City of love, city of light, city of … noise? Aimée Boutin’s 2015 City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris presents a literary history of the way authors, engravers, policy-makers and musicians heard the urban landscape as it changed through a century of industrialization and modernization. As she signals from the start, she focuses not so much on the sounds themselves as on how people responded to them, capturing them in word and image. Most of the book’s examples and case studies demonstrate how authors, visual artists and musicians represented quotidian activities of Parisian daily life using the senses of sound, sight and language. As a literary critic, Boutin chooses and interprets texts; her book largely centres on prose and poetry. But her method raises new questions and calls upon an exploration of a wide variety of sources that both touch upon musicology and can point in the direction of new studies in our field as well. With City of Noise, Boutin contributes a new set of tools for making sense of the past and its contexts for art and thought. If we already know that the Paris of Napoleon and Haussmann, Baudelaire and Zola, Berlioz and Bizet was a city with a new sense of grandeur and cultural status, as evidenced through the systematic construction of modern residential neighbourhoods and distinctive monuments, Boutin narrows in on a forgotten cost of new construction: the loss of the city’s many intangible qualities, such as the sounds of each different neighbourhood. This way of telling history enriches the old narrative. It draws attention to a way of connecting with a social class and its cultural products that have often been marginalized in scholarship.

Boutin situates her literary history within sound studies, a pluridisciplinary approach to new scholarly materials with many aims: reconstruction of lost soundscapes, understanding the relationship between sound and sight and expanding the notion of the sensorium as a way to deepen phenomenological inquiry into history. For example, French historian Alain Corbin’s findings on how sounds of church bells in the French countryside affected villagers’ sense of place, history and self make an imprint on Boutin’s methodology.Footnote ¹ As in her previously published work (including the chapter ‘Aural Flânerie’, which appeared as an article in a special edition of Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes), Boutin relies on studies of the sounds themselves to study how authors react to or represent sounds.Footnote ² Her object of study and the complexity of her final arguments are distinct from those outlined in such seminal contributions to the field as composer/theorist Murray Schafer’s The Soundcape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World or media theorist Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Instead of offering a new way to hear nineteenth-century Paris, the book tunes readers in to what authors were hearing.Footnote ³

Noise means different things to different people. In Boutin’s study, it principally means the songs – the Cris de Paris – street peddlers used to advertise their wares. The Cris are essential to the book’s thesis, which emerges over the course of multiple propositions. Fundamental to these is one that will pique musicologists’ attention: according to Jacques Attali, noise is the sound of an era that reveals power struggles, as various groups create or control it.Footnote ⁴ Boutin relies on a liberal reading of Attali’s theory by discarding the essential identification between noise and music, and neither the author nor his complex theory of social evolution reappears in the book. But the idea that noise is a sign of power struggle threads through this innovative literary study. Starting from the claim that ‘the loud cries of peddlers were perceived as nuisances by bourgeois listeners increasingly sensitive to sound’ (p. 5), Boutin concludes that ‘the association of noise with resistance certainly helped endear it to artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and avant-garde poets seeking to oppose their culture’s dominant discourses and to provoke their complacent audiences’ (p. 6). With the equation of noise and social struggle thus considered an a priori, this work does not explore the development of an idea or the progression of a social phenomenon over time. Instead, ‘this book is organized around sources rather than themes’ (p. 8). Perhaps Boutin means that she conducted research by exploring multiple types of source material, because the book spreads examples from these sources across five chapters devoted to different levels of immanence: first the flâneur, or person who strolls; then the peddlers he encounters; next the government officials trying to control the Cris and finally, poets who critique peddlers as a way to situate themselves in the new economic categories of modernity.

The first chapter considers the character of the flâneur in short stories and autobiographies. The character marks the starting-point for the project, which takes issue with the Arcades project, Walter Benjamin’s study of nineteenth-century Parisian literary aesthetics that has become a standard reference for theorizing urbanity in nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin was fascinated with Charles Baudelaire as an author of modernity. In particular, he conceived of Baudelaire’s accounts of city strolling as proto-cinema: the stroller sees moving images, he is a voyeur, he strings together his own intrigue from the people and situations he has observed. In the first chapter, Boutin reconsiders Baudelaire and other authors’ construction of the flâneur as someone who was attuned to sounds just as much as to sights. Boutin historicizes Baudelaire’s flâneur, placing him in a continuous literary tradition with examples by Honoré de Balzac, Victor Fournel and Delphine de Girardin. This chapter contains much of interest to the cultural and historical musicologist studying the sounds of nineteenth-century Paris. Two sections, ‘The City as Concert’ and ‘The Flâneur and Street Music’, are devoted particularly to stroller’s impressions of music heard throughout the city. We learn about the flâneurs’ musical ear from a passage in Fournel’s Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris:

As Boutin points out, ‘the flâneur not only hears the street criers, but his ear transforms their sounds into musical forms’ (p. 18). A charivari, which Boutin presents with rich context – an engraving, police ordinance, health tracts, travel writing and literature – brings to life the variety of class-oriented judgments passed against the sounds of the street.Footnote ⁵

Once she has established that the flâneur does not just see but also hears, Boutin turns her attention to the peddlers, whose Cris are the sound of the city. But in the absence of audio recordings, the iconography of a long tradition of engraving called the Cris de Paris becomes a metonymic stand-in for noise. While the visual tradition is undoubtedly important, it causes significant problems for interpretation, since it is on the one hand conspicuously silent and on the other suggestive of noise. The engravings take on metaphorical musical properties in Boutin’s imagination. She suggests,

The introduction to and analysis of nineteenth-century engravings of peddlers also contribute to a deeper understanding of the genre as a reference-point for musical productions as varied as Clément Jannequin’s ‘Voulez ouir les Cris de Paris’ (c. 1528), Georges Kastner’s symphony and ethnography Les Voix de Paris (1857), the vaudeville show Les Cris de Paris: Tableau poissard en un acte, mêlé de couplets (1822) and Gustave Charpentier’s Louise (1900).

Chapter Three deals with the attempts to limit or control street sounds. Boutin consults legislation as well as travel writers who describe Paris’s urban soundscape. These writers cite the types of noises characteristic of each neighbourhood, wax poetic about the peacefulness of wide Haussmannian boulevards and compare noises in Paris to those in London. The chapter presents a historical view of the material reality of the urban landscape. Boutin notes that despite many ordinances relating to noise, ‘abating noise pollution per se was not one of the primary concerns of the regime, which followed the era’s general stance on the innocuousness of noise’ (p. 72). These urban improvements – road reconstruction and noise abatement policies – resulted in an aestheticization and commodification of street noises, especially peddlers’ cries, as they became rarer in everyday life. One example is the recording of sound clips which both documented real noises and witnessed to their disappearance. During the second half of the nineteenth century commerce became regulated, and marketing morphed from songs and cries to print and posters.

The transition from commentary on street noises to their systematic categorization signifies a growing sense of identification between authors and peddlers. This interpretation is borne out in Chapter Four, where Boutin offers a detailed comparative reading of poems by Houssaye and Baudelaire, both about the cry of the window-maker, or the glazier. She argues that Houssay’s poem sentimentalizes the glazier, presenting him as a sympathetic personage who faces a difficult lot in the modern city. In contrast, Baudelaire vilifies the glazier, who as the type itself, rather than an individualized manifestation of it, embodies all the shrillness and vitriol of the screeching pauper. This chapter provides the richest contextualization of any of Boutin’s literary readings, in particular one source that will be enlightening for musicologists. Engravings of vitriers from nineteenth-century albums of Cris de Paris sometimes included transcriptions, in musical notation, of their calls. It is thus possible to compare the Glazier’s cry as recorded by Mainzer and Bertrall. Boutin perhaps makes too much of the differences between the transcriptions, but by showing them and using technical language (which is, alas, not without error, for example Boutin’s reference to the ‘sixteenth note for the final /e/’ in Bertall’s score, which is actually an eighth note [quaver]), she makes great strides towards an interdisciplinary approach that gets beyond the mere metaphoric language of multiple disciplines (p. 93).

In the final chapter, Boutin considers the poetry of fin-de-siècle modernists and Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans, François Coppée and Charles Cros. She asserts forcefully that the economic change affecting the peddlers and their livelihood also touched poets who saw their work as woefully tied to the capitalist marketplace. These poets, avant-gardistes who often advocated for anarchy in the political sphere, identified with peddlers who were kept out of the bourgeois value system. Boutin demonstrates the value of parody in a poetic movement that challenged the status quo. The infusion of parody into Mallarmé’s sonnets for an updated version of the Cris de Paris illustrated by the society artist Jean-François Raphaëlli challenges the standard notion that Mallarmé’s aesthetic programme was exclusively serious and metaphysical. It also provides the grounds for a new interpretation of Darius Milhaud’s adaptation of the poet’s Chansons bas that a musicologist specializing in the twentieth-century should consider undertaking.

Scholars who engage with cultural or critical theory must eventually realize that the context of the high art they study is often just as complex and rich as the works themselves. Aimée Boutin has offered a compact work resonating with important social dynamics that invites us musicologists to reconsider our own methods and questions. What sonic and social realities did composers face in nineteenth-century Paris? Can we consider any individual composer, or a work, or an institution as part of a web or hierarchy of social power? Using a literary approach to read historical documents of all kinds and a historical awareness to read literary texts, Boutin introduces a new application of the findings of the sound studies discipline. Although the book is not strictly about music, it will be stimulating reading for anyone with an interest in a nineteenth-century French history that has opened its ears to the sound of power.