Graffiti - Jaytalking in 19th Century Paris
Graffiti: Jaytalking in 19th Century Paris
The files of Paris police from the late nineteenth century reveal the tumultuous politics of the time through the graffiti recorded in them.
By: Matthew Wills
JSTOR Daily
January 24, 2022
American histories of urban graffiti tag Philadelphia in the 1960s as its birthplace, but people have been scrawling on and carving into walls around the world for millennia, long before the advent of spray paint. Scholar Elizabeth Sage digs into the Paris police files for examples from the late nineteenth century, the fin-de-siècle [Journal of Social History, Vol. 49, No. 4], when the police actively documented the “political, obscene, sincere, humorous, or just plain cranky” writings they found in public.
Late nineteenth century cities, Sage reminds us, were “often represented as politically, morally, and physically dangerous.” The streets of these cities were also—and continue to be—“places of spontaneity, disorder, and resistance.” In Paris, the “perception of streets as dangerous and ambiguous spaces,” where the classes mingled and could be hard to tell apart, meant that the “streets were closely regulated” by the police.
Sage uses urban theorist Andy Merritfield’s notion of “jaytalking”—like jaywalking, but meaning speaking where people are not supposed to—to explore graffiti chalked on “wall, tree, urinal, park bench, or sidewalk,” among other places, in defiance of police regulation.
