Fiacre

Fiacre may refer to:

Fiacre (carriage)

A fiacre is a form of hackney coach, a horse-drawn four-wheeled carriage for hire. In Vienna such cabs were called Fiaker.

Origin

The earliest use of the word in English is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as from 1699 ("Fiacres or Hackneys, hung with Double Springs"). The name is derived indirectly from Saint Fiacre; the Hôtel de Saint Fiacre in Paris rented carriages from about the middle of the seventeenth century. Saint Fiacre was adopted as the cab drivers' patron saint because of the association of his name with the carriage.

In Paris

In 1645, Nicholas Sauvage, a carriage maker from Amiens, decided to set up a business in which horses and carriages were to be kept in Paris and rented out. He set himself up in the Hôtel de Saint Fiacre and rented out his four-seater carriages at 10 sols an hour. Within twenty years, Sauvage's idea had developed into the first citywide public transport system "les carossses at 5 sols" ("5-sol 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.