Edme Bouchardon's ‘Cris de Paris’: crying food in early modern Paris

Abstract

This article takes as its subject the set of sixty drawings made by the sculptor Edme Bouchardon between 1737 and 1746 depicting Cris de Paris, now at the British Museum in London. Focusing especially on the food vendors it makes a case for the orality and performativity of their portrayal via an analysis of the sculptor's manipulation of red chalk and his composition and arrangement of the five suites that constitute the work. Drawing on the anthropological writing of Marcel Jousse on oral culture and on the ethnographic record of Paris Cries made by Georges Kastner it makes a case for the drawings as sounding images. The connoisseur, antiquarian and writer of ‘low’ fiction, Caylus, noted that Bouchardon had drawn like he played the cello. The essay asks whether and to what end Bouchardon's Cris can be considered not just auditory but musical. It ends with an analysis of the reproductive prints Caylus made after the drawings and considers their ‘aura’ or lack of it, in light not of Benjamin's writing on mechanical reproduction but of Adorno's on sound recording and light music.