“Noise is the most distinctive characteristic of our modern world,” the popular French health magazine Guérir cautioned its readers in 1933, and the very sounds that defined interwar urban life--honking automobile horns, the strident squeals of loudspeakers and public address systems, the echoes of radios and phonographs, and the hums of factory and office machines--constituted far more than a nuisance to city residents. To many contemporaries, noise appeared to threaten the mental stability, physical health, and vitality of the French nation at a moment when legislators and physicians alike worried about the rise of a vigorous and health-obsessed German population across the Rhine.

This paper will examine Paris as the birthplace of France’s first national noise abatement campaigns: the Touring Club de France’s La lutte contre le bruit and the Ligue de légitime défense contre le bruit. In rallying a Parisian bourgeoisie discomfited by a cacophonous capital to demand noise regulations, both organizations relied heavily on the arguments of physicians and urban hygienists. René Martial, the Municipal Director of Hygiene, and Edouard Toulouse, the celebrity alienist, both argued that noise could turn city dwellers into déséquilibrés resembling shell-shocked veterans of World War One. Since Parisian urban hygienists had long focused on water supply, sewer construction, and trash removal as the keys to creating a healthy and disease-free city, the interwar noise abatement societies sought to quantify urban noise as a legitimate health concern by drawing on recent scientific and technological innovations in audiometry and architectural acoustics by hiring engineers to measure street noise and test sound-absorbent construction materials.

Yet regulating the soundscape of Paris quickly proved to be a challenging task, pitting individual radio owners, businessmen, and vehicle owners against neighborhood policemen, concerned citizens, and municipal authorities. However, by the 1940s the French state and Parisian politicians acknowledged noise as a genuine health concern that demanded regulation at the municipal, regional, and national level. Medical considerations of noise as a hygienic concern during the interwar decades consequently shaped urban development into the late twentieth century.