The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

1 •• Modernity in motion: omnibus literature and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris Setting the stage On 25 May 1828, one month after the launch of Stanislas Baudry’s omnibus service in Paris, a new vaudeville play premiered at the Théâtre de Vaudeville. Titled Les omnibus, ou la revue en voiture, the play portrays a bitter dispute between drivers of the newly introduced omnibuses and those of the individual vehicles for hire – fiacres, coucous and cabriolets1 – that had previously dominated the Parisian transportation market. The drivers of vehicles for hire accuse the omnibus of unfairly luring customers away from other modes of transport, which are unable to compete with a fare of just 25 centimes.2 In a parallel plot line, new popular theatres (such as le Théâtre du Gymnase, Le Cirque and the Théâtre de Vaudeville) engage in a fierce feud with the elite and aristocratic Théâtre de l’Opéra. While the popular theatres align themselves with the omnibuses, the Opéra sides with the more expensive vehicles for hire, representing social privilege. By masterfully weaving together these two seemingly unrelated strands of the plot, Les omnibus, ou la revue en voiture brings to the fore the nexus of public transport and popular culture, and thus the relationship between mass transit and mass entertainment. Les omnibus, ou la revue en voiture was one among many works of popular literature that embraced the new form of mass transit as an archetypal modern subject that embodied many of the features of this very literature. An aston- ishing number of cultural documents published across the nineteenth century explored different aspects of the omnibus experience. These included a broad range of works of urban observation, literary guidebooks,3 short stories, cari- catures, vaudeville plays, society games and epic poems, as well as a number of works that are difficult to classify. Popular luxury volumes such as Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un (1831–34), Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840–42), Nouveau Tableau de Paris au XIXe siècle (1834) and others included chapters 35 Masha Belenky - 9781526138606 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 11:57:13AM via free access Omnibus literature in context on omnibus travel, while Edouard Gourdon devoted an entire physiologie – one of the most popular genres of the 1840s – to the topic (Physiologie de l’omnibus, 1842). Beyond the middle decades of the nineteenth century, which saw the rise of popular print culture, the omnibus continued to fascinate writers long after it had lost its novelty. In the 1880s and 1890s, for example, there were scores of popular songs telling stories set on the omnibus. Writers such as Emile Dartès, a well-regarded editor of Victor Hugo’s work, produced a three-volume humorous Contes en omnibus (1894), and as late as 1906 fin-de-siècle writers such as François Coppée, Jean Lorrain, Jules Clarétie and Octave Uzanne continued to publish tales set on the omnibus or wax nostalgic in the press about their experiences riding the vehicle in their youth. In this chapter, I investigate the literary appeal of the omnibus – a seemingly mundane element of everyday life – and introduce many of the works to which I will return in later chapters. My argument here is twofold: first, I show how the omnibus fascinated nineteenth-century writers because it embodied the ideas of ‘the popular’ and ‘the everyday’; second, I illustrate how this literature harnessed distinctive features of the omnibus – such as the diversity of the passengers, the idea of mixing different elements within the same space and the concept of the multiplicity of perspectives – to generate new modes of writing. Omnibus literature, as I call it, deployed the vehicle as an organising narrative and structuring principle, a means of depicting both the totality and the vicissitudes of the modern urban experience. In other words, the omnibus as a space of mixing and mobility provided a literary model for the writing of the everyday. Paris on the page Omnibus literature arose during a veritable revolution in the literary market- place, beginning in the 1830s. The dramatic changes concerned both the kind of literature that was being written and consumed and the way it was produced and disseminated. Alongside the profound transformations of Parisian urban and social landscapes in the 1830s and 1840s emerged a broad array of new literary genres aimed at representing a society in transition. This lively urban literature became the hallmark of the mass literary market during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.4 Described today as ‘panoramic’ (a term coined by Walter Benjamin), it sought to provide a seemingly objective, encyclopedic view of the city, its inhabitants and contemporary urban practices and trends – the kind of perspective afforded in the panoramas popular throughout Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 Different forms of panoramic literature targeted different types of audience. There were, for example, the widely popular and inexpensive physiologies, pocket-sized, easily consumable volumes that focused on a single social type or a particular urban location or phenomenon. Nearly 120 different 36 Masha Belenky - 9781526138606 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 11:57:13AM via free access Modernity in motion physiologies were published between 1840 and 1842, predominantly by the publishing house Maison Aubert, with 500,000 copies sold at 1 franc each.6 A genre known for satirising contemporary mores, the physiologies offered remarkable insight into the social dynamics of the time while also providing the middle classes with a space for self-reflection. Similar to the physiologies in tone and aims – but different in looks and audience – were the upscale tableaux de Paris, or literary guidebooks. From Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un, published between 1831 and 1834 and authored, as the title suggests, by 101 different writers, to the 1839–42 Les Français peints par eux-mêmes and numer- ous nouveaux tableaux de Paris, these books could be purchased in instalments or as elegantly bound complete editions and were usually geared toward a wealthier, middle-class public. Both the physiologies and the luxury volumes presented humorous, pseudo-sociological, episodic depictions of everyday urban phenomena (types, events, places, professions).7 Other cultural forms, such as the daily press, the serial novel (roman-feuilleton), the caricature and the popular theatre, emerged largely in response to the constantly changing, ephemeral pressures of the modern city. The development of new literary forms took place against the backdrop of dramatic changes in the production and consumption of literature. Beginning in the 1830s, a number of technical innovations transformed both the print- ing process and paper production. Historian Martyn Lyons suggests that the 1830s saw the most significant changes to the publication process since the age of Gutenberg: ‘In political terms, the Old Regime had ended in 1789, but the typographical Old Regime expired in the 1830s.’8 The industrialisa- tion of book production, the launch of large-circulation daily newspapers, inaugurated by Emile de Girardin’s La Presse and Armand Dutacq’s Le Siècle in 1836, the introduction of advertisements and the invention of the railway, which facilitated distribution and marketing, all contributed to a fundamen- tally changing process of producing and reading literature, and to the advent of a mass literary market. These new cultural forms did not limit themselves to depicting everyday experiences and urban phenomena: they aimed to classify, decipher and ana- lyse the social class and moral standing of various Parisian types and to render legible and transparent the urban spaces they inhabited. This imperative to establish transparency stemmed not only from a reconfiguration of physical city spaces, increasing circulation of people and vehicles and a dramatic rise in population size in Paris but, even more importantly, from radical shifts in established social structures in post-Revolutionary France. To understand Paris meant to understand French history and society. As Priscilla Ferguson notes, ‘Writers focused so obsessively on the city because it seemed to hold the key to an explosive past no less than to a bewildering future’.9 They saw a need to untangle the new cultural codes necessary to navigating a society in flux. 37 Masha Belenky - 9781526138606 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 11:57:13AM via free access Omnibus literature in context Yet, as scholars have pointed out, Paris was a difficult place to read.10 Nineteenth-century Parisian urban spaces and the social landscapes associated with them refused clear interpretation. Indeed, urban observers who sought to make sense of Paris, to define or distil its identity, or to catalogue and classify it, were confronted with a decentred, unstable and multifaceted city. For writers interested in urban observation, ‘reading’ or ‘writing’ Paris was always prob- lematised; the city, unsettled by accelerating circulation and social flux, seemed to elude understanding. As we have seen, though, the raison d’être of this array of specifically urban genres and texts was the ambition to give coherence and meaning to the instability of modern experience. Their proliferation reflected the desire to suspend and hold (and thus control) through writing the ever changing urban and social environment. Within this context, the omnibus became a key object for representing the city and its inhabitants in all their complexity. Omnibus literature effectively taps into different connotations of the word omnibus. The term is, first of all, a neologism referring to a new mode of transport, a vehicle containing a hetero- geneous group of people who are haphazardly thrown together and thus exposed to each other’s gaze for an extended period of time. The diversity of passengers with respect to their social class, gender, comportment and attire, all contained within the same space, is central to the fascination the vehicle of mass transit exerted upon nineteenth-century writers and artists.

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