During Napoléon III’s Second Empire (1852–1870), Paris underwent a colossal transformation. Under the guiding eye of Georges-Eugène ‘Baron’ Haussmann, some 13 per cent of Paris’s buildings were demolished, giving way to a staggering kaleidoscope of grand new buildings and boulevards. Before the mid-nineteenth-century mark, Paris was often described as a dark and dingy place noted for its dirty streets, a shortage of housing and too much traffic. Violence and crime, cramped living conditions and poor sanitation had made Paris something of a cesspit.
After much dithering and politicking, Haussmann was put to work to redesign Paris in 1854. Its new buildings and parks, gardens and boulevards would become a draw for tourists to one of the world’s most iconic cities. At the height of the city’s demolition and rebuilding, 3,000 workers laboured in shifts around the clock on just one piece of the new Parisian streetscape: the rue de Rivoli.
Haussmann was no ordinary urban designer. With a keen eye for beauty in various arts, including music, he was a Renaissance man, a polymath, which led to the creation of not just a new city, but a work of art. In fact, this was exactly Napoléon’s brief for Haussmann: ‘To transform the capital, to make it both more expansive and more beautiful, it is not enough to rebuild more houses than we knock down, nor to provide employment for a host of various industries; rather, it is to reintroduce everywhere the habits of order and the love of the beautiful (Napoléon, quoted p. 3).
Jacek Blaszkiewicz’s book is a history of the music of Haussmann’s period of renovation, by recounting the festivities associated with the inauguration of the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène on 7 December 1862. Its opening was on a grand scale befitting the equally grand scope of such a dramatic rebuild. It was, according to Blaszkiewicz, a ‘multimedia spectacle worthy of national attention … a theatrical performance’ (p. 1). This moment of spectacle did not come out of nowhere; as Blaszkiewicz explains, Parisians had been bombarded with a host of advertising and other material written for the occasion, including songs, odes, hymns and choral works. The boulevard was cloaked in a narrative not only of its architectural splendour but also of its function as a ‘monument to the new brand of imperial urbanism’ (p. 4). In the introduction, Blaszkiewicz describes some of the songs written for the occasion and the literary and visual meanings some of them brought in revering this architectural marvel.
Blaszkiewicz describes his book as a study of the intersections between musical and urban history in the Second Empire. By exploring the sonic and spatial worlds of World Fairs, cafés, city streets and markets, the book shows how popular and ceremonial music in the city became an integral theme in modernist narratives about le nouveau Paris: ‘a metropolis at a crossroads between its treasured medieval past and its cosmopolitan and imperial future’ (p. 7). In a city teeming with construction workers and equipment, barricades, and the cacophony of demolition and reconstruction of so many buildings, an account of Haussmann’s renovation history might have silenced entertainment, amusement, and music. Blaszkiewicz disabuses us of this notion by creating a work of urban musicology in which sound, spectacle and space are given prominence in the construction yard. He provides us not only with a history of music and sound during the Second Empire, but of the musical life of a community, an industry, and the everyday experience of sound neither stifled nor silenced by what was going on around a building site. This reconstruction of Paris was not just one of architecture, it was one of civic and national pride, and a cause for celebration across the arts.
Chapter 1 investigates Haussmann’s musical imagination. The urban designer enjoyed hosting musical parties and as a result he provided opportunities for musicians to rub shoulders with local and foreign dignitaries in such venues at the Hôtel de Ville. The chapter moves on to a critical study of the term ‘Haussmannization’, with the author navigating its meaning not only in terms of style, aesthetic and policy but also as a blend of all three. Here, as in other parts of the book, Blaszkiewicz’s forensic attention to individual words and phrases is brilliantly handled. Nothing escapes his notice. He sees connections in the most unlikely places and does not accept standard definitions or understandings of even the most fundamental of terms. ‘Haussmannization’ is dissected in every which way before a longer discussion of Haussmann’s early years and training as a musician (including in composition), before the author considers Haussmann’s ‘Total Art’, which drew on a range of tropes attributed to Wagner. This is another good example of Blaszkiewicz drawing together complex threads into a fascinatingly new narrative.
In Chapter 2, ‘Fanfare City: The Expositions Universelles’, Blaszkiewicz shows ‘how planners attempted to transfer visual ceremonial aesthetics into the realm of sound’ (p. 43). Taking nothing at face value, Blaszkiewicz probes the usual tropes or symbols of French nationalism in architecture and interrogates received ideas about ‘monumental contingency’ as expressed in discourses about the sublime. These social and aesthetic ideals are explored around issues of spatial monumentality. Later, Blaszkiewicz relates two musical misadventures. First was a performance of Berlioz’s L’Imperiale, the timing of which was a complete mismatch to the orderly procession it was supposed to accompany. Second was a bungling in the process of awarding a prize to Saint Saëns for his Les Noces de Prométhée. Saint Saëns was not supposed to win the prize, but there was little choice in the matter: to award the prize to a foreigner during a time in which French nationalism had reached new heights was always going to be an embarrassment.
While there is a small literature on the Café-Concert, and a variety of stereotypes that surround this typically Parisian institution, Blaszkiewicz revisits its historical position. As he writes, this type of concert ‘remains vastly underrepresented in contemporary music histories of the period’ (p. 82). With reference to previous work by various scholars, Blaszkiewicz analyses standard accounts of this genre or style with fresh insights and identifies problems arising from his own research. Just as in his attention to detail on terms and idioms, Blaszkiewicz introduces the reader to new lines of thought. His work here on classicism and the early Café-Concert is superbly handled. The chapter concludes by positioning the awkwardly defined Café-Concert into the similarly awkward perceptions of the spaces these concerts occupied.
The fourth chapter ‘Street Music: Between Regulation and Liberation’ begins with reference to Charles Nisard’s Des Chansons populaires chez les anicens et chez les Français (Popular Songs Ancient and French), the period’s standard history of street music in Paris. Of particular interest in this chapter is Blaszkiewicz’s examination of songs including the 1864 hit ‘Hé Lambert’ by Félix Baumaine, which was set to the tune of ‘La Belle polonaise’. This re-working of new texts to old tunes was par for the course for street musicians everywhere in the nineteenth century and well before it. Reportedly, the song sold 12,000 copies. Blaszkiewicz charts the popularity of this and other songs ‘with catchy tunes and picturesque images’ (p. 115) that often flew under the radar of the fun police for their ‘lack of seriousness and artistic merit’ (p. 115). Blaszkiewicz carefully traces the genealogy of the text, its critical reception, the nature of its performance and the reasons its humour was so appealing. He considers the song’s vogue not only in Paris but also in England and the United States. The chapter later examines songs that were noticed by lawmakers – such as Eugène Baumester’s song ‘Paris’, set to the tune of ‘Mon âme à Dieu’. This is an excellent example, he argues, of the role that works with ‘Paris’ in the title played in Napoléon III’s ‘primary domestic agenda’ (p. 131) in the new cityscape of Paris.
Moving from street singers, Blaszkiewicz devotes the last chapter to street cries and criers. He notes that hawkers had been present in Parisian streets since at least the thirteenth century and finds many terms and definitions of them in guidebooks. Blaszkiewicz explains the fate of street criers during Haussmann’s attempt to ‘bludgeon the city into modernity’ (Blaszkiewicz, p. 146, quoting David Harvey) and the historiography of ‘middle’ class collective mobilization to thwart the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds’ (pp. 146–7). This chapter is a complex foray into the imagined old city of Paris that provides, as Blaszkiewicz notes, an ‘ideological check on the Second Empire’s utopian, capitalistic urbanism’ (p. 147). The bulk of this chapter is concerned with the voices of hawkers in poetry, fiction and song, noting, through finely selected examples, that ‘nineteenth century poets drew on the cris de Paris to explore the negative efforts the urban change could wreak on the collectible psyche’ (p. 152). Examples include works by Baudelaire, as well as café songs such as ‘Feraille à vendre! Chiffons! (Metal scraps! For sale! Rags!), with words and music by Léon Peuchot. Of special interest in this chapter is Blaszkiewicz’s discussion of medals given to hawkers to denote their ‘new’ and ‘old’ association with Paris. These medallions were a way of identifying the rights of permit holders to cry their wares to the public without breaking civic laws. The chapter ends with a study of Jean-Georges Kastner’s work Les Cris de Paris, grande symphonie humoristique vocale et instrumentale that, as the title suggests, inscribed street cries into a symphonic form paying homage to the old regime style. Blaszkiewicz notes the value of street cries to history, writing that their ‘mythology, homage, preservation, ethnography, historicity, and nostalgia’ all belong to ‘broader discursive practices of nineteenth-century Parisian modernity’ (p. 179).
Like many readers, I have had devoured more books on French history and the history of Paris than I have eaten roast dinners, to the point that one may wonder what new material and scholarly insights can be borne in a book of Haussmannn’s Second Empire project. All I can relay is that on every page this book is brimming with a huge array of sources, new ideas, and bold insights. Blaszkiewicz modestly brands his book as a study in urban musicology, but it is a new kind of study in the field that sets an extremely high bar for the rest of us. This book is a clever blend of urban history and politics that covers the everyday lived experience of music not just for the residents of Paris but for those people, including musicians and literary figures, moving in and out of it. This book shines and succeeds on every level: its methodological purpose, its wide use of sources, its clever exploration of terms, all of which are delivered in beautiful prose. The book is also beautifully produced: from typesetting to binding, complemented by musical examples and figures, and a comprehensive index.
