<i>Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris</i>, by Jacek Blaszkiewicz

In 1878, Henry James admitted that Paris’s recently inaugurated Avenue de l’Opéra offered an attractive new vista stretching from the Palais Garnier to the Théâtre Français. Yet James felt the new boulevard also demonstrated how “twenty years of the empire gradually deprived the streets of Paris of nine-tenths of their ancient individuality.”1 James’s opinions concerned the momentous alteration of France’s capital during the 1850s and ’60s, an immense “urban renewal” project engineered by Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91). Haussmann demolished massive sections of Paris, replacing warrens of medieval streets with wide boulevards, public parks, and government buildings. This dramatic reordering was intensely controversial; in his essay, James described the new cityscape as “the deadly monotony of the Paris that M. Haussmann called into being—its huge, blank, pompous, featureless sameness.”2Jacek Blaszkiewicz’s book, Fanfare for a City, analyzes this remaking of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70). In service of his employer Emperor Napoléon III, Haussmann envisioned “an ordered metropolis that balanced imperial authoritarianism and classical liberalism” (p. 85). Haussmann had many goals: to sanitize Paris, contain “chaotic” aspects, and reorganize the geographical distribution of different social classes. Blaszkiewicz notes these well-known aspects of the urbanization project, yet also conceptualizes Haussmann as author of an aesthetic program which attempted “to curate urban sensory experience” (p. 19). Through this lens, Blaszkiewicz connects sounds and musical activity with Haussmann’s Paris, examining “how sound—ambient, intentional, intrusive, melodious, or conceptual—informed the urban policies and histories of musicmaking in the city” (p. 13).Blaszkiewicz draws on a virtuosic assortment of sources: literature and poetry, government and police documents, sheet music, paintings, and performers’ memoirs. The book traces understudied and sometimes unexpected examples, rather than revisiting prominent musical genres during the Second Empire such as opera. And while aspects of his methodology are certainly reminiscent of historical sound studies, Blaszkiewicz prefers to conceive this work as “urban historical musicology,” building on approaches by early-music scholars like Tim Carter (p. 15).Overall, the book explores intersections between power, sound, sight, and urban history. Blaszkiewicz begins and ends with inaugurations—the boulevard du Prince-Eugène in 1862 and the much-delayed boulevard Haussmann in 1927—reading these spectacles as a type of fanfare, defined as “any sonic event or text that outwardly signals power, from literal trumpet fanfare to speeches to songs, cantatas, and hymns, printed in newspapers and placarded on walls” (p. 12). Considering power and urban space in this multisensory manner necessitates engaging with the vast literature on nineteenth-century visual culture; Blaszkiewicz does this deftly, including multiple chapters that dialogue with work on flâneurs and flânerie.The first two chapters focus on imperial Paris. Chapter 1 explores Haussmann’s relationship with music, from his own youthful training to mid-century musical soirées he hosted at the Hôtel de Ville. Blaszkiewicz parses how Haussmann’s musical tastes informed his ideas about urbanism and empire, particularly his veneration of monumental classicism and antipathy toward Romanticism. The author then places Haussmann’s aesthetics in counterpoint with two contemporaries: Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner. While Haussmann had little direct relationship with either composer, this section offers new insights on these noteworthy figures. Blaszkiewicz argues that Berlioz hoped to create monumental musics in exactly the kinds of imperial spaces created by Haussmann, while Wagner (perhaps) aligned with Haussmann vis-à-vis relationships to institutional authority and authorial power. Blaszkiewicz compellingly (and innovatively) connects Haussmann, Berlioz, and Wagner as figures who each “cited the distant past in constructing modernity on a monumental scale” (p. 19). This enormous subject invites additional exploration.The second chapter turns to the Expositions universelles of 1855 and 1867. Blaszkiewicz traces Haussmannian elements in these World’s Fairs, particularly monumentality as “a unidirectional force stemming from authority figures and aimed at a mass public” (pp. 47–48). The chapter analyzes the music and reception of three cantatas written for these expositions: Hector Berlioz’s L’Impériale (1855), Camille Saint-Saëns’s Les Noces de Prométhée (1867), and Gioachino Rossini’s Hymne à Napoléon III et à son vaillant peuple (1867). Blaszkiewicz argues that Berlioz and Saint-Saëns failed to situate their compositions within an appropriately monumental style, whereas Rossini’s piece successfully directed attention to the emperor. This chapter adds important case studies to preexistent work on Parisian expositions by Katharine Ellis and Annegret Fauser, and attends carefully to pièces d’occasion rarely discussed in such detail.The remaining three chapters of Fanfare for a City shift from imperial projects to individuals, institutions, and repertoires that attempted to subvert Haussmannian aesthetics. These chapters are unified by a focus on legal codes and policing, which Blaszkiewicz sees as providing the means for a significant methodological shift in musicological studies of nineteenth-century France. He argues for thinking of “policing as a historiographical category,” one which has always shaped the documents central to reception histories and textual readings (p. 162).As Haussmann demolished the old theatrical district around the boulevard du Temple, café-concerts resisted attempts at bourgeois containment. In his third chapter, Blaszkiewicz delves into geography, institutions, performers, and audience behavior to situate café-concerts as subversive spaces, noting that “the café-concert espoused openness—open doors, no tickets, mobile tables and chairs, and an open flow between musical and gastronomic spaces” (p. 81). One particularly moving account of the institution’s importance comes from the performer Thérésa, who poignantly described café-concerts as vanishing places of refuge and community for working-class women (p. 102). This intersectional exploration of urbanization’s unequally destructive impacts invites additional research on performers such as Thérésa or the filles de maison displaced by Haussmann’s demolitions.Chapter 4 focuses on street songs, from the 1864 hit tune “He! Lambert” to nostalgic chansons about the demolition of le vieux Paris (old Paris). Blaszkiewicz describes these multivalent songs as “an opportunity to narrate urban experiences alternative to those imposed by status quo journalists and bureaucrats” (p. 121). He also explores the roles of itinerant musicians such as organ grinders. Street songs and street musicians came under increasingly rigid police surveillance and control in this era, acts betraying anxieties about how these repertoires and individuals might transgress authoritarian urban planning.Chapter 5 turns to the roving street vendors who advertised goods via melodies known collectively as les cris de Paris. Though these working-class hawkers had been represented in literature and music since the Middle Ages, they were adopted by the Second Empire’s middle class as symbols of a disappearing way of life. Analyzing multiple preservationist responses, including Jean-Georges Kastner’s three-movement symphonic representation, Les Cris de Paris (1857), Blaszkiewicz situates this new romanticization of les cris de Paris as an essential part of le vieux Paris. For critics of Haussmann, this “imagined ‘old city’ provided an ideological check on the Second Empire’s utopian, capitalistic urbanism” (p. 147).Fanfare for a City is an unstintingly ambitious project, from its analysis of urban planning and sound to the archival challenges of studying institutions such as the café-concert. Blaszkiewicz has achieved a formidable undertaking and added important new insights to considerations of sound, power, and urban space in Second Empire Paris. The book will be of interest to many disciplines, though it’s certainly helpful for the reader to have extensive preexistent knowledge of this period and place. There are moments—due to the sheer breadth of material covered in some of the chapters—where I personally wanted to linger more on a particular example, but overall the book is absorbing and thought-provoking.Some of the most fascinating questions from Blaszkiewicz’s work move beyond the scope of the book. He is resolutely focused on Second Empire understandings, which serve as needed correctives to the abundant scholarship on Third Republic France. Yet I couldn’t help but ponder connections between his work and later examples. How could we understand Haussmann’s destructive policies in relation to later “urban planners” such as Robert Moses? Or to recent “city cleansing” for the Olympic Games, often with similarly catastrophic implications for marginalized communities?3 How does Haussmann’s program to create quiet bourgeois spaces map on to contemporary discourse about noise and class?4 And how does the romanticization of the “vanishing” sounds of le vieux Paris intersect with other antimodern rhetoric about sonic loss?5 Blaszkiewicz’s Fanfare for a City does an excellent job of offering answers to these questions in the context of the Second Empire, yet clearly invokes larger discussions about sound, power, and urban history.