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"Nineteenth-century Paris was grand, busy, and overwhelmingly noisy, so noisy that the racket became a matter for public concern in Paris before any other city. There were not only more people in the growing metropolis, but more sources of sound, much of it sung, barked, or bellowed to sell merchandise. The competition for attention raised the volume and increased the variety of sounds as street peddlers strove to be heard amid the din. Aimée Boutin draws on the first-hand accounts of Parisian noise to recreate, as much as possible, what the city sounded like, especially in its commercial core, and how people responded to the different sounds. Boutin focuses on the peddlers whose status altered in the 19th century. Dating back to the Middle Ages, the Cris de Paris were a musical, textual, and graphic genre that classified tradesmen as fixed, often idealized types, identified by the cries of their trade. In the 19th century, Parisian peddlers were perceived by bourgeois listeners as troublemakers (noisiers), lowlife who disturbed the peace, and by poets like Baudelaire as challenges to the bourgeois he despised. Itinerant, often from provinces that spoke a different accent, they were just a step above begging, or peddled as a pretense for begging, and they demanded to be heard. Peddlers became identified with sedition and rebellion. Boutin examines how peddlers were affected by Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris, and by legislation and urban policy regarding vagrancy and noise abatement. As the peddlers' cries diminished, they were taken into poetry, but they never really went away"..
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