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Flâneurs in Paris and Berlin
restaurant, a stroller passed through busy streets where, in a new bourgeoiscapitalist
environment, commerce had come to signify vitality – busi-ness. The
city streets were bustling – hence their appeal to the flâneur desirous of haphazard,
condensed sorties. In 1857, Adolf Stahr’s survey of the Second Empire Nach Fünf
Jahren illustrated in a vignette the Parisian technique of inhabiting the streets. Men
are repairing the pavement and laying a pipeline. An area in the middle of the street
is blocked off, but covered with stones.
On the spot street vendors had immediately installed themselves, and five or six were
selling writing implements and notebooks, cutlery, lampshades, garters, embroidered
collars, and all sorts of trinkets. Even a dealer in second-hand goods had opened a branch
office here and was displaying on the stones his bric-a-brac of old sups, plates, glasses,
and so forth, so that business was profiting, instead of suffering, from the brief
disturbance. 6
Trade thrives in city disorder. Spaces of commerce and intercourse open up in the
turmoil of the streets, and temporary sites of transaction emerge alongside the latest
dazzling rows of shops with plate-glass windows, vitrines, mirrors, and artificial
lighting (which allowed shops to open late into the night). These trading zones
slinking through the metropolis are a facet of an enticing cityscape that offers many
opportunities for looking, investigating, and speculating without having to commit
to buy. Disinvestment from the displays is important, for the flâneur hopes to
maintain a curious but uncommitted attitude, intense but not absorbed. The
flâneur’s experience is concentrated. Balzac links the flâneur to the artist, the person
who experiences life in a heightened fashion: “to stroll is to vegetate, to flâner is
to live,” says Balzac’s flâneur. 7 The flâneur lives passionately, but he also attempts
to retain an intellectual mastery over the flux of spectacle and event. As Victor
Fournel’s Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris states in 1858:
Let us not, however, confuse the flâneur with the rubberneck (badaud): there is a subtle
difference . . . The average flâneur . . . is always in full possession of his individuality,
while that of the rubberneck disappears, absorbed by the external world, . . . which moves
him to the point of intoxication and ecstasy. 8
The flâneur approaches the city with faculties alert. He is a reader. For him, the
city is a text, an array of signs ready for decipherment and interpretation. Scrutiny
is directed at buildings and street furniture, but also at passers-by, men of the
crowd. In 1840 Edgar Allen Poe’s London-based “Man of the Crowd” appeared
as an enigma demanding to be cracked. This followed on from Balzac’s observation,
in 1830, of the need for vestignomie. Reading clothing as signs was a
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