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Flâneurs in Paris and Berlin
loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive
pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call
“modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes
it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within
history, to distil the eternal from the transitory . . . By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral,
the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the
immutable.
The flâneur treks the streets and boulevards in pursuit of the modern. He rummages
among bourgeois ordinariness, encountering the modern everyday. The flâneur is
a native, not a tourist, and he must live among everyday structures, for they are
crucial to the flâneur’s mode of seeing. As Benjamin noted:
For it is not the foreigners but they themselves, the Parisians, who have made Paris the
promised land of the flâneur – the “landscape built of sheer life” as Hofmannsthal once
put it. 21
The flâneur does not seek out beauty or ancientness, the exotic or the picturesque
– indeed such things would distract him or overwhelm his attention. He searches
rather for the modern quotidian, in order then to sniff out the fantastic in the
ordinary. By now though, in Baudelaire’s account, the flâneur appears to be less a
man pursuing leisure, and more definitely an artist seeking material.
Baudelaire’s study of Guys – which was also a self-conscious delineation of an
epoch – was written for a newspaper, which is to say it was penned for money.
Baudelaire is a mid-nineteenth century flâneur, and characteristic of such flânerie
is the need to earn money in a more edgy, cut-throat marketplace. As the century
progresses flânerie becomes less a leisure practice and more a mode of laboring,
or at least turning leisure activities (walking, observing) into written copy in order
to provide the material to occupy other people’s leisure time. Or, perhaps, as the
fine art of flânerie declines, a more mass version of its practices develops. This
was certainly the way in which the word entered Anglophone usage. Harper
Magazine spoke of the flâneur in 1854, asking its audience whether they too had
not wasted a couple of hours in the metropolitan city window-shopping, as they
“played the flâneur.” 22 This is the flâneur as leisured type, yet also a potential
consumer. In 1872 Braddon’s Life in India ascribes a more purposeful activity to
flânerie, mentioning the “knowledge of London life that comes to the active
regular flâneur after years of active experience.” E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary
of Phrase and Fable of 1894 makes flâneur synonymous with a lounger or
gossiper, derived from flâner, to saunter about. Websters Revised Unabridged
Dictionary of 1913 underlines this, calling the flâneur “one who strolls about
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