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Flâneurs in Paris and Berlin
write prodigiously in a retired place . . . and a day in London sets me up again and starts
me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is
immense . . . My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. 25
Once more an optical metaphor – the city appears as a sort of screen, its throngs a
phantasmagoria of half-perceived figures, obscurely going about their business.
Dickens’s social comedies, serialized in newspapers and journals, relied on his
street observations. He also, in the persona of Boz the voyeur, lurked around the
slums and market stalls of St Giles Circus, sketching farcical and tragi-comic
encounters between individuals, which he then sold on to magazines.
The flâneur’s experience, converted into creative output, is welcomed by the
newspapers and magazines that are ever-more important vehicles of communication
and, especially, distraction. From the beginning of the nineteenth century,
“feuilleton” was a part of what the newspaper offered. Feuilleton – from the French
for “little leaves” – may refer to a particular rubric in a newspaper, perhaps marked
off from the main copy by appearing underneath a line across the page or it may
be a supplement to the main newspaper. Feuilleton can also denote a special mode
of writing, a genre with a particular philosophical-aesthetic approach to the world
and everyday life. It arose in the early 1800s in Paris and spread shortly afterwards
to Germany. The Oxford English Dictionary records its slippage into the English
language in 1845, in a quotation from the Athenaeum, but it remains a word for a
peculiarly French activity: “The tendency of the newspaper feuilleton, in France,
to absorb the entire literature of the day.” In 1840 the Blackwood Magazine
observes that: “The number of young feuilletonists . . . is now very considerable
in France.” The practice spread across Europe. In 1863 the Macmillan Magazine
notes that a lot of Russian journals are carrying feuilleton. Feuilleton becomes a
substantial part of the newspaper, as the newspaper market expands, and being
informed about city life becomes a leisure pursuit. Gabriel Guillemot notes, in Le
Bohème in 1869, that the introduction of the absinthe hour is connected to the
growth of feuilletons. 26 As they sipped their green potion, drinkers relished the
gossipy, frivolous and flamboyant feuilleton contributions: book reviews, fashion
and the like, but also gleaned information about the latest events and most
fashionable haunts in town. In this way the city itself becomes an object of interest,
and the flâneur its expert witness. Observation has turned into a skill.
The flâneur has a keen eye for the market. But he is a participant too. In the
guise of writer or journalist, he is also a supplier of commodities. Walter Benjamin
records that the intelligentsia came into the marketplace as flâneurs. They thought
that they were only observing the vitality of the market but soon they had to seek
purchasers for their writing. 27 According to Benjamin this grouping became the
bohème, and the corollary of its members’ curious dependence on, but simultaneous
rejection of, the market, a double-bind formed by the uncertainty of their
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