Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

Anne Hidalgo’s twenty-first-century mayoral plans for turning Paris into the “fifteen-minute city” remind us of the spatiotemporal effects that public transportation can have on our urban experience—and of the contingency of today’s vehicular forms, from bicycles and cars to buses and trains. We are well aware of the key date of 1900 for the development of the Paris métropolitain system and because the Métro continues to provide rapid transit, it tends to overshadow previous models for communal urban transportation in the public imaginary. It is tempting to take the teleological view of transportation as a progressive development from oxcarts and galleys to airplanes and supersonic jets. Within that history, the horse-drawn omnibus that ferried small groups of passengers across the streets of Paris from 1828 to 1913 would seem merely a transitional mode, a hiccup before the propulsive advent of engines. Indeed, if we look backward to the nineteenth century through the critical prism of what David Harvey calls the “time-space compression” of postmodernity—or through the historical lens of what Mathieu Flonneau identifies as the democratization of the city under the “automobile revolution” of the Trente glorieuses, the omnibus might appear as a pale preface to modern, efficient modes of transport—akin, perhaps, to the kinetoscope as a quaint proto-version of cinematic technology.Such thinking would sell the omnibus short—something I would have been likely to do before reading Masha Belenky’s lively and well-researched book Engine of Modernity. In Belenky’s account, the omnibus emerges not just as an eclipsed precursor to the eventual acceleration of modernity but as itself already embodying that acceleration. In fact—and this is a nuanced, intriguing point that Belenky’s book develops convincingly—it is precisely because the omnibus was becoming swiftly obsolete that it registered in the popular cultural imaginary as the perfect symbol of the (Baudelairean) éphémère, of everyday life’s “provisional, transitory and fragmented nature,” and of sped-up anxieties about gender and class mixing in the capital city even before the changes wrought by Haussmannization (3). The etymological meaning of omnibus, “for everybody,” set up a horizon of democratization evoking responses of both hope and despair, with low-cost lines transgressing topographical boundaries and creating interior spaces where different classes, genders, and races rubbed elbows in new ways. Belenky harnesses a wealth of archival documents to support her analysis of the new mode’s sociological dynamics; one of the book’s pleasures lies in its black-and-white and color illustrations of omnibus-related caricatures, paintings, postcards, press clippings, advertisements, vaudeville songs, fashion, and even a board game.Engine of Modernity is more, however, than a cultural history of a mode of transport. Belenky’s book proposes the thesis that the omnibus not only fundamentally changed the material conditions of urban life as a “motor” of new sociabilities but also inspired innovations in literary form. As both vehicle and storytelling device with “powerful figurative and self-reflexive potential” the omnibus became a “super-topos” marked by heterogeneity (5, 165). In physiologies, story collections, popular vaudevilles, and more canonical works like Zola’s La Curée, the logic of chance encounters defines both the content and the mode of writing. Belenky deftly crosses the lines between intra- and extra-diegesis to trace a repertoire of recurring features in middlebrow tales of transit, including first-person narration by an “omnibus flâneur,” urban description, marriage plots, and themes of estrangement or connection in the enclosed space of the omnibus car. Bourgeois anxieties about a society in flux get staged through everything from an overturned omnibus turned revolutionary barricade in Hugo’s Les Misérables to the alienating sensory experience of working-class passengers emitting pungent smells in the cramped space of the omnibus in Maupassant’s short story “La Dot.” And in other literary texts, the bodily realities of sloppy wet nurses and bulky crinoline skirts crystallize wider discourses about transgressive female behavior and women’s bodies in public space, which Belenky usefully situates within critical work by scholars like Griselda Pollock, Catherine Nesci, Sharon Marcus, Marni Kessler, Temma Balducci, and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Engine of Modernity ends cleverly with a “final stop” addressing fin de siècle ambivalence about the omnibus as an emblem of urban modernity and mobility: Fortuné du Bosgovey’s Le Crime de l’omnibus and Zola’s Au bonheur des dames call attention to its violent dangers, while Octave Uzanne’s article “Omnibus de Paris” provides a nostalgic elegy for this mode of transport as it nears definitive obsolescence. Belenky’s book is a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in the rich, intertwined histories of literary mobility and transportation technology of the nineteenth century—a subject that continues to flourish, as evidenced by Kari Weil’s newly published Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France and Seth Whidden and Corry Cropper’s forthcoming Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France.