ABSTRACT
The classificatory development, which had already commenced with d'Outrepont's report on the gamin de Paris in 1833, was part of the burgeoning of panoramic literature and the visual culture of social type as a commercial enterprise. A depoliticization is found in Ernest Bourget's Physiologie du gamin de Paris, galopin industriel, with the addition that the social mobility mentioned in passing by Janin is given more attention. In the cycle of repeated revolutions, the gamin de Paris is turned into a recycled, if entertaining, myth as part of a fictive collective memory in a self-reflexive exploration of masculine bourgeois identity. Gavarni's illustration for Jules Janin's essay in Les Francais peints par eux-memes depicted the gamin as an apprentice wearing a workshop apron and a cap tipped to one side at a rakish angle. Tortillard, whom Eugene Sue calls a gamin, was the kind of dubious character who gave street urchins a bad name, one that would be recalled in June, 1848.
