From Transit to Transitoire: The Omnibus and Modernity

When Baudelaire defined modernity as "le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitie de l'art dont l'autre moitie est l'eternel et l'immuable," it is unlikely that he was thinking of new modes of urban transport. Yet his observations on how art responds to the flux of the modern life may well apply to the phenomenon of the Parisian omnibus and its literary representations. When the first voiture omnibus made its debut in the streets of Paris in 1828, no one could have imagined that this new conveyance would elicit boundless fascination and anxiety on the part of its contemporaries, becoming a symbol of urban transformation and of radical social change. A decade before the locomotive became emblematic of changing perceptions of rime and space, the omnibus represented the excitement associated with the rapid urbanization, democratization and opening up of city life, along with increased circulation and mobility, both spacial and social. In short, the omnibus ushered modernity into Parisian urban space decades before Haussmann's massive reconstruction project of the 1850s and 1860s. Yet at the same time, numerous anxieties and fears related to these very changes crystallized around the omnibus. For many observers, the omnibus appeared as a ravenous monster whose enormous size and indiscriminate palate fostered chaos and disorder, both on the streets of Paris, and within the established social order. The enormous vehicle threatened to clog Parisian streets, crush unlucky pedestrians while allowing a dangerous commingling of the social classes, and even worse, the sexes. The ambivalence of nineteenth-century commentators vis-a-vis the omnibus is perfectly captured in Edouard Gourdon's 1842 Physiologie de l'omnibus. Written fourteen years after the first omnibus appeared in the streets of Paris, Gourdon's text presents a concise, thoughtful and ironic analysis of how mid-nineteenth century Parisians perceived the new vehicle, and signals its importance as a social space. But while Gourdon's Physiologie expresses exhilaration generated by the omnibus, it also conveys his contemporaries' unease about this "voiture gigantesque" (Gourdon 46), which in turn reflects a cultural ambivalence toward modernity itself. This essay proposes to examine the symbolic role of the omnibus in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. The first part of this essay looks at the relationship between the history of the omnibus and the continuing changes in the social texture of nineteenth-century Paris. The second part turns to two fin-de-siecle texts in which the figure of the omnibus expresses cultural anxieties about tumultuous social and economic changes associated with modernity. The first text, Zola's 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames, charts a dramatic and often traumatic shift from traditional forms of commerce to the modern capitalist economy. In this novel, the omnibus is depicted as an instrument of physical mutilation and death, and as a symbol of the dangerous and ruthless modern world. The second text, Maupassant's 1883 short story "Le pere," explores the erotics of the public, yet menacingly intimate, space of an omnibus, and points to the social disorder it engenders. Throughout this paper, I will refer to Gourdon's Physiologie de l'omnibus as a founding text of what might be termed "the omnibus mythology," because it articulates major omnibus tropes and their literary and symbolic uses in the nineteenth century. The omnibus came to Paris at the moment of striking population growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially among the working class and the lower middle class. (1) The overall population of Paris increased from 550,000 in 1800 to 700,000 in 1830, and reached one million in 1846 (Higonnet 77). Since many workers lived on the periphery but worked in the fashionable center of the city, a vehicle capable of transporting large number of people and traveling along fixed routes was urgently needed. …