At the reverse of the Paris clichés “ picturesque », Street trades require endurance and physical strength. Corrects, colleagues of posters, merchants of the eighty-speaons, carriers of bread: so many jobs crossed by wage inequalities according to gender and age.
Spontaneously associated with the photographs taken by Eugène Atget at the turn of XXe A century, Parisian street trades were at the heart of a visual exhibition differently abundant and dynamic. At the sidewalks, overhang or immersion, the diversity of views contributes to grasping the social realities of popular work in a capital which is transformed at high speed.
A socio-historic survey
If the image, of different nature and support (postcard, photography, drawing, caricature, painting, cinema), is privileged, its semiological analysis is nourished by multiple written sources, among which we distinguish the statistical directories of Paris, the press and the police archives. Genealogical research must be added, which has made it possible to establish professional routes.
In his introduction, Juliette Rennes indicates her socio-historian approach, her work as an investigator on Thisas well as those And those which can be seen in the street. It mobilizes-among others-the sociology of cases, micro-history and the theories of the event, without counting studies on visuality, “ understood as the way in which a company defines what must be seen and the meanings granted to this visible “And, this time borrowing from the history of art, from” attention regimes », Conceptualized by Jonathan Crary around the historicizable ways to listen, to look and to focus on certain objects (p. 17).
These theoretical inspirations find an exemplary realization in its way of “ unfold a case »(P. 12), that of the Lords who, from their first outing, on February 21, 1907, were subject to a buzz Memorable of which Juliette Rennes dissects the ins and outs throughout the book. Note that the relationship woman of the people (co -lord) / bourgeois man (client), and what she led as a literature and imagery, which is not or less erotic, reminds us that not only the second entrusts her road safety to a woman, which is far from self -evident, but that in addition to the fundamental sexual principle (passive woman / active man) records a striking reversal, since it is the coquer who is the customer. Domesting time for its race.
Hostility, displayed or underlying, which emerges from number of articles and postcards published by the “ elites Male, also draws from the symbolic value of the horse. The latter is indeed closely associated with power and masculinity in an iconographic and sculptural tradition dating at least to the statue of the Augustus Emperor in the Capitol. Admittedly, the Second Empire partly dear the quadruped (Napoleon III Installation in riding outfit in its official portrait, but without its mount, while the first hippophagic banquet, in 1865, then the opening of the first horse butcher’s shop reduce the noble animal to simple food), but it remains associated with men. His sudden companion with the Les Les Les Courinte therefore comes to strike a very gendered imagination. With them, the horse continues a process of “ feminization », In addition to its democratization, widely successful today.
Juliette Rennes focuses on several of the protagonists, almost all from popular backgrounds, among which still detonates Marie Lutgen. The latter embraced the profession after a fairly mocked social tumble in the many articles it aroused. Coming from a wealthy environment and wife of an aristocrat, she lost her fortune and divorced before remarking with a simple Belgian employee, Oscar Lutgen, who encouraged him to put his equestrian skills, acquired in his first life, in the service of hippomobile urban transport.
The last chapter returns to the emergence of women in the male professions, evoking the colleagues of posters which also knew, a few years after the Courings, their moment: this is how The Little Journal uses the figure of the pioneer to sell her soap opera, The daughter of Alsace,, in a “ self-promotional strategy (P. 382). This last target explicitly targets women, heart of the readership: three women among the five people who look with the young woman to glide the large format, a worker, perhaps a small bourgeois accompanied by a man with amelon hat and, in the background, a touch of modernity emancipated with an elegant leading her Tilbury alone.
Corsers or colleagues of posters, Juliette Rennes shows that these pioneers in male territory are not the result of feminist mobilization, but are rather linked “ to entrepreneurs who derive symbolic and material profit from it This does not prevent the feminist press from greeting their advent.
Physical effort and arduous work
The author envisages the street trades in a broad sense, by “ any possible form of remunerated activities, including a significant part of working time takes place outside ». Suffice to say that these are little lucrative jobs and crossed by wage inequalities according to gender and age, which can range from 1 (sellers of onions or Mouron) to 8 (carriers of halls, plumbers, roofers).
Another of their characteristics is their arduousness, sometimes made extreme by bad weather, wind, rain, cold and heat. The vigor and endurance deployed by some challenge. If the physical strength claimed to join the forts of the halls reserves the employment for men (you must be able to carry a bag of cobblestones of 150 kg over at least sixty meters) and participates in their full incarnation of virility, that deployed by the merchants of the four seasons (or almost 67 % of the 6,416 authorized by the prefecture of police), bread bearers or milk carriers serve as arguments for feminists to breach the tenacious speech on the alleged “ weakness Women.
Far from being confined to physical effort, the arduousness of work is also expressed in the social interactions generated, as evidenced by several journalists investigating more or less infiltrated in February 1901, a journalist of The sling Follows 14 hours during a trading merchant in the basket, by zero degree, and testifies, in addition to the harshness of the exercise, the social contempt of customers and police tyranny.
We are far from Paris “ picturesque (P. 39) that visual production contributes to disseminating. The series of postcards on the “ Small Parisian trades Or the “ Older »Value, not without artifices (the physical, the pose, the sun), traditional craft activities in an urban space which is renewed very quickly. Nostalgia is summoned with, for example, an old woman presented as “ The last woman public writer of the former Montmartre “In 1903 (p. 73), knowing that almost thirty later, another” Last woman public writer Is identified in a hut, this time backed by Saint-Lazare prison.
Prostitution microcosm
The link that Juliette Rennes weaves between realities and cultural representations runs through the book and lingers, among others, on Amélie Élie, alias Helmet d’Or, and her legend built between press articles and multi-support iconography (postcard, poster, film) on Paris Apache. More generally, the prostitutional microcosm is mentioned, particularly exposed to the surveillance of mobile brigade agents and discretionary arrests. The pimps, with the circumspect and threatening presence, do not confuse themselves completely with the Apaches. Prostitutes, on the other hand, must deal between signs of recognition for potential customers and discretion, because even if homosexuality is not penalized in the XIXe century, an arrest for public outrage to modesty quickly arrived. Prostitutes see their number continue to grow during the Belle Époque, and especially illegals.
The 1900 universal exhibition and its 50 million visitors has further amplified the phenomenon, which remains difficult to encrypt. Many women of a modest environment have a punctual appeal to sex work and can alternate, in parallel or in a substitute, with periods of professional activity outside prostitution. The prefect of police may urge his agents to use severity with “ Girls who scandalously tackle “, He only succeeds in attracting the jibes of journalists:” M. Lépine must open a raking school. He will teach them the authorized gestures and words. The joke points to a necessity of the street, because there is indeed a learning, largely self -taught and empirical, of the “ Shaving arts »(P. 219) who shape and individualize not only sex workers, but also the batelers, managers and other hunts who live as a gesture.
In this work at the crossroads of the history of work, urban history and the history of the genre, Juliette Rennes innovatively illuminates the professional occupation of the streets of the capital at the heyday. The richness and rigor of his convincing analyzes, while the place granted to singular courses, combined with representations by the image of people, gives the study a particularly appreciable humanity. Among the tracks that could register in its wake, let us quote the climatic dimension characteristic of the arduousness of these street trades, with a possible use of climatological data and attention to the repercussions of weather disasters. In September 1896, a cyclone devastated the Paris urban space, breaking the moorings of a wash boat, projecting one of the laundresses in the Seine-saved in extremis drowning.