Les chiffonniers de Paris by Antoine Compagnon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Les chiffonniers de Paris by Antoine Compagnon Alexander Hertich Compagnon, Antoine. Les chiffonniers de Paris. Gallimard, 2017. ISBN 978-2-07-273514-1. Pp. 512. If Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, then the chiffonnier may be its most colorful figure. Identifiable by his ubiquitous spiked trash picker, lantern, and wicker basket, as shown in this engaging book's 146 beautifully-reproduced engravings, paintings, photographs, and other illustrations, the chiffonnier was "l'idéal-type du XIXe siècle" (413). Until the 1870s paper was made from fabric pulp, which was recycled from old papers and rags collected by chiffonniers. As formal trash collection did not start until Poubelle's municipal ordinances of 1883–84 (and the invention of the bin that took his name), chiffonniers made their livings picking up anything that had been discarded in the narrow, putrescent streets of Paris. While laws or languages could tomber en désuétude, the idea of a useless object did not exist at the time. At the intersection of history, economics, literature, and art, he (primarily men, but there were some women and children) differed from the rag-and-bone men or bone-grubbers found in London and elsewhere by way of his unique role in Parisian society and imagination. This golden age of the chiffonnier generally coincided with the lives and careers of Baudelaire, Gautier, and Hugo. Compagnon extensively cites these and numerous other writers of the era in an effort to show the image of the chiffonnier and his cultural omnipresence. We learn how the chiffonnier, commonly believed to be a member of the comité des recherches and active in the fall of the Ancien Régime, soon took on an allegorical role, as the king's carnivalesque double. He personifies the Wheel of Fortune: just as the chiffonnier, following common lore, may finally find "cette cuiller d'argent dans le fumier" (90), bourgeois and nobles may find themselves in his place. "Quel meilleur symbole de la ville moderne que le chiffon comme consubstantialité de la fange et du génie, ou de la boue et de l'or?" asks Compagnon (28). "Philosophe des bornes" (15), Diogenes, as Daumier depicted him, a working-class equivalent of the flâneur, the chiffonnier also doubles as poet. Literally, both needed the other for their work; literarily, both gathered their material in the streets, transforming random scraps into something new and valuable. While Hugo "est sans conteste le grand chiffonnier du XIXe siècle" (346), Compagnon primarily uses his works to illustrate the aforementioned themes. His textual analysis centers on Baudelaire, especially "la dissémination du chiffonnage dans [son] imagination" (412), offering [End Page 209] intriguing, original readings of poems like "Le vin des chiffonniers" and "Le soleil," among others. However, as direct references to chiffonnage in Baudelaire are limited, this at times can lead to tenuous arguments based on "résurgences d'un courant souterrain, d'émanations d'une atmosphère" (353). In this fascinating stroll through nineteenth-century Paris, the reader too must act like a chiffonnier—a process that Compagnon himself illustrates in the book's last chapter— and wander through Compagnon's occasionally digressive (such as an anecdote about Claude Bernard, his wife, la Place Marcelin-Berthelot, and chiffonniers who specialized in killing animals) and repetitive prose to find that precious silver spoon. Alexander Hertich Bradley University (IL) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French