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Flâneurs in Paris and Berlin
supervision, forming a criss-cross of decaying wires, some of which were no
longer in use. The protruding wires of the arc lights were dangerous to the touch.
In addition there were overhead circuits for distributing electrical energy to motors
for lifts and driving machinery. Eventually this system of wires broke under its
own weight and underground conductors were probed. Here Thomas Edison
played a part in reforming the city, for he had long promoted the underground flow
of electricity, just like water and gas. The system reached Paris. 35 A rationalized
city emerges: well supplied with amenities and functionally planned boulevards.
In certain respects the environment for walking was improved, and yet, at the same
time, what had once attracted the flâneur diminished: the sense that something
unexpected might occur, the chance encounter, the excuse to wander randomly.
Those who can still afford to be flâneurs by the end of the century – that is, those
do not have to find ways to make money from their leisure activities – retreat into
the interior to build fantastic worlds of sensation and adventure. Here Huysmann’s
decadent hero D’Esseintes, with his perfumed experiments and luscious exotic
interiors, is germane. But perhaps, at the point at which city planning and the
intrusion of wage-labor made flânerie difficult to pursue in any serious and fulltime
way, it generalized as a part-time leisure activity, one largely linked to
shopping and modes of seeking distraction. If this figure was no longer to be found
loitering in arcades or bobbing in the mêlée, he had become a little part of every
city dweller.
In any case the flâneur was not long absent and returned with some force – selfconsciously,
that is to say, with a theoretical armory – when, in the 1920s, the Parisbased
Surrealists undertook a fantastic journey into the past that lurked in the
present. Surrealism revived the art of strolling through a cityscape made of
everyday peculiarities and chance encounters. They enjoyed the enclaves of
anomaly that still nestled in the rationalized city. These niches, with their remnants
of the past or ludicrous juxtapositions of objects, operated according to a different
rhythm to that of the ordered rational city. 36 In particular, the Surrealists cherished
the remaining arcades, as if they were passages into the unconscious of the city.
Louis Aragon wrote in Paris Peasant in 1927:
And how easy it is, amid this enviable peace, to start daydreaming. Reverie imposes its
presence unaided. Here surrealism resumes all its rhythms. 37
The Surrealists emphasized the reverie that could befall a flâneur wandering
through the streets, disconnected from the purposiveness of regular daily life. This
dreamstate was, of course, as is so often the case with flânerie, a precondition for
poetic production. Saint-Pol Roux was said to display a sign on his bedroom door
as he retired to sleep after a night on the tiles: Poet at work. 38
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