FLÂNEUR

The simplest literal translation of the French world flâneur is an idler. One of the first people to write at length about it insisted that the verb flâneur's core meaning was "to do nothing," and that the glory of the flâneur lay in just that. Such nothing was done in a particular place, however, namely the modernizing city that was a center of vibrant activity, ever-shifting spectacle, and sometimes-violent conflict and change. It was out of this contrast between the evident energy and busy animation of modern urban life and the possibility it offered some inhabitants for leisured and tranquil contemplation and reverie that the idea of the flâneur emerged. Paris was its birthplace, perhaps partly by chance (because no one denied there were flâneurs elsewhere), but also because, more than any other great city, it was its nation's undisputed center of political, social, and cultural life, the site where a highly self-conscious (and often conflict-ridden) people displayed the sociability, wit, and style many thought to be their hallmark. But much about the flâneur remains difficult to pin down; we do not know who originally coined the term, or how many people it properly fit (or may still fit) in any given time and place. If the flâneur remains famous today, it is largely because the figure was celebrated by some great writers, especially the French poet Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s and the German critic Walter Benjamin in the 1920s and 1930s; but they built on a broader interest in the phenomenon articulated by less-eminent people.

huart's early physiology

One of these less-eminent people was Louis Huart, a little-known journalist who portrayed contemporary flâneurs in terms at once serious and humorous in a little book of 1841. Huart distinguished the flâneur (and later writers would follow him) from its cousin the badaud (the gawker or rubberneck), driven by curiosity or the rage to see great sights or occasions. By contrast the flâneur was the observer who took in whatever scenes his aimless wanderings brought before him (it was not thought proper for women to engage in such unsupervised moving about), and made something of them.

The flâneur frames a whole novel out of nothing more than the simple sighting of a little woman with a lowered veil on an omnibus—then the next instant he gives himself up to the most exalted philosophical, social, and humanitarian considerations as he admires all the wonders that education can work on simple scarab beetles that fight duels like real St. Georges. (Huart, pp. 55–56)

Unlike the badaud the flâneur never covets the things displayed in city shops and he is never bored: "He suffices to himself, and finds nourishment for his intelligence in everything he encounters" (p. 124).

baudelaire's "the painter of modern life"

When, fifteen or so years later, Baudelaire saw the flâneur incarnate in the journalist and illustrator Constantin Guys, whom he immortalized as "The Painter of Modern Life," he infused these qualities with meanings born from his sense that the city, with its crowds, its anonymity, its unpredictable encounters, was the consummate place to experience the modernity he famously defined as "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent." Inserting himself into this ever-changing scene, the flâneur distilled an essence from it, as bees with flowers.

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. … The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness. …He is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I,' … rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself. (Baudelaire, p. 9)

The flâneur knew the possibilities urban modernity offered for an expanded personal existence, a life charged up with the imagined content of other lives, finding in the world of ordinary experience the promise of entry into another, higher, and more poetic world. And yet, that promise was never fulfilled. Other realities overcame it, ugliness, poverty, loneliness (Huart had noted more prosaic ones, such as getting splashed with mud in the foul Paris streets)—the dark side of things that the Baudelairean urban wanderer experienced as spleen.

benjamin's "arcades project"

One element in this seesaw between hope and despair was revolution, whose highs and lows Baudelaire experienced in 1848, and the imagination of revolution would continue to color the image of the flâneur cherished by Benjamin, its greatest twentieth-century cultivator. In the 1920s and 1930s Benjamin gathered much material about flâneurs in the notebooks he filled for his never-completed "Arcades Project" (published after his death in the fragmentary form in which he left it), his evocation of Paris as "the capital of the nineteenth century." Viewing Baudelaire's city through a heady glass concocted out of mystical messianism, Marxist hope for a postcapitalist social order, and a mix of Freudian and surrealist belief in the transformative power of desire, Benjamin projected a flâneur who embodied the dreaming state of absorption, wishfulness, and anxiety out of which humanity would awake to a more fulfilled existence. Among the animating features of his flâneur were intoxication, a state Baudelaire had also prized for its ability to give wings to imagination, and simultaneity, the quality of combining the disparate moments and the separated sites of experience into a mode of consciousness that dissolved the bounds of ordinary time and place. Like Baudelaire's, Benjamin's flâneur drew energy from the city's streets and crowds, but it was an energy rooted in mythical images of primitive humanity, and in desires aroused by what the city at once offered and withheld, both material well-being and the ennobling equality that rose like a mirage at the horizon of modern life. To Benjamin, writing at a time when the Soviet experiment could still seem a beacon of hope to liberals and progressives, in the shadow of the fight against fascism, Baudelaire's image of the flâneur bore "prophetic value," forecasting a redeemed future. That prophecy has lost much of its persuasive power since Benjamin's day, but the image of the flâneur still beguiles, bearing with it the mix of hopes and fears that modern city life calls forth.

See alsoParis.

bibliography

Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. London, 1971. Reprint, Boston, 1994.

Baudelaire, Charles. "The Painter of Modern Life." In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne. London, 1964.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, based on the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

Huart, Louis. Physiologie du flâneur. Paris, 1841.

White, Edmund. The flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris. New York, 2001.

Jerrold Seigel