Conocimiento y uso de herramientas y aplicaciones relativas a la comunicación, la

Two questions need further exploration to understand the significance of nostalgia in postwar Paris—but also to avoid essentializing it as a unique moment rather than a defining one. Firstly, how do we account for the centrality of Paris in nostalgic narratives? Secondly, how does the nostalgia of postwar Paris differ from that of previous decades?

To answer the first question, we must first look at the relationships between urbanity and nostalgia. Cities leave traces of the passing of time—or rather, cities gather traces of different times and turn them into a temporally heterogeneous whole. It is no coincidence that Svetlana Boym’s momentous work, The Future of Nostalgia is mainly concerned with cities; she describes their post- Soviet era reconstruction as “ideal crossroads between longing and estrangement, memory and freedom, nostalgia and modernity.”128

More so than non-material artifacts, cities render visible and tangible the discontinuities of time which trigger nostalgia as well as the continuous whole of overlapping histories in which they exist in the present. As such, cities favor a look at the world that is non-chronological, with monuments of various periods existing side by side, alongside construction sites and plans for future developments. “Paris blurs boundaries, pulling place and time, the Opéra-Comique and café-concert, the popular pleasures of two centuries, into a single, complex warp,” writes Adrian Rifkin.129 _{Being nostalgic for a city’s past is therefore synonymous}

to being nostalgic for temporal homogeneity and cohesiveness, a longing to refocus on the center of immediate reality devoid of gaps, interstices and difference.

128 _{Boym, 76. See chapter “Archeology of Metropolis”: “The urban renewal taking place in the present is no}

longer futuristic but nostalgic; the city imagines its future by improvising on its past. . . . There is a pervasive longing for the visible and invisible cities of the past, cities of dreams and memories that influence both the new projects of urban reconstruction and the informal grassroots urban rituals that help us to imagine a more humane public sphere. The city becomes an alternative cosmos for collective identification, recovery of other temporalities and reinvention of tradition.” (Boym, 75–76.)

129 _{Adrian Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,}

Tara Isabella Burton, in a short essay for The American Reader, vividly expressed the connection between cities and the passing of time:

Nothing evokes melancholy like cities do. . . . The literary experience of urban space is so often the experience of longing, of nostalgia, of alienation, and of loss. For such writers, the city is not merely setting but allegory: a physical embodiment of the irrepeatability of experience and the inevitability of decay.130

For Burton, cities manifest absence in that they reveal the past that no longer exists. That is why she describes urban space as “a graveyard of memory.” Alternatively, I prefer to see the temporal discontinuities embedded into urban space as living memory of overlapping times.131 Rather than being a “reminder that the was no longer is,” as Burton puts it,132 cities actually make us realize that the was still is. But because, as with sites of memory, symbolic meaning is attached to urban space through an act a collective construction of the social body, the meaning of cities’ pasts is always fleeting.

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century with Haussmann’s renovations, the urban transformations of Paris affected the process of memorialization of the city’s past on a large scale, which contributed to the making of Paris as a site of nostalgic longing. Many artists—such as Baudelaire, in the oft-quoted poem “Le Cygne”133_{—took to heart or lamented what they perceived}

as the vanishing traces of the city’s historical past. The “fleeting” existence that Baudelaire so famously perceived at the core of modernity134 _{became one of the city’s predominant features until}

the early twentieth century, to the extent that passing events like the 1900 Exposition, intended as

130 _{Tara Isabella Burton, “The Geography of Melancholy,” The American Reader, July 21, 2014,}

http://theamericanreader.com/the-geography-of-melancholy/.

131 _{Svetlana Boym writes: “Collective memory can be seen as a playground, not a graveyard of multiple}

individual recollections.” (Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 54.)

132 _{Burton, “The Geography of Melancholy.”}

133 _{“Paris change ! mais rien dans ma mélancolie / N’a bougé ! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, / Vieux}

faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie, / Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.” (Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 85–87.)

demonstrations of technological progress, were turned into nostalgic moments as soon as they were ended.135

The disappearing sights of the old city were not the only things being mourned; attempts were also made to preserve the sounds of Old Paris for a future that was already nostalgic for itself. For instance, Aimée Boutin has explained how “street criers were remade into nostalgic symbols, revealing both a maladjustment with the present state of society and a longing for imagined better times.”136

For Boutin, the circulation of street cries as cultural memory—and commodified objects to be sold as souvenirs—hinted at the disappearance of street peddlers, but it also conveniently discarded the associations between street cries and discord, between conflicts and revolution. It therefore encompassed the whole spectrum of the nostalgic paradigms, from regretting loss of a reimagined past to the promise of an ideal future sans discord.

In these attempts to preserve the past, the city shifted from a lived social space to an imagined urban space, as Robin Walz has explained: no longer referring to “former social classes and professions, and to traditional entertainments, festivals and parades,” the expressions “ancien

Paris,” “Paris d’autrefois,” or “Vieux Paris,” became “increasingly detached from this social conception.”137 _{In other words, Walz contends that a “nostalgic Paris pittoresque” was replacing a}

“Parisian vie populaire.” As we will see in the following chapters, music from the past effected the

same shift towards the nostalgic imaginary when encountering and overlapping with new musical styles in an accumulation of temporalities. I will frequently come back to this shift towards the imaginary, symbolic, or metaphoric in the following case studies.

135 _{See Kalifa, La Véritable Histoire de la « Belle Époque », 38. Kalifa quotes Jean Frollo, who wrote, in Le}

Figaro of November 13, 1900: “Longtemps encore après que l’Exposition aura disparu, on évoquera par le

souvenir le spectacle de cette cité de merveilles.”

136 _{Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,}

2015), 132. Boutin is referring especially to Fournel’s documentation of the street criers in Les Cris de Paris

of 1900.

137 _{Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Berkeley:}