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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book adopts a sensory approach to understanding the city as a sonic space that orchestrates different, often conflicting sound culture. It shows how city noise heightens the significance of selective listening in the modern urban condition and argues for an aural rather than visual conception of modernity. In nineteenth-century Paris, urban renewal did not mark the beginning of a period of diminution of sound, but rather it was a time of increasing awareness of, and emphasis on, noise. By reconsidering the myth of Paris as the city of spectacle, where the flâneur's scopophilia reigns supreme, this book attends to what has been silenced by the visual paradigm that still prevails in nineteenth-century French cultural studies. It explores perceptions of street noise in nineteenth-century Paris by selecting specific sounds from the 1830s to the 1890s—peddling sounds—that were distinctive.

This chapter investigates repeated attempts to control street noise in order to cleanse Paris of its antiquated soundscapes, which social policy makers associated with mendicancy, vagrancy, sedition, and economic parasitism. Conversely, amateur historians, preservationists, bibliophiles, collectors, and musicologists were enthralled by what Victor Fournel called the “plaintive cry of Old Paris,” which stood for the resistance to modernity. In their nostalgic writings, these members of the elite circulated shared cultural memories of street cries that erased peddlers' associations with sedition and revolution and fostered the picturesque charms of urban strolling. Fournel and Mainzer repeatedly refer to the need to preserve street cries for posterity, thus anticipating future documentary recording projects, such as Ferdinand Brunot's Archives de la parole. Fournel's attempt to render tradesmen mutedly picturesque, however, is not completely successful, as street cries resist complete co-optation.

This chapter draws on a network of discourses including the picturesque and flâneur-writing, panoramic literature on the Cris, and reflections on populist song, in order to show how different writers harmonized the glazier's cry into poetic prose. It compares Arsène Houssaye's “La Chanson du vitrier” and Charles Baudelaire's “Le Mauvais Vitrier”. It shows how Houssaye's transcriptions of the glazier's cry and his use of the cry as refrain relate to efforts by musicians such as Mainzer and Kastner to document the cry for posterity. Houssaye harmonizes the cry to exploit its pathos and, in tandem with Nerval, Gautier, or Dupont, he seeks to achieve an authenticity through the transposition of song. In contrast, Baudelaire espouses dissonance in “Le Mauvais vitrier” and evokes the sinister and demonic effects of strident noise.

This chapter follows representations of peddlers from Baudelaire to François Coppée, Charles Cros, and Jean Richepin, and finally to symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joris Karl Huysmans. It considers whether they perceived the city-as-concert as harmonious or dissonant by analyzing the extent to which their poems reflect or inflect the discourse on the picturesque. Poetry about peddlers incorporates the vitality of street noise, the formal experimentation of popular song, and the aural acuity of flâneur-writing into the art of the establishment or the avant-garde. Such mixing of high and low registers is especially salient when Mallarmé's Chansons bas are read alongside Jean-François Raffaëlli's illustrations of types in the tradition of the Cris de Paris. The parodic poetry of Cros and Richepin, written in reaction to Coppée's moralizing sentimental dizain, in a way sets the stage for Mallarmé's “lowly songs.”

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It argues that the collective experience of sounds is what gives aurality meaning, even though there is an element of idiosyncrasy in sound perception. The street cries of peddlers and hawkers were meaningful sounds that resonated as a shared cultural experience in the nineteenth century, even for those who rarely heard them, or chose not to write about them. In the twenty-first century, peddlers still operate and vocalize in locations as diverse as New York City, Mexico City, Dakar, Port-au-Prince, Calcutta, Sidi Bouzid, and even Paris. Modern forms of peddling are alive and well, and the intrusiveness of street trade remains a point of contention in today's noise-conscious society.