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Esther Leslie
economic position, corresponded to the uncertainty of their political function. In
his view, they become hacks, available to the highest buyer – an offshoot of their
cultivated cynicism. Flânerie mutates into journalism: where the writer strings out
sentences for cash, the artist illustrates for commercial purposes. The contemplation
of the crowd, the impressions of urban seducement are rendered into
currency. To this extent the flâneur is little different from any other person who
sells his or her self, for he is inextricably linked in to the universality of exchange
in commodity society. The flâneur, like the worker, is subordinated to the market.
The peculiarity of capitalist commodity production is its all-engulfing nature. None
can escape, and, in time, the flâneur succumbs to the clutches of that which had
initially fascinated him but from which he had retained a certain distance. For
Walter Benjamin it is their surrender while protesting that makes the flâneur, along
with the poet, the dandy, the collector, the gambler, the worker, the rag-picker and
the prostitute, a modern hero. 28 The modern hero is tragic, skewered on the
contradictions of capitalist modernity. However, he is not nostalgic or sentimental
about the past, rather he is engaged in finding strategies to survive the present.
The world had changed so much since the flâneur’s first gentle steps. Once upon
a time the flâneur strolled leisurely through the city, in order to imbibe the visual
delights of the urban display. His protest was to use idleness as a rebuke to a
burgeoning economy of commodity manufacture and increased productivity. 29
Benjamin writes:
There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the
flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman
of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of
labour which makes people into specialists. It was also his protest against their industriousness.
30
The flâneur’s pace had been slow as a matter of principle. Of the arcades there
developed a rumor that it was fashionable in 1839 to have the walking pace set by
a turtle on a lead. 31 Gérard de Nerval preferred the more outlandish display of a
lobster in the Palais Royal. Such behavior is bound to draw attention – and is, as
such, perhaps, more dandyish. And even in the department store, where flânerie
generalizes, restrooms, washrooms, and entertainments such as theatrical spectacles
and fashion shows were part of a strategy to ensnare the shopper for a day.
But this luxurious position becomes more and more difficult to sustain. The
flâneur’s position is seen to be ever more shaky as the century progresses, reaching
a critical situation in the 1860s. The anonymous flâneur-author of Ten Years of
Imperialism in France: Impressions of a Flâneur (1862), in his chapter titled
“Money Mania,” identifies an acceleration of Parisian life, and it is clear that as
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