-
to-be Napoléon III issued a set of regulations that rendered all previous
decrees pertaining to hawkers obsolete and generally viewed vendors as
a disturbance to everyday traffic and commerce. The new law prevented
hawkers from moving freely within the city, subjecting them to strict
licensing and zoning requirements: “No one shall circulate on public
roadways to sell merchandise or food on display devices [e.g., stands or
52
Antoine Le Roux de Lincy, “Rue et faubourg Saint-Martin,” in Paris chez soi: Revue
historique, monumentale et pittoresque de Paris ancien et moderne (Paris: Paul Boizard, 1855),
257–71.
53
De Lincy, “Rue et faubourg Saint-Martin,” 271.
blaszkiewicz
stalls] or by any other means.”54 There was immediate backlash. A group

of angry peddlers stormed the prefecture with a petition carrying fifty
thousand signatures, and they flooded the daily press with polemical
open letters. But the police préfet (chief) upheld the decree. The October
1851 decree irrevocably affected the aural component of street com-
merce. As vendors could no longer accost customers, they increasingly
turned to visual advertising. As a result, many of their cries, stripped of
their communicative function, were rendered obsolete.
Subsequent police decrees placed further restrictions on public
spaces in which street peddlers could sell goods. In the early 1860s the
police increasingly cracked down on vendors who stopped to sell goods
in Paris’s voies publiques, or “public thoroughfares.” A decree posted on
July 25, 1862, effectively forbade merchants from obstructing pedestrian
flow by occupying sidewalks. Instead, they were to find spaces away from
foot and vehicular traffic, such as the tips of street corners.55 Reports and
vendor application forms suggest that hawkers were often accused of
turning bridges, streets, and squares into full-blown markets, which re-
sulted in traffic jams and occasional accidents. Yet empty spaces were
increasingly difficult to find, as the curvy streets, alleyways, and squares
that defined the geography of pre-Haussmann Paris were systematically 141
replaced by the long boulevards of seemingly endless sidewalks. In addi-
tion to easing urban flow, these regulations of public space also sought to
defend brick-and-mortar boutiques and markets by banning peddlers
from working within a hundred meters of indoor businesses where sim-
ilar products were being sold.56
Other police measures reveal that Haussmann’s notion of moder-
nity relied on a symbolic segregation of old from new, center from
periphery, and regulated sound from unregulated noise. During the
years of the Second Empire, all street vendors who applied successfully
to the Pr éfecture de Police were issued medallions. According to
a police ordinance issued on December 28, 1859, “Street merchants
who have obtained a permit will receive from the Prefecture a brass
medallion engraved with the last name and first initial, as well as the
permit number. It is mandatory to wear the medallion and make it
constantly visible on the public thoroughfare.”57 To passersby, these
medallions were a visual reassurance that the products sold were at least
54
“Nul ne pourra circuler sur la voie publique en quête d’acheteurs, avec des
marchandises ou denrées exposées en vente sur des appareils quelconques ou par tout
autre moyen.” Untitled looseleaf decree, APP, Box DB 195.
55
“Application form, “Distributeur d’Écrits sur la voie publique,” APP, Box DB 195.
56
“Application form, “Distributeur d’Écrits sur la voie publique.”
57
“Tout marchand ambulant qui a obtenu une permission, reçoit à la Préfecture de
police une médaille de cuivre qui porte son nom et les lettres initiales de ses prénoms, ainsi
que le numéro de sa permission. –Il est tenu de porter constamment cette médaille d’une
figure 3. Medallions worn by street vendors to denote registration in

“new” or “old” Paris. APP, Box DB 201
partially vouched for by the government. To the police, the medallions

ensured that vendors traded within their designated zones. Following
the enlargement of Paris in 1860 from twelve arrondissements to twenty,
142 street vendors were assigned specific parts of the city in which they could
do business. To facilitate policing, medallions came in two shapes: bell-
shaped or circular (fig. 3). Bell-shaped medallions indicated zone one,
or ancien Paris, which represented the central neighborhoods of the first
through eleventh arrondissements. Circular medallions indicated zone
two, or nouveau Paris, which consisted of the outer ring of communes
(arrondissements twelve through twenty). Through mandatory licens-
ing and branding, and by rezoning the newly added Parisian neighbor-
hoods, the municipal government remapped outdoor commercial
activity by creating two distinct Parisian identities: one “old” and one
“new” (fig. 4).
Policing, coupled with the annexation of the outer communes in
1860, brought about a redistribution of human bodies that directly
affected outdoor commerce. Memoirs and book-length essays published
in the 1850s and 1860s, most notably by Fournel and Kastner, proposed
a preservation of sonic urban heritage: readers were instructed to seek out
criers before they all vanished. Boutin posits that the cris de Paris became
a valuable cultural commodity as soon as they became threatened by
police interference: “preserved under glass, as it were, peddlers are no
longer heard but seen, their evanescent sound afforded the permanence
of an image (a print, a poster, a postcard, a score, or a museum record)
-
manière ostensible lorsqu’il circule sur la voie publique pour exercer sa profession.” APP,
Box DB 195.
blaszkiewicz
figure 4. 1860 map showing distribution of commercial space between

the “old” and “new” Parisian zones. Crosshatched spaces
indicate “market” territory that was off-limits to ambulant
vendors. Circles indicate public spaces where vendors could
assemble. APP, Box DB 201
143
that can be bought and sold.”58 Granted, Boutin’s claim that peddlers “are
no longer heard” is slightly overstated. This narrative of disappearance, as
we have seen, was an invention of the time; nostalgia functioned here as
yet another way to experience modernity. Moreover, hawkers remained
a subject of interest for songwriters, composers, and librettists who used
the cris de Paris as material to convey a perceived tension between Hauss-
mann’s modern city and the shrinking footprint of le vieux Paris.
Kastner’s Parisian Voices
It took a particularly idiosyncratic musical imagination to hear the street

cry as something more meaningful than caricature or couleur locale. Enter
58
Boutin, City of Noise, 81.
Jean-Georges Kastner (1810–67), a polymath composer, theorist, and

critic who married preservationist rhetoric with romantic subjectivity to
write a proto-ethnomusicological treatise on the urban soundscape:
a “sound student” avant la lettre.59 Of all the guidebooks, travelogues,
and memoirs detailing life on the boulevards, Jean-Georges Kastner’s
Les voix de Paris, published in 1857, offers the most synoptic account of
the cris de Paris. Kastner supplements his prose with musical examples
from compositions featuring street cries, including Janequin’s Voulez
ouyr, as well as transcriptions of cries that he purportedly had heard
himself. Yet Kastner went further than any predecessor in setting Paris’s
cries to music: he concludes his volume with a fully scored, three-
movement symphony for orchestra and chorus titled Les cris de Paris,
which sets a text by Édouard Thierry and reuses street-cry transcriptions
as motivic material. Kastner plays out two roles with this monograph-
score, or livre-partition as it was dubbed in the printed edition. On one
hand, he is a scholar, penning a historical essay that treats the street cry
the way an ornithologist would treat birdsong. On the other hand, he is
a humorist, composing a musical work in which a sleepless bourgeois
urbanite and an amateur pianist are respectively interrupted by brazen
144 vendors shouting from the streets. Kastner’s livre-partition, its critical
reception, and its influence on subsequent opera composition all point
to a historiographical—and market-driven—demand for nostalgic sonic
histories of the “old city.”
Les voix de Paris is divided into two parts. Chapters 1–4 survey musical
and poetic representations of street cries in chronological order. Chap-
ters 5–7 discuss the vocal differences between various petits métiers, the
ways in which street cries have been discussed by writers in the past, and
how Paris’s cris compare with street noise in other cities and countries.
Although most of Kastner’s statements regarding the specifics of street
commerce either rely on previously published French or German
sources or involve sweeping generalizations, what is enlightening is the
way in which he approaches street cries as sonic relics to be cherished
and not destroyed. The more personal and philosophical passages of his
book are indicative of how the rhetoric of community preservation
implicitly challenged Haussmannian notions of modernity.
In the introductory chapter of Les voix de Paris, Kastner describes the
Parisian soundscape as a resonating example of collective social and eco-
nomic activity. As Kastner writes, “large cities have a language; they even
59
In Jonathan Sterne’s formulation, “sound students produce and transform
knowledge about sound and in the process reflexively attend to the (cultural, political,
environmental, aesthetic . . . ) stakes of that knowledge production.” See Sterne, “Sonic
Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge,
2012), 1–17, at 3–4.
blaszkiewicz
have their own sort of—if I may use the term—music that expresses, at all
hours of the day, the movement and evolution of life that is joyous or
somber, laborious or peaceful, which comprises home. . . . There is some-
thing characteristic in this sonic chaos that cradles the pleasures that make
up activity in the Parisian behemoth.”60 The ambient noises of the street,
he implies, are not the concealed pit orchestra but rather the epicenter of
the urban drama. He notes, “these cries, taken as a whole, are like the
voice of the people, and in certain civilizations become symbols or tradi-
tional formulas of certain groups or certain distinct professions.”61 Here as
in other passages, Kastner alludes to Rousseau’s ideas about modern lan-
guage’s ties to ancestral cries. Kastner does not cite Rousseau’s 1781 “Essay
on the Origin of Language,” perhaps knowing that the philosophe famously
disdained the noisy din of inner Paris. Nevertheless, as Emily Laurance
convincingly explains, human cries offer Kastner’s narrative “continuity
from the civil society of the Ancien Régime through subsequent expressions
of revolutionary fervour and ultimately to the soundscape of modern
commerce.”62 Just as the French Revolution produced the very notion
of an ancien régime—as Boym reminds us—so too was the notion of le vieux
Paris a byproduct of Haussmannization.63 To Kastner, street cries are not
noisy obstructions to civilized living, nor are they mere sonic curiosities. 145
Instead, Kastner used his ears to write a nostalgic urban narrative that
sought to reclaim the boulevard as a communal space.
For eighteenth-century commentators, as we have seen, sensory
distaste signified class; the frail ear was likened to delicate hands
relieved of manual labor. Kastner, in contrast, suggested that his own
privileged, trained “voice” as a member of the Académie was no more
prominent than the unrefined, utilitarian voices belonging to his every-
day urban community:
Yes, without a doubt, the Paris resident, disturbed while sleeping or

while studying, could curse these unwelcome noises. But if he leaves
his dwelling for a while, all of these noises will charm him upon his
return. They will no longer seem like sour and discordant voices that
tore at his eardrum. They will be intimate and friendly voices that seem
to celebrate him; they will be the sweet voices of home.64
Rather than dismiss street cries as intrusive and amoral impositions on

the bourgeois ear, Kastner argues that these sounds comprise—literally
60
Georges Kastner, Les voix de Paris: Essai d’une histoire littéraire et musicale (Paris:
Brandus, Dufour & Co., 1857), v.
61
Kastner, Les voix de Paris, v.
62
Laurance, “Georges Kastner’s Les Voix de Paris,” 60.
63
Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xvi.
64
Kastner, Les voix de Paris, 77.
and figuratively—the collective “voice” of the Parisian community. Tim-

bre becomes an index of familiarity. Kastner’s nostalgia for hawkers
translates into a “sweet” and inviting vocal sound. In his orchestral score,
nostalgia translates into an accessible tonal language which, for an
orchestral work of the late 1850s, was particularly sparse in Wagne-
rian/Lisztian chromaticism. Although Kastner demonstrates great inven-
tiveness in orchestration to bring the urban soundscape to life, I read this
reserved approach to harmony as a sign of his familial sonic relationship
with the street cry.65
The Symphonic Street Cry
Kastner’s aforementioned description of the disgruntled Parisian resi-

dent turned enthusiastic listener aptly summarizes the scenario of his
programmatic symphony Les cris de Paris: Grande symphonie humoristique.
Cast in three parts—respectively titled “Paris by Morning,” “Paris by Day-
time,” and “Paris by Evening”—Les cris de Paris consists of a sequence of
solo numbers alternating with orchestral dance movements and choruses.
146
Technically the work does not fit the formal conventions of a symphony;
rather, as Laurance has noted, the work is more akin to a nineteenth-
century secular cantata given the diversity of its musical material.66
As if to link the soundscape of le vieux Paris to ancien régime operatic
convention, the first movement opens with an evocative aria by the muse
Titania, in which the soprano bids farewell to the quietness of night and
welcomes the sights and sounds of dawn: “Do you hear the rooster crow
in the distance? / A cool air skims the air. / Shadows are shifting on the
horizon, / Gentle dreams; it is morning.”67 A clarinet in C evokes a dis-
tant birdsong, which is later echoed in the flutes and English horn.
Kastner then turns to the Parisian street at morning; the high woodwinds
give way to percussion instruments—anvil, cymbals, whip, jingle bells,
and tympani—that render the noises of workers and merchants prepar-
ing for the day (ex. 2). The written instructions in the score give a sense
of the desired effect: “Various noises. The shops opening up, the
65
As Thomas Christensen argues, nineteenth-century tonality functioned as a theo-
retical construct that betrayed Europeans’ anxiety as they came into increasing contact with
non-Western musical systems. On the perceived tonal qualities of street hawkers, see
Thomas Christensen, Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2019), esp. 115–24.
66
See Emily Laurance, “Varieties of Operatic Realism in Nineteenth-Century France:
The Case of Gustave Charpentier’s Louise” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 2003), 335.
67
“Entendez-vous le coq lointain? / Un air plus frais rase la terre. / À l’horizon
l’ombre s’altère, / Songes légers, c’est le matin.”
blaszkiewicz
example 2. Orchestral interlude in part 1 of Jean-Georges Kastner,

Les cris de Paris, grande symphonie humoristique vocale et
instrumentale (Paris: G. Brandus, Dufour & Co., 1857), 13
milkman’s trumpet, the blacksmith striking an anvil, the coppersmith

147
striking copper, etc., etc.”68
The music unfolds as a gradual ebb and flow of sound. Following
a pedal tone on G in the clarinets and double basses marked ppp, the
strings exchange a sextuplet ascending motive, creating a sense of quiet
but frenetic energy. Repeated triplets in the horns further reinforce the
workers’ business at dawn. There is no discernible melody in this passage;
it is not the cries themselves that we hear but rather the sounds of the city
as heard by a pedestrian. The passage is built on a dynamic arc that
suggests movement through space, beginning pianissimo and ending in
near silence with a quintuple piano marking in the penultimate measure.
Although the symphony’s other movements contain musical structures
and idioms conventional in mid-nineteenth-century French composition,
such as a ternary cavatina form and an orchestral polka, this brief passage
is an outlier in its minimal motivic development and atmospheric orches-
tration. Indeed, this passage makes a case that Kastner’s symphonic work
is more than a mere playful symphonie humoristique. The interlude, with its
programmatic instructions and substantial percussion battery, reveals
a serious attempt on Kastner’s part to validate the cris de Paris as inextri-
cably linked to the fabric of the industrialized city.
This orchestral interlude sets the stage for the cavatina that initiates
the symphony’s program. Édouard Thierry’s text recounts the awakening
68
“Bruits divers. Les boutiques qui s’ouvrent, la trompette du laitier, le forgeron qui
bat l’enclume, le chaudronnier qui frappe le cuivre, etc., etc.”
of a troubled sleeper (simply named “Dormeur”) by street noise in the

first part, his profession of love for a piano-playing neighbor in the
second, and his transition from angry auditor to committed flâneur in
the third. Thierry’s text alternates between octosyllabic and alexandrine
verse; following the sleeper’s cavatina, in which he wishes away his insom-
nia, several street hawkers interrupt the second verse. Kastner does not
present hawkers on their own as free-standing objects of alterity but
rather writes a duet that situates street cries vis à vis the listener.
Although the sleeper perceives this outdoor discourse as an abrasive
intrusion, the hawkers humorously complement the sleeper’s song by
maintaining the versification and concluding on the same end-rhyme:
Sleeper: Stay put, my faithful dreams! . . .

A Voice: Nuts! Nuts! Come eat these new nuts.
Sleeper: [My dreams] hear me; they seem to speak . . .
A Voice: Knives, scissors, ironing!69
Kastner sets this passage as a rocking barcarolle, with the alto saxophone
presenting the main melody. As the sleeper then takes over the melody,
148 the saxophone continues as an obbligato line. In the reprise of the cavatina,
the hawkers interject through sporadic parlando outbursts. The resulting
vocal counterpoint creates an illusion of spatial distance between the
bedchamber and the street: the sound is close enough for the sleeper
to hear the hawker, but far enough away that the hawker is unaware any
intrusion is taking place (ex. 3).
Unable to ignore these sounds any longer, the sleeper erupts in
what can only be called a “rage aria” (ex. 4). Following a series of
exclamatory remarks, he describes the unpleasant timbre of the criers’
voices as “yelping” and “bellowing.” This ternary-form movement is the
noisiest passage of Kastner’s work. The rapid alternations of piano and
forte, the chromatic weaving of the singer’s melody, the tremolo strings,
and the piercingly high range of the first flute all underscore the sing-
er’s unrelenting hatred of street noise: Paris, c’est l’enfer! (Paris is hell!),
he laments.
If the street noise drove the “Dormeur” to sing a rage aria, then the
following section—a tightly woven polyphonic chorus of street cries—
betrays a radically different attitude toward Paris’s morning sounds. The
final chorus of Part 1—À deux liards les reinettes! (apples for two
pennies!)—is in essence “heard” through Kastner’s own sympathetic ears.
69
Le dormeur: Restez, restez, o mes songes fidèles! . . .
Une voix: La noix! la noix! Mangez la noix nouvelle.
Le dormeur: Elle m’écoute; elle semblait parler . . .
Une voix: Couteaux, ciseaux, à repasser!
blaszkiewicz
example 3. Hawkers’ parlando interjections. Kastner, Les cris de Paris,

part 1, p. 28
149
example 4. The sleepy protagonist’s “rage aria.” Kastner, Les cris de

Paris, part 1, p. 31
150
blaszkiewicz
example 4. (Continued)
151
Hawkers do not disrupt or distract; rather, each entrance of the SATB

chorus corresponds with a motive heard in the orchestra. Composed in
a sprightly C major, the choral passage unfolds through a series of lyrical
or declamatory motives. We hear a total of sixteen distinct street cries, with

one of them—à deux liards!—functioning as a recurring motive. In con-
trast to the protagonist’s E minor aria, this passage demonstrates compo-
sitional restraint. Each motivic recurrence retains its basic rhythmic and
melodic contour. The orchestra stays out of the way and delicately doubles
the vocal lines. The restraint and academicism of this contrapuntal choral
passage demonstrates Kastner’s willingness to hear the street cry not
merely as a cacophonous intrusion or sonic marker of working-class alter-
ity but also as a palatable, even pleasant, musical experience.
Part 2 of Les cris de Paris, “Le jour,” takes place indoors and involves
a playful exchange between a gawking resident and a piano-playing
neighbor. Since no street cries appear in this movement, we will rejoin
the protagonist in Part 3, “Le soir.” As if to reflect on the carnivalesque
diversity of boulevard life, “Le soir” features a compilation of five mini-
movements: a ternary aria, a choral number, an orchestral polka, a hunt-
ing chorus for brass, and a final sung chorus. The narrative trajectory of
Les cris de Paris effectively concludes with the aria of “Le soir,” since it is
the last time we hear the main character. Singing in a barcarolle rhythm,
the protagonist—whose name has changed in the score from “Dormeur”
152 to “Promeneur” (walker)—offers a tender serenade about Paris by night.
Recalling Part 1, the street criers—this time a group of crieurs de journaux
(newspaper vendors) and a marchand de contre-marques billets (ticket
scalper)—interrupt the song right before the final cadence. In the E
minor section that immediately follows, the band of hawkers shouts the
names of the newspapers for sale. Instead of expressing annoyance as
before, the fully awake protagonist seems content with or even pleased by
the hawkers’ presence. During the serenade, the violas and a baritone
ticket scalper support the soloist through obbligato melodic lines (ex. 5).
Kastner uses this humorous union of musical forces to obliterate the
distinction between melodious singing and intrusive crying; rather than
interrupt or disturb the stability of the aria, the hawkers complement the
protagonist’s melody. Although there are no stage directions, we can
imagine the sleeper-turned-flâneur parading through the streets of Paris
alongside his hawking compatriots. Kastner’s aforementioned “sweet
voices of home” find their symphonic parallel here: by deploying coun-
terpoint, rocking barcarolle rhythms, and obbligato melodies, Kastner
presents a sonic landscape of a city that treats hawkers not as intrusive
Others but as welcome elements of the urban fabric. Kastner’s Les cris de
Paris can thus be heard as a symphonic triptych on the moral imperatives
of listening to disenfranchised voices. The work presents a series of
programmatic vignettes that musically outline the main ideas that Kast-
ner proposed in his prefatory essay. Listen without prejudice, Kastner
suggests, and you will be rewarded.
blaszkiewicz
example 5. Protagonist’s melody (top) and viola reprise (bottom).

Kastner, Les cris de Paris, part 3, pp. 107 and 114, respectively
153
The broad critical response to Kastner’s Les voix de Paris suggests that
the volume made its way around the Parisian musical and theatrical com-
munities. Taking note of the book’s warm reception, François-Joseph Fétis
observed in his 1866–68 edition of the Biographie universelle des musiciens
that Les voix de Paris “generated as much astonishment for the originality of
the idea, as for patience of the research.”70 Writing in the Revue des beaux-
arts in 1857, Antoine Elwart commended Kastner’s efforts to historicize
street cries: “[Kastner] set out to highlight the intimate rapport between
the sonorities of outdoor commerce and the state of our history. He also
sought to demonstrate that these cries, which are all too often perceived as
insignificant chaos, hold keys to understanding the traditions and inten-
tions that touch upon the most problematic and delicate issues of our
musical heritage.”71 In other words, the cris de Paris belonged to both
linguistic and musical narratives of history, and as such, they merited
a study like Kastner’s to secure their place in French cultural memory.
Joseph d’Ortigue was more direct in connecting Les voix de Paris to
ongoing debates about urban demolition in Paris. In a lengthy essay pub-
lished in the Journal des débats on March 19, 1858, d’Ortigue looked past
the inherent humor of the musical work and situated it as a creative by-
154 product of mass urbanization. Les voix de Paris, d’Ortigue claimed, should
interest those who specialize in the history of the French capital and who
are witnessing “the architects’ hammer demolishing what remains of old
Paris.”72 Under such devastating urban conditions, he continued, the
vibrant practice of hawking was at serious risk of being annihilated from
Paris’s cultural memory: “in a few years, no traces will remain of these old
cries, just as no traces will remain of the old city. Both will be replaced by
constructions and ‘compositions’ which are perhaps more regulated, but
which will be far from presenting the same character.”73 D’Ortigue draws
a direct parallel between urban construction and musical composition,
and he implies that Haussmann’s symmetrical urbanism and Kastner’s
symphony are two ways of disciplining the urban experience. Kastner’s
project, as d’Ortigue sees it, was not so much an act of preservation as it
was a composer’s attempt to make the sounds of le vieux Paris palatable for
bourgeois consumption. In other words, d’Ortigue reads Kastner’s book
Les voix de Paris not necessarily as antimodern but rather as an “off-mod-
ern” artistic product. Just as the winding alleyways of le vieux Paris were
replaced with straight boulevards, Kastner’s cris de Paris are polished and
70
François-Joseph Fétis, “Kastner, Jean-Georges,” in Biographie universelle des musiciens
et bibliographie générale de la musique, 8 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1866–68), 4:484.
71
Antoine Elwart, “Les voix de Paris!,” in Revue des beaux-arts 27 (1857): 202–3, at 202.
72
Joseph d’Ortigue, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, March
19, 1858.
73
D’Ortigue, “Revue musicale.”
blaszkiewicz
ordered versions of the original, made to conform to tonal diatonicism,

counterpoint, and conventional symphonic and cantata forms.74
Un peu de folklore
One year after the publication of Les voix de Paris, Jacques Offenbach and
librettist Armand Lapointe quoted Kastner’s transcriptions of street cries
in Mesdames de la Halle, a one-act opérette-bouffe that premiered at the
Bouffes-Parisiens on March 3, 1858. Set in Paris’s historic Marché des
Innocents during the reign of Louis XV, the operetta features an open-
ing chorus of street vendors who advertise their wares to passersby.
Indeed, each distinct street cry heard in the chorus could be traced to
specific examples in Kastner’s book—an observation that d’Ortigue
made in the review discussed above.75 But it is the operetta’s setting in
the Marché des Innocents that begs our attention, as it offers a spotlight
on one of the most celebrated outdoor markets that was slated for demo-
lition. In early 1858 Haussmann closed the Marché des Innocents to
make room for a giant, indoor marketplace known as Les Halles cen-
155
trales. The glass and iron edifice designed by Victor Baltard, which Zola
later dubbed “ The Belly of Paris” in his eponymous novel of 1873, was to
represent Second Empire modernity at its peak. The closure of the
Marché des Innocents meant that the bustle of surrounding outdoor
commerce would give way to the indoor pavilions, fixed prices, and visual
advertising. In “modern” Paris, then, transactions became interactions
between customers and signs, with vendors serving as silent mediators.
This Kastner-inspired operetta can thus be read as a modernist homage
to le vieux Paris: an adaptation of a seemingly antiquated sonic world for
a modern entertainment industry. Satirical musical works by Offenbach,
Kastner, and others deserve merit as documents of urban history, offer-
ing a nostalgic counternarrative to the Haussmannian utopianism and
modernist pessimism that has dominated the historiography of Second
Empire France.
Amidst heavy police crackdown on street commerce during the nine-
teenth century, writers, composers, and critics situated street vendors on
a historical continuum with “old Paris” and its alleyways and street carts
on one side and “new Paris” and its boulevards and market halls on the
74
In earlier writings, d’Ortigue suggested that the modernization of Paris precipi-
tated modern tonality’s encroaching on the increasingly fragile traditions of modal church
music. See Christensen, Stories of Tonality, 124.
75
See Jacek Blaszkiewicz, “Street Cries on the Operetta Stage: Offenbach’s Mesdames
de la Halle (1858),” in Musical Theatre in Europe 1830–1945, ed. Michela Niccolai and Clair
Rowden (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2017), 63–89.
other. The many debates, reflections, and creative acts inspired by the
cris de Paris highlight the rift between urban change and collective care
for the municipal past, but they also reveal a horizon of experience that
has eluded the predominantly opera-centric scholarship of the period.
As a cultural phenomenon, Haussmannization redistributed social activ-
ity from a diverse array of intimate spaces and interactions to monumen-
tal boulevards, stores, and markets. The cris de Paris thus represented an
antiquated, haphazard exchange economy that was at odds with the new,
homogenized vision of the city. I have suggested that urbanization is as
much about controlling the historiography of sensory experience as it is
an execution of public works projects. The resonant accounts buried in
the unsorted boxes in Paris’s Archives de la Préfecture de Police reveal
that street hawkers did more than provide passive couleur locale to oper-
atic works such as Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle, and later, Giacomo
Puccini’s Parisian verismo operas La bohème and Il tabarro and Gustave
Charpentier’s Louise of 1900.76 Rather, hawkers constituted an urban
community whose prevalence in the economy inspired nostalgia in the
preservationists and ire in the Préfecture de la Seine.
Notwithstanding the ultimate success of these attempts to “preserve”
156 the memory of outdoor urban commerce, the cris de Paris played a sub-
stantial role in the folklorization of le vieux Paris. Today, the ubiquitous
presence of Parisian street criers is a thing of the past, although some
produce vendors will still advertise bargains by hawking the price—albeit
in euros—to passersby. But the phenomenon of the cris de Paris has been
literally folded into history: at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police,
nineteenth-century police decrees are tucked into twentieth-century
newspaper clippings reminiscing on le vieux Paris. Buried in the afore-
mentioned “Cris de Paris” Box DB 201 is a 1976 clipping from the news-
paper Le Parisien entitled “Les petits métiers de Paris il y a 150 ans” (The
small-scale tradespeople of Paris, 150 years ago). Without referring to
Kastner, Fournel, d’Ortigue, or any other nineteenth-century voice, it
asks: “the cries that once animated the street of Paris are gone. Is that for
better, or for worse? Opinions are divided. A bit of folklore [un peu de
folklore] has disappeared, steamrolled by commercial codification.”77
Folklore—along with related concepts such as patrimoine (heritage for-
mation), mythology, homage, preservation, ethnography, historicity, and
nostalgia—belonged to the broader discursive practices of nineteenth-
century Parisian modernity. The use of the word “folklore” in the 1976
76
See Arman Schwartz, Puccini’s Soundscapes: Realism and Modernity in Italian Opera
(Florence: Olschki, 2016); and Laurance, “Varieties of Operatic Realism.”
77
“Les cris qui animaient les rues de Paris ont disparu. Est-ce du bien, un mal? Les
avis sont partagés. Un peu de folklore a disparu, sous le rouleau de la codification.” Le
Parisien, July 6, 1976.
blaszkiewicz
Le Parisien article suggests that oral histories of Paris were fueled by

nostalgia for a community perceived to be lost. As Boym writes, nostalgia
“desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective
mythology.”78 The idea of le vieux Paris emerged in parallel with Hauss-
mannization as a way to reclaim a sense of community in an industrial-
izing metropolis. The “old city,” as reimagined by Kastner, Offenbach,
and others, was a quintessential cultural product of the nineteenth cen-
tury, a nostalgic painting of modern life.
ABSTRACT
The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris
or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the
Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition
severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The pro-
liferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris
circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared
the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These 157
nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène
Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced.
Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by dis-
placing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that
made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia
offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by sug-
gesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what
came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s
symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of
the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of moder-
nity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century”
and a romanticized Old City.
Keywords: French Second Empire, Jean-Georges Kastner, modernity,

Paris, soundscape, street cries, urbanization
78
Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xv.

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Listening to the Old

City: Street Cries and

Street hawkers—itinerant salespeople who ped-

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2016 meeting

hawkers were an active and ubiquitous element of the city’s economy,

which they dwelled vanished from the map.3 A proliferation of books,

representation of street cries in nineteenth-century France thus factors

distinct from questions of nationalism and national identity. Tim Car-

A history of urban soundscapes asks how diverse musical communi-

expression from Adam Krims.22 From a musicological perspective, no

Gutting the Center

By Haussmann’s own estimation, 13 percent of the city was leveled between

memory; when a city undergoes radical transformation, it makes sense to

Hawkers in Poetry and Song

As Boutin, Brehm, and others have shown, nineteenth-century poets

figure 2. Image accompanying “Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons!” in Paris en

Look at that old hag,

Street Cries in le vieux Paris

example 1. Peuchot, “Ferraille à vendre! Chiffons!”

sounds of hawkers selling a wide variety of goods: produce, bread, fish,

Within musical communities in the late eighteenth century, the cris

For Mercier, street cries were distasteful—even dangerous—because they

Cage welders, produce vendors, ambulant glaziers, newspaper vendors,

Lanterelu’s account of the street’s “deafening” noise anticipates Antoine

Soon, as in previous centuries, these little merchants appear, each with

As Lanterelu and de Lincy warned, to be a nineteenth-century urbanite

Peddlers and the Police

Between roughly 1850 and 1900 a series of police decrees systematically

stalls] or by any other means.”54 There was immediate backlash. A group

figure 3. Medallions worn by street vendors to denote registration in

partially vouched for by the government. To the police, the medallions

figure 4. 1860 map showing distribution of commercial space between

Kastner’s Parisian Voices

It took a particularly idiosyncratic musical imagination to hear the street

Jean-Georges Kastner (1810–67), a polymath composer, theorist, and

Yes, without a doubt, the Paris resident, disturbed while sleeping or

Rather than dismiss street cries as intrusive and amoral impositions on

and figuratively—the collective “voice” of the Parisian community. Tim-

The Symphonic Street Cry

Kastner’s aforementioned description of the disgruntled Parisian resi-

example 2. Orchestral interlude in part 1 of Jean-Georges Kastner,

milkman’s trumpet, the blacksmith striking an anvil, the coppersmith

of a troubled sleeper (simply named “Dormeur”) by street noise in the

Sleeper: Stay put, my faithful dreams! . . .

example 3. Hawkers’ parlando interjections. Kastner, Les cris de Paris,

example 4. The sleepy protagonist’s “rage aria.” Kastner, Les cris de

Hawkers do not disrupt or distract; rather, each entrance of the SATB

or declamatory motives. We hear a total of sixteen distinct street cries, with

example 5. Protagonist’s melody (top) and viola reprise (bottom).

ordered versions of the original, made to conform to tonal diatonicism,

Le Parisien article suggests that oral histories of Paris were fueled by

Keywords: French Second Empire, Jean-Georges Kastner, modernity,

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