In the twenty years since Pierre Nora began publishing his landmark work on Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1984-92), the study of memory, especially in its collective forms, has become a veritable industry. If historians such as Nora were to the fore in giving momentum to the field of study, scholars in many other disciplines have also been actively involved. It has become increasingly clear that the construction of memory is imbricated in a complex network of social, psychological, political and cultural processes which require analytical tools spanning a wide range of scholarly disciplines. We cannot understand how collective memories gain currency or, a contrario, slip into oblivion, without understanding the dynamics of power within the societies in which they circulate. Equally important is an understanding of the cultural forms in which memories are inscribed. A medieval manuscript holds and transmits memories in ways which are radically different from a printed page or a twenty-first-century website. Cultural artefacts are in turn open to a range of inflections depending on the relative strength of different social groups and the memories that they hold dear.
Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth-century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard. This book tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting, sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, the book braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As the book shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.
Aimée Boutin is associate professor of French at Florida State University. She is author of Maternal Echoes: The Poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine (2001) and“Inventing the 'Poétesse': New Approaches to French Women Romantic Poets,” Romanticism on the Net, nos. 29-30 (2003).
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