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The criminal lament or ballad, given the ease with which, with its excesses and approximations, it can caricature itself, does not figure in many anthologies: it seems it is a “second tier song”, a cheap work for the vulgum pecus. The same goes for news rags, with their macabre xylographs for support, with their street singers in front of their “crime scenes”. Need one neglect such songs for all that, given that they aroused the enthusiasm of the ordinary people, as much those of Paris as of the provinces? Previous work on this topic deserves to be completed and nuanced through the study of provincial producers and publishers of criminal laments and songs, based on sources from the press, the peddlers’ guilds and regulation authorities, the legal deposit, and a multitude of unpublished songs, which enable us to bring light upon the conditions leading to the publication of this modest sung literature, its circulation, and its reception by popular audiences.