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Esther Leslie
niches. The department store signals the generalization of flânerie as a mass affair,
for, as Benjamin points out, the palaces of commodities “made use of flânerie itself
in order to sell goods.” 18 The point was to wander, circumspectly, among crowds,
to tarry, to push past, to explore, and, above all, to see. In the city everyone is on
show behind plate-glass windows and on café terraces. As much as they look, they
are looked at. Resplendent nineteenth-century Paris reflects in countless passing
eyes, transferring onto mobile crowds the gleaming brilliance of shop-windows,
lit cafés and bistros, reflective façades and, after road surfacing, the “glassy
smoothness of the asphalt on the roads,” all performing as screens that mirror
subjects back to themselves as objects. Paris is dubbed the “looking-glass city,”
and within its bounds the crowd turns spectacle and the flâneur its spectator and
chronicler. 19 Such reportage presupposes detachment, even while in the midst of
the crowds. Anonymity is an advantage.
Flâneur-poet Charles Baudelaire relished the sense of anonymity that the
bustling streets provided. He hoisted the flâneur’s sense of self to the ideal of
anonymity in a crowd, a figure borne along by the waves of human activity. A
defining article was that on Constantin Guys, published in the Parisian newspaper,
Figaro, in 1863, titled “The Painter of Modern Life.” Here Baudelaire describes
Guys, an illustrator, as a superior relation of the “mere flâneur.” This superior
flâneur participates fully in modern life:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and
his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. 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. To be
away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at
the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – impartial natures
which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere
rejoices in his incognito. 20
The flâneur is “the lover of universal life” who “enters into the crowd as though it
were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.” Baudelaire scrambles for other
metaphors to express the multifaceted and symbiotic relation of flâneur and crowd:
“we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope
gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing
the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.”
What is this life he seeks that twinkles so enticingly, dispelling boredom?
Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him – this solitary, gifted with an
active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert – has an aim
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