Compared with Spain or Germany, France, or at least the French-speaking parts of that country, does not possess a very rich ballad tradition. Inspired by Breton successes, French folksong collectors actively searched for ballads throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but the harvest was meagre. Lyric song was the prevailing genre. This absence has long been remarked and has been the subject of scholarly investigation. However, perhaps the most plausible explanation is the relative scarcity of broadside ballads. This is not to deny that broadside ballads have a long history in France, with famous collections surviving from the sixteenth century. The same is true of other other genres of cheap print. Before the French Revolution, Parisian streetsingers congregating around the Pont-Neuf were famous for their songbooks or ‘garlands’, while in other cities songbooks were produced for carnival. In the smaller towns, marketplace-singers relayed news and, in particular, sensational crime stories, while others sold religious knicknacks. Provincial print houses, particularly in Troyes and Rouen, were famous for their chapbooks (known in France as ‘la bibliothèque bleue’) and almanacs; these were carried to every part of the countryside by pedlars. Therefore, there was clearly a market for ‘street literature’. However, whereas in England text dominated the single-sheet print, in France it was the image that mattered. Every region had its own imagists, although by the mid-nineteenth century such production had been concentrated in eastern France. These highly coloured images were often accompanied by songs, but songs were secondary. The reasons for this preference lie both in the specifics of production (the makers of woodcut images originated in the card-making industry, rather than printing), and consumption. Images, especially religious images, were supposed to do work for their consumers; they watched over their belongings and provided blessings for the household. The songs that accompanied images certainly influenced popular song traditions, but because the production of coloured images was more expensive and print runs longer, producers tended to play safe and avoid new material. Censorship also encouraged conservatism. Songs on a single sheet, known as ‘canards’ continued to be sold by marketplace singers, but the ‘canard’ was considered a low genre, and marked by its own conventionalism, in that most songs were sung to just one tune (Fualdès, or Le Maréchal du Saxe). Popular aesthetics were more stimulated by the visual than the aural in France
