Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening by David Hendy

Author:David Hendy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781781250891
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2013-10-15T21:25:08+00:00

20

Revolution and War

Revolution and war are unlikely to be quiet affairs. For those caught in the thick of the upheaval and violence, the experience might even be defined by noise more than anything else; what they remember, even years afterwards, is the visceral shock or disorientation of overwhelming and unceasing din, the terror or the foreboding at the danger it foretells, the sheer auditory theatre of it all:

… one huge sea of heads covered the whole Place [Dauphine] and thousands and tens of thousands were wrapt in confusion, noise and violence.1

… mutterings of the awful strife … began to be heard. Soon the din began. The voices of an hundred big mouthed guns began to vomit.2

The first of these two eyewitness accounts is of Paris on the brink of revolution in August 1788; the second is from an infantryman in the midst of an American Civil War battle three-quarters of a century later. Both prove – if proof were needed – that when political and social differences erupt into fighting, an onslaught on the senses will quickly follow.

Yet the soundtrack of the French Revolution wasn’t always that of a frenzied mob, nor was the American Civil War all about the noise of unceasing bombardment. In both revolution and war, conflict was made of a richer, more complex tapestry of human sounds. Protest songs and rabble-rousing speeches, the ability to be silent and listen out for the invisible movements of your enemy: attending to these, as well as to the obvious din, allows us to experience the conflicts differently. It reveals how often sound itself had a major role in shaping the way the two events unfolded.

In the case of the French Revolution, one place to begin is with the sounds drifting playfully through the air, across the parks and along the streets of Paris in the 1780s. For what Parisians heard then, when out and about in the city, would perhaps have given them a keen sense of what was in the air politically.

The liveliest place to spend your leisure time if you were a citizen of Paris in the final days of the monarchy would probably have been in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, which had just been opened to the public but remained closed to the police. You would have been able to stroll among the crowds, soaking up the atmosphere of street performers, boulevard theatres, sideshows, shops, pickpockets and prostitutes. You would have walked past people selling pamphlets and newspapers offering you a profusion of reading material, much of it stuffed with the latest scurrilous gossip about the royal family or the king’s ministers – gossip you might chew over later with your drinking companions at one of the busy cafés. On the Pont-Neuf, and along nearby boulevards, you would also have heard strolling ballad-mongers as they hawked satirical and bawdy songs. And when you stopped at a café for a drink, you would most likely have overheard some of these songs being performed – songs of

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