The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris…[Read more]

When Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne premiered in Paris in 1866, it entered a longstanding debate on what it meant to be “Parisian.” This article uses La Vie parisienne to explore a key facet of Second Empire modernity: the notion that the Paris was a theater and that its dwellers were actors in a play. The operetta’s title alludes to a popular…[Read more]