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Esther Leslie
response to a pace of life in which it seemed that there was no longer time to get
to know the whole man. To a certain extent, such a “science” was developed in
the spate of “physiognomies” and “physiologies” of eccentric or remarkable urban
types presented to the public. The perplexing city scene provides the flâneur with
much to see, but he too is a part of the spectacle. The flâneur is awarded his own
handbook: Physiologie du Flâneur written by Louis Huart in 1841. Such books
allowed the identification of social types, a guide to their clothing, mien or slang,
and a key to their habitat and milieu. Surfaces are on show, but they may not be
decipherable without further ado. Guides and experts are indispensable. This
certainly appeared to be the case with commodities, in Marx’s view, as intimated
Das Kapital (1867), his guide to the nineteenth century’s economic regime. One
section is titled: “The fetishism of commodities and their secret.” Marx’s phrase
conjured up detection and intrigue, and likewise many have written of the flâneur
as a detective investigating modernity. The modern scene needed constant
reinvestigation, for it was in permanent flux. As the author of Ten Years of
Imperialism in France put it in 1862: “Another week or two, and another leaf will
have been torn out of the book of historical Paris.” 9 The city kept changing, most
notably in the grand restyling of Paris by Baron Haussmann from the late 1850s
onwards. The texts of the city, in turn, had to be ever revised. As Walter Benjamin
notes in The Arcades Project, his uncompleted study of Paris, “the capital of the
nineteenth century”:
Few things in the history of humanity are as well known to us as the history of Paris.
Tens of thousands of volumes are dedicated solely to the investigation of this tiny spot
on the earth’s surface. 10
The city as text, the city become decipherable signs, or words and stories, chocka-block
with secrets, stimulates the flâneur to activity. His activity is like that of
an artist, a writer or a journalist-writer who records the scenes that he witnesses,
the impressions that he snatches on his wanderings through city streets. That
conversion of flâneuristic experience into an output – first freely generated as
artistic pursuit, a by-product of leisured activity, later a mode of wage-labor –
becomes a necessary part of the flâneur’s remit over time. The flâneur is drawn
into earning a wage. An 1808 dictionary of vulgar usage defined the flâneur as “a
lazybones, a dawdler, a man of insufferable idleness, who does not know where
to carry his trouble and his ennui.” 11 This flâneur contrasts with a definition from
a pamphlet in 1806, which presents the vision of a leisured type who submits to
the daily rounds of salon visits in the guise of reviewer. 12 One is the dandyish idler
without any purpose, the other a creature of habit, oriented to the cultural scene. A
quarter-century later the flâneur cuts a quite different figure. Indolence is banished
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