Murder in Parisian Streets is one of those rare scholarly texts that manages to not only critically analyze one particular area of research, in this case the place and role of the canard in nineteenth-century Paris, but to also challenge current thinking in other disciplines. As a cheap sensationalist broadsheet or booklet that detailed the more gruesome murders and crimes in Paris, the canard was a not only a precursor to the newspaper media of the time but also ran as a parallel means of reporting these crimes.
As Cragin cogently points out, the canard was not only a deeply-embedded form of popular culture, with the daily printings often sung by the peddlers who sold them, but also a genre of cultural resistance. While they changed with the times, adapting to new printing technologies and form of sale, they remained a relatively static text-type and were popular with all classes of French society. In doing so, they came to represent a direct challenge to the state’s modernization and, as evaders of censorship, to the ideals of contemporary jurisprudence. The views of the developing French state and associated elite were not totally rejected, with the upholders of the state’s institutions cast in the light of those enacting divine retribution. The canard became a literary pastiche combining the old ways of knowing and the new modes of being. Thus Cragin’s work challenges the current Foucauldian notions of state control, repression, and the concept of disciplinary "technology" that underpins historical studies in general and the research foci of nineteenth-century France in particular.
As carefully detailed by Cragin, the canards remained much the same in appearance and fixed in respect to content for over four hundred years. However, Murder in Parisian Streets focuses on the period 1830-1900 as the socio-political forces in the nineteenth century are generally perceived to have changed "tradition" in France as well as to have facilitated cultural change throughout Europe. By using this period as a pivotal focus, Cragin reveals how the canard became emblematic of the relationship between oral history and the print media. In a carefully crafted delineation, Cragin unpacks the process by which the canards not only preserved folklore traditions within a burgeoning city environment, but also became blended with and fixed within the long-held oral narratives. The content and intent of past folklore, monster, and trickster traditions were celebrated and preserved within this text-type rather than being subsumed by them. The crimes they supposedly exposed were cast in the light of good versus evil within a supernatural discourse. Thus, this book challenges a central tenet of the firmly entrenched "modernization paradigm," which holds that in the development of literate societies there is a clear-cut oral-literate dichotomy. The canard’s longevity, nature, and centrality within French society reveal how print culture can act as a preservative mediator of folklore, tropes, ballads, poetic forms, long-held traditions, and oral narratives. This challenges the long-held view that in this form of cultural shift and transition the rise of print media acts as a destructive agent.
Linked to this notion of folklore, literate development, and modernization, Cragin’s work also has major implications and fresh research directions for those working in the fields of monster theory, alterity, abject theory, critical literacy, narrative theory and linguistics, print media, and reportage.
Thomas Cragin has the ability to write so that his pages walk the usually difficult fine line between meeting the demands and rigor of academe and simultaneously creating an eminently readable and accessible text. Murder in Parisian Streets is a high-quality interdisciplinary bricolage of scholarship that clearly delineates the relationship between cultural change and the role of text and popular culture.
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[Review length: 607 words • Review posted on April 26, 2007]