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Afiacre is a form ofhackney coach, a horse-drawn four-wheeled carriage for hire. In Vienna such cabs are calledFiaker.
The earliest use of the word in English is cited by theOxford English Dictionary as from 1699 ("Fiacres or Hackneys, hung with Double Springs").[1] The name is derived indirectly fromSaint Fiacre; theHôtel de Saint Fiacre in Paris rentedcarriages from about the middle of the seventeenth century.[2] Saint Fiacre was adopted as the cab drivers' patron saint because of the association of his name with the carriage.[3]
In 1645, Nicholas Sauvage, a coachbuilder from Amiens, decided to set up a business in Paris hiring out horses and carriages by the hour. He established himself in the Hôtel de Saint Fiacre and hired out his four-seater carriages at a rate of 10 sous an hour. Within twenty years, Sauvage's idea had developed into the first citywide public transport system:les carosses à 5 sous ("5-sou carriages"). These 8-seater carriages, forerunners of the modern bus, were put into service on five "lines" between May and July 1662, but had disappeared from the streets of Paris by 1679, almost certainly because of the spiralling cost of fares.[4]
Although the public transport system had suffered a temporary demise, private hirers were quick to fill the gaps with carriages including the "vinaigrette", a two-wheeled chair powered and guided by two people; the cabriolet, a dangerous two-wheeled buggy pulled by a single horse; and the more traditional four-wheeled fiacres. By the time of the Revolution there were more than 800 fiacres operating in Paris.[4]
In 1855,Napoléon III instigated a monopoly control of the fiacres of Paris via theCompagnie Impériale des Voitures à Paris (CIV), which by 1860 operated 3,830 fiacres and owned 8,000 horses; in this year theCIV carried over 10 million passengers.[5] Fiacre drivers earned about three francs a day, plus two francs in tips.[6] In 1866 theCIV lost its monopoly status and became aSociété Anonyme. It began to use motorized vehicles in 1898 but was still operating 3500 horse-drawn vehicles in 1911.[7]
In the 1890s the Parisian music-hall singerYvette Guilbert introduced a popular song,Le fiacre, in which an aged husband sees his wife in a fiacre with her lover.[8]
In Vienna such cabs are calledFiaker.[9] They featured in popular music, such asGustav Pick's song, the "Fiakerlied". Fiaker and their drivers also featured in operas ofJohann Strauss II and inRichard Strauss's operaArabella (where the second act takes place at the fiaker-drivers' ball).[10]
Fiacres still survive in Vienna[9] and other European travel centres as tourist attractions.
Media related toFiakers at Wikimedia CommonsAuthority control databases: National |
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