Dokumen - Pub - The Flaneur Abroad Historical and International Perspectives 1443860166 9781443860161

The Flâneur Abroad
The Flâneur Abroad:

Historical and International Perspectives
Edited by
Richard Wrigley
The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives,
Edited by Richard Wrigley
This book first published 2014
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2014 by Richard Wrigley and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-6016-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6016-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii
Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiv
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One ............................................................................................... 14

“This Publick Sort of Obscurity”: The Origins of the Flâneur
in London and Paris, 1660-1780
Jonathan Conlin
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 40

Did the Flâneur Exist? A Parisian Overview
Laurent Turcot
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 66

Promenades in Enlightenment Madrid: The Tapestry Cartoons
and New Social Spaces
Simon Lee
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 94

Early Forms of Flânerie in the German Journal London und Paris
(1798-1815)
Christian Deuling
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 117

Flâneurs, Commodities, and the Working Body in Louis Huart’s
Physiologie du flâneur and Albert Smith’s Natural History
of the Idler upon Town
Jo Briggs
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 142

A Patchwork of Effects: Notions of Walking, Sociability,
and the Flâneur in Late Nineteenth-Century Madrid
Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 166

The Phantasmagoria of the City: Gogol’s and Sadovnikov’s
Nevsky Prospect, St Petersburg
Tatiana Senkevitch
Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 205

Flâneurs, Monsters, Madmen and Wanderers: The Functions of Anxious
Flânerie in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg
Claire Gheerardyn
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 223

Roving Anarchist Flâneurs: The Visual Politics of Popular Protest
via Parisian Street Art in L’Assiette au beurre (1900-1914)
Kevin C. Robbins
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 256

Henri Béraud’s flâneur salarié Abroad in Ireland
Oliver O’Hanlon
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 269

Arcades and Loggias: Walter Benjamin’s Flâneur in Paris and Berlin
Kathrin Yacavone
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 281

Prague Flânerie from Neruda to Nezval
Karla Huebner
Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 298

The Flâneur in the Fog: Phenomenologies of the Northern Port-Town
Landscape in the Peripatetic Narratives of French Existentialism
Alexander McCabe
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 307

The Flâneur in Brussels: French and Belgian Literary Perspectives
in Counterpoint
Daniel Acke
Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 325

Underground, Overground, Wandering Free: Flânerie Reimagined
in Print, on Screen and on Record
Kevin Milburn
The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives vii
Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 342

The Subject of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977):
On the Political Potential of the Cinematic Flâneur
James Harvey-Davitt
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 357
Contributors ............................................................................................. 384

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
* Colour plates are all used for chapter 9 Robbins

Colour Plate I. Jacques Baseilhac, Les gueux, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 81, 18
October, 1902, cover, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
University Library, Indianapolis.
Colour Plate II. Fernand-Louis Gottlob, Ca, mon enfant, c’est du pain. L’Assiette
au beurre, no. 4, 25 April 1901, 70, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection,
Indiana University Library, Indianapolis.
Colour Plate III. Fernand-Louis Gottlob, Le Snob charitable, Dans la rue.
L’Assiette au beurre, no. 20, 15 August 1901, 322-23, detail, photoengraving
of original lithograph. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Colour Plate IV. Armand Gallo, …il sort d’un bal de bienfaisance, L’Assiette au
beurre, no. 280, 11 August 1906, 1149, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection,
Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Used with permission.
Colour Plate V. Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), La Couture où on décore,
L’Assiette au beurre, no. 40, 4 January 1902, 640-1, photoengraving of
original lithograph. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Colour Plate VI. Félix-Edouard Vallotton, Crimes et Châtiments, L’Assiette au
beurre, no. 48, 1 March 1902, cover, lithograph. Rare Book Collection,
Fig. 1-1. Anon, frontispiece to Rétif de͒La Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris (1789),
engraving. Private Collection.
Fig. 1-2. William Hogarth, The Times of Day: Morning, 1738, engraving, 34.1 x
23.5 cm. ͒© The Trustees of the British Museum.
Fig. 1-3. Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, “Bâtir Est beau, mais detruire est
Sublime,” 1761,͒ watercolour, ink and graphite on paper, 18.7 x 13.2 cm.,
Livre de Caricatures tant bonnes que mauvaises, Waddesdon Manor, The
Rothschild Collection (The National Trust), acc. no. 675.358. Photo: Imaging
Services Bodleian Library © The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor.
Fig. 3-1. Lorenzo de Quirós, Triumphal arch erected in the Calle de Carretas for
the Entry of Charles III, 1760, oil on canvas, 112 x 167 cm.. Museo de
Historia, Madrid.
Fig. 3-2. Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, Plano Topographico de la Villa y
Corte de Madrid, 1769, 165 x 234 cm.. Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Corte de Madrid, 1769, detail of the Paseos del Prado and Atocha.
The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives ix

Corte de Madrid, 1769, detail of the insert showing the former state of the
Paseo del Jéromino (Paseo del Prado).
Fig. 3-5. Tomás López, Plano Geometrico de Madrid, 1785, 65 x 95 cm..
Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Fig. 3-6. Tomás López, Plano Geometrico de Madrid, detail of the Paseos del
Prado and Atocha, including the Botanical Garden, 1785.
Fig. 3.7. Francesco Sabatini, Portal of the Botanical Garden, Madrid, Paseo del
Prado, Madrid, 1781.
Fig. 3-8. Ginés Andrés de Aguirre, The Alcalá gate and the Cybele Fountain,
1785, oil on canvas, 442 x 345 cm.. Madrid Museo del Prado, on loan to the
Museo de Historia, Madrid.
Fig. 3-9. Ginés Andrés de Aguirre, Tapestry of the Alcalá gate and the Cybele
Fountain, c. 1786/87, 291 x 473 cm.. Borbón Apartments, Escorial Palace.
Fig. 3-10. Fernando Brambilla, View of the Cybele fountain and Alcalá Gate,
c.1790-1800. Private collection.
Fig. 3-11. José del Castillo, The Gardens of the Buen Retiro towards the wall of the
bronze horse, 1779, oil on canvas, 260 x 363 cm.. Museo del Prado, on loan to
the Museo de Historia, Madrid.
Fig. 3-12. José del Castillo, The Gardens of the Buen Retiro, detail of the majo
and petimetra with the statue of the Woman of Herculaneum in the
background.
Fig. 3-13. José del Castillo, The Gardens of the Buen Retiro, detail of the statue of
Isis and bronze horseman statue.
Fig. 3-14. Ramón Bayeu, The Paseo de la Delicias, 1784, oil on canvas, 255 x 385
cm.. Museo del Prado, on loan to the Museo de Historia, Madrid.
Fig. 3-15. Pierre-François Tardieu and Debuisson, Madrid map c.1780, detail of
the Paseo de Delicias.
Fig. 3-16. Ramón Bayeu, detail of The Paseo de la Delicias, the two majos.
Fig. 4-1. Carl Starcke after James Gillray, John Bull taking an luncheon, hand-
coloured etching, London und Paris, vol. 2, issue 7, 1798, No. XXIV.
Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, classmark Opp 8° 708/1 (2).
Fig. 4-2. [Anonymous English artist] Temple of the Muses, hand-coloured etching,
London und Paris, vol. 4, issue 8, No. XXIV. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha,
classmark Opp 8° 708/1 (4).
Fig. 4-3. [Carl Starcke (?) after an anonymous French artist] Les Nouveaux Cris de
Paris, hand-coloured etching, London und Paris, vol. 5, issue 1, 1800, no. II.
Fig. 4-4. [Carl Starcke (?) after an anonymous French artist] Les derniers
monumens … de la République, hand-coloured etching, London und Paris, vol.
4, issue 7, 1799, no. XX. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, classmark Opp 8°
708/1 (4)
Fig. 5-1. Anonymous wood engraver, after a drawing by Marie-Alexandre Alophe,
Honoré Daumier or Théodore Maurisset, half-page illustration from the
Physiologie du flâneur (Paris, 1841), 106.
x List of Illustrations
Fig. 5-2. Anonymous wood engraver, after a drawing by Archibald Henning, half-
page illustration from The Natural History of the Idler upon Town (London,
1848), 25.
Fig. 5-3. Anonymous wood engraver, after drawing by John Leech, initial letter
from chapter 8 of the “Physiology of the London Idler,” “Of the Mooner,”
Punch, vol. 3 (January 1842), 82. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
Collection.
1848), 49.
Fig. 5-5 Anonymous wood engraver, after a drawing by Archibald Henning, half-
1848), 73.
Fig. 5-6. Anonymous wood engraver, after a drawing by Archibald Henning,
vignette initial letter from the opening of chapter 9, The Natural History of the
Idler upon Town (London, 1848), 71.
Fig. 5-7. Ebeneezer Landells, wood engraving after a drawing by John Leech,
quarter-page illustration from chapter 8 of the “Physiology of the London
Idler,” “Of the Mooner,” Punch, or the London Charivari , vol. 3 (January
1842), 82. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Fig. 5-8. Ford Madox Brown, sketch for Work (1852, retouched 1864),
watercolour over pencil, 7 ¾ x 11 ins (19.7 x 28 cm.). Manchester City Art
Galleries.
Fig. 5-9. Henry Vizetelly, “France No. 3” (detail), hand-coloured chromolithograph
after a watercolour, from Dickinsons' Comprehensive Pictures of the Great
Exhibition of 1851, from the Originals Painted for H.R.H. Prince Albert by
Messrs. Nash, Haghe, and Roberts, R.A. (Dickinson, Brothers: London, 1854).
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Fig. 6-1. Ramón Cilla, “En la Puerta del Sol,” Madrid Cómico, no. 192 (23
October 1886), 4, 5. Biblioteca Residencia de estudiantes, Madrid.
Fig. 6-2. José Jiménez y Aranda, “El Mentidero,” La Ilustracion Española y
Americana, supplement to no. 47 (22 December, 1878). Biblioteca Virtual
Miguel de Cervantes.
Fig. 6-3. José Luis Pellicer, “Una acera de la Puerta del Sola al anochecer,” La
Ilustración Española y Americana, no. 17 (8 May 1876), 304/305. Biblioteca
Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
Fig. 6-4. “High Life”, El Solfeo, no. 183 (2 March 1876): “And how is Mrs X’s
salon this year?” “Admirable (etonant) [sic], the most select people of
Madrid’s society gather there.” “Then I must be there this evening.”
Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid.).
The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives xi
Fig. 6-5. José Luis Pellicer, “En la Puerta del Sol. High-Liffe”, Madrid Cómico,
no. 270 (21 April 1888), 4. Biblioteca Residencia de estudiantes, Madrid.
Fig. 7-1. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), I. A. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (St Isaac Square, right side of the street), paper
mounted on linen, 718.6 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Fig. 7-2. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), P. S. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Palace Square, left side of the street), paper
mounted on linen, 847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Fig. 7-3. The Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, rolled in marbled paper tubes with a
printed label of Prévost’s shop, h. 21.6 cm., d. 7.6 cm. The Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles.
Fig. 7-4. Mikhail Makhaev (drawn by), Yu. Vasiliev (engraved by), Plan of St
Petersburg with the Representation of its Most Significant Prospects,
engraving, 1753-61. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Fig. 7-5. Nicolas de Fer, Plan de la Nouvelle Ville de Petersbourg, 1717, 48 x 38.5
cm., engraving. The National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic
Collection, Shapell Family Digitization Project and The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Department of Geography, Historic Cities Research Project.
Fig. 7-6. Nevsky Prospect, View to the Admiralty, ca. 1890-1900, photomechanical
print, photochrome, colour. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 7-7. Mikhail Makhaev (drawn by), Yu. Vasiliev (engraved by), View of
Nevsky Perspective Road from the Admiralty towards East, engraving, 1753-
61. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundation.
Fig. 7-8. John Augustus Atkinson (made and published by), Panoramic View of St.
Petersburg dedicated by permission to His Imperial Majesty Alexander I, c.
1805-7, aquatint, 438 x 810 mm., plate 1 of 4. Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Fig. 7- 9. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), P. S. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Police Bridge, left side), paper mounted on
linen, 847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Fig. 7-10. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), I.A. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Police Bridge, right side), paper mounted on
linen, 718.6 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (New Street across from Michael Palace, left
side), paper mounted on linen, 847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute,
Los Angeles.
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Anichkov Palace, right side), paper mounted on
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Cathedral of Our Mother of Kazan, right side),
xii List of Illustrations
paper mounted on linen, 718.6 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles.
Fig. 7-14. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), P.S. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (St Catherine’s Church, left side), paper mounted
on linen, 847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Café Volf and Béranger, left side), paper
mounted on linen, 914 x 15 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Fig. 7-16. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), S. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Police Bridge, detail), paper mounted on linen,
914 x 15 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Anichkov Bridge, left side), paper mounted on
Fig. 9-1. František Kupka, L’Argent, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 41, 11 January
1902, cover, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University
Library, Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-2. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, Hiver, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 1, 4 April,
1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-3. Georges Dupuis, La Hurle, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 153, 5 March 1904,
cover, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-4. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, La Foule, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 13, 27
June 1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University
Fig. 9-5. Charles Huard, Parisiens! L’Assiette au beurre, no. 1, 4 April 1901, 19,
photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-6. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, Représentation gratuite, L’Assiette au
beurre, no. 15, 11 July 1901, 256, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection,
Fig. 9-7. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, Tout ça, c’est-il pour manger? L’Assiette
Fig. 9-8. Hermann Vogel, VIII. Danse Macabre. L’Eau de vie, L’Assiette au
beurre, no. 16, 18 July 1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection,
Fig. 9-9. Fernand-Louis Gottlob, Le Snob charitable, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 20,
15 August 1901, 322-3, photoengraving of original lithograph. Rare Book
Collection, Indiana University Library, Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-10. Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), Les démarches, L’Assiette au beurre,
no. 40, 4 January 1902, 622, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives xiii
Fig. 9-11. Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), Alimentation, L’Assiette au beurre,

Fig. 9-12. Kees van Dongen, Petite histoire…, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 30, 26
October 1901, cover, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
Fig. 9-13. Kees van Dongen, La marchande de quat’saisons, L’Assiette au beurre,
no. 30, 26 October 1901, 466 bis, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection,
Fig. 9-14. Kees van Dongen, L’Hiver étant venu…, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 30, 26
October 1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University
Fig. 9-15. Félix-Edouard Vallotton, Le jour de boire est arrivé, L’Assiette au
beurre, no. 48, I March 1902, 768, lithograph. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
Fig. 9-16. Félix-Edouard Vallotton, Bougeons pas…, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 48,
1 March 1902, 760, lithograph. Rare Book Collections, Indiana University
Fig. 9-17. Félix-Edouard Vallotton, Ah! mon gaillard! L’Assiette au beurre, no. 48,
1 March 1902, 775, lithograph. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University
Fig. 15-1. Frank Sinatra album, No One Cares, Capitol Records, 1959.
Fig. 15-2. Frank Sinatra album, In The Wee Small Hours, Capitol Records, 1955.
Fig. 15-3. Frank Sinatra album, Point of No Return, Capitol Records, 1962.
Fig. 15-4. Frank Sinatra album, Songs For Young Lovers, Capitol Records, 1954.
Fig. 16-1. Chantal Akerman, News from Home (1977): Akerman stands in the
centre of the carriage, her camera obstructing the boarding and alighting
passengers.
Fig. 16-2. Chantal Akerman, News from Home (1977): The final image: a long-
take, departing the island, the famous skyline shrinking and fading amidst the
clouds.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Elizabeth Jennings for taking responsibiity for the

practical organisation of the conference from which these papers are
derived, and seeing this through with her unfailing efficiency and good
humour. As ever, Penelope Curtis helped in many essential ways. On the
day, Mary Jane Boland provided welcome assistance. The conference was
supported by the Centre for Advanced Study in the Faculty of Arts at the
University of Nottingham. However, I am most indebted to all the
contributors for their boundless patience, and above all their enthusiastic
involvement both in the conference and this volume.
Richard Wrigley
INTRODUCTION
The flâneur – the leisurely but vigilant urban stroller - is well-known as a

quintessential nineteenth-century Parisian archetype. A self-contained but
all-seeing city-dweller, the flâneur has been variously seen as an icon of
modernity, master of the empowered male gaze, and embodiment of
anguished urbanité in retreat from the inhospitable environment of the city
and its threatening crowds. Within Paris, its meanings evolved from early
nineteenth-century versions, including alienated consumers and
compulsive voyeurs, to more derivative types of pedestrian observer, as in
the case of self-indulgent touristic fantasies.
From its inception, this character has attracted a distinguished array of
champions and historians – from Balzac and Baudelaire to Walter
Benjamin. However, so familiar has the figure become in the realms of
academic commentary that it has been considered to have turned into a
tired cliché – more often recycled in simplified form than analysed. For
example, a conference held at the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art in
Paris, on the representation of Paris in film, had the subtitle ‘beyond the
flâneur’ (‘au-delà du flâneur’). The subtitle acted as a reassuring signal that
the conference would steer clear of any simplistic and overfamiliar
equation of cinematic practice with the flâneur’s leisurely scanning of
urban spectacle.i Benjamin’s charismatic writings, both in essay form and
the encyclopedic Passagen-Werk, have been translated into a well-
rehearsed orthodoxy in the standard-issue intellectual furniture of cultural
historians, and have been assumed to provide an authoritative source for
our knowledge of the origins of this phenomenon.ii It is hard to ignore the
culturally promiscuous breadth of appropriation by means of which the
flâneur becomes a prop for much writing whose diffuseness is, indeed,
precisely expressed by the casual invocation of this model. There is
evidently a kudos attached to the claim to be following in the prestigious
footsteps of Baudelaire and Benjamin, which can stand in for active
analysis or scrutiny.
One reason to revisit the flâneur is to reassess this orthodoxy, and to
consider the way it conceals second-hand misconceptions. However,
although several of the contributions to this volume engage with aspects of
Benjamin’s ideas (most originally Kathrin Yacavone’s essay), the primary
purpose in gathering these texts together was to adopt a different
2 Introduction
perspective, by means of which to approach the flâneur in a new light -

that of internationalism. By stepping away from Paris, we can review the
potential for an expanded, more versatile combination of the flâneur’s two
essential features – walking and looking, and how they might take on
different forms and purposes depending on context.
Recent writing on the subject has given little sustained attention to the
widespread adaptation of the flâneur outside Paris, let alone France and
indeed Europe, whether in the form of historic antecedents, modern
sequels, or contemporary echoes. Yet it is clear that the allure of the
flâneur’s persona has led to its translation and adoption far beyond
Parisian boulevards and passages. The conference in which these papers
originated sought to map some of the flâneur’s travels and transpositions.
In doing so, the question of how far the flâneur is dependent on Paris as a
milieu was opened up for questioning: for all the international dispersal of
this idea and model, in some sense Paris is always present, if only as a
reference to kick against or replace. When modern flâneurs appear in
foreign cities, how far does a Parisian ethos cling to them, however much
they might claim independence? This is not to ignore critical repudiations
of the stereotype, notably from a postcolonial perspective, which look to
local, alternative, subaltern, independent and indigenous modes of
mobility, walking, and viewing, beyond the highly prescriptive behaviour
of the flâneur, as in the male Gallocentric urbanite.iii Indeed, Anne-Marie
Milne has reflected on the viability of flânerie in a post-68
internationalised world, as manifest in Paris itself as a subject in the work
of François Maspero. The myth of modernity had given way to a fractured
urban/suburban landscape, which could no longer sustain the ritualised
individual surveillance of a leisured, empowered observer. Yet refusal of
the spectacle of the city in its new forms leaves the author in a quandrary
as to where s/he stands.iv In his review of Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Amit Chaudhuri points to
alternatives and equivalents to the association of the flâneur with Western
modernity, thereby disowning the habit of taking modernity to be a
universal measure of cultural relevance.v
The conference was intended to be interdisciplinary, and brought
together scholars from art history, history, literary studies, film, history of
photography, music, historical and cultural geography. Although the initial
programme included several papers addressing topics from Asia and
Africa, various practical obstacles (and late withdrawals) led to these not
materialising. Furthermore, there was significant interest in what might be
called the virtual flâneur, justifying a separate conference. One of the
The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives 3
legacies of the conference will be two further conferences on the global

flâneur and the virtual flâneur. To that extent, an answer to the question
which would usually be raised at the end of this introduction regarding
further lines of enquiry and research can already be acknowledged.
In the event, it has been possible to add two papers (by Jonathan Conlin
and Kevin Milburn) to those given which extend the range and scope of the
volume (while also regretting that we were not able to include Robert
Adlington’s contribution, “Without Tendency: Amsterdam, situationism
and atonal music”; fortunately, this has been published elsewherevi). What
is as striking in reviewing these essays as it was during the conference, is
the way that the figure of the flâneur provided a point of consensual
convergence. On the one hand, the Parisian prototype seemed to drift
across national frontiers with ease; on the other hand, it carried its local
identity pungently with it, whether met with approval, ambivalence, or
mockery.
A suitably challenging point of departure is Laurent Turcot’s
problematisation of the very existence of the flâneur. Against the backdrop
of his study of “le promeneur” in the eighteenth century and a long-term
perspective on the significance and feasibility of walking in cities, Turcot
seeks to refine our sense of how the specialised phenomenon of the flâneur
fits within broader forms of individual and collective pedestrian activity.
What emerges very clearly is that the flâneur is indeed a Parisian
phenomenon, and needs to be analysed as such, relating successive phases
of characterisation and function to its initial manifestations. This historical
anchoring includes subsequent mythologisation, which has reinforced the
belief that the flâneur is both quintessentially Parisian and an historically
contingent phenomenon. Moreover, as Turcot emphasises, we should also
take account of the adoption of this role model more widely as leisure time
and spaces proliferated both amongst Parisians and visitors to the city
(although the idea that there were true flâneurs and inauthentic imitators
can be found already in the heyday of flânerie in the July Monarchy). Such
derivative practices have their own meaning and function as signs of social
confidence, laying claim to a particular urban tradition. There is also a kind
of meta-flânerie evident in the tourist groups who march through the
passages, and the pseudo-flânerie of latterday Surrealists following
reverentially in the footsteps of Breton and Nadja, rubbing shoulders with
more serious souls in search of the shade of Walter Benjamin, the seed of
whose Passagen-Werk was sown, as Kathrin Yacavone points out, by his
reading of Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris as a child.
It was possible to adopt the identity of the flâneur when travelling, by
means of which a Parisian outlook could be applied to foreign sights,
4 Introduction
locations, and behaviour. Henri Béraud inherited the flâneurial journalistic

vein of the nineteenth century, which seems to have succeeded in giving
him access to places in early twentieth-century Ireland which would
otherwise have been off limits. Béraud doubles the paradoxical usage of the
flâneur as persona by converting it into a salaried nom de plume. Rather
than exploiting the advantages of anonymity, he played up his role as
sympathetic yet intrepid reporter – a Parisian at large whose vocation was
visual attentiveness translated into the genre of eye-witness accounts.
Precedents for exporting the flâneur’s ways of looking and surveying
are to be found in the series of French writers who stayed in or passed
through Brussels, where it became starkly evident that the familiar
symbiosis between Parisian spaces and spectacle was strongly dependent
on quite particular structures of public space and forms of mobility. This
aperçu became jarringly obvious once the limitations of Brussels – its
urban thoroughfares, its inhabitants and their rebarbative habits – assaulted
the senses of, successively, Baudelaire, Nerval, and Huysmans. Daniel
Acke nonetheless shows that there was a homegrown culture of urban
literature which was tailored to local circumstances, in his sampling of
writings of Marcel Lecomte (1900-1966), in which walking becomes an
instrument of Surrealist sensibility, oriented around a programmatic
indifference, and later William Cliff (b.1940), for whom the city’s
degradations become visible to the eye of the pedestrian, on the receiving
end of a profiteering and disastrously inept administration. Albeit filtered
through idiosyncratic poetic form, this is nonetheless critical writing,
against the grain of the status quo, embodied in the city’s abused fabric.
The way that an alternative, unfamiliar locale can provide a
counterpoint to established habits of flânerie emerges especially vividly in
Alexander McCabe’s account of northern towns in their fictional
reinventions by Sartre and Camus as inhospitable settings which suffocated
flâneurial inclinations. Le Havre and Amsterdam are each sounded out as
types of mise-en-scène suitable for the playing out of existentialist
repudiation of city life as a microcosm for more abstract philosophical
assertions of individual despair and integrity. In McCabe’s account, the
flâneur works as a template which, by the mid-twentieth century, was
capable of remaining attached to its original roots, even while taking on
dissonant and distorted internalised forms. The Baudelairean flâneur was
“source and model, something in the bloodstream of writers like Camus
and Sartre.” Ideas of a contemporary “poetics of the crowd and of the city”
were recast in the form of “stark surface description of nauseating sensory
experiences in the case of Sartre, detached ironic judgement in the case of
Camus, and a shift in gaze from cityscape to seascape, from the social to
the abyss.”
Themes that emerged in discussions on and between papers included
the relative status of the city’s visual appearance and character in writing –
be it journalism, literary chronicles, or legislation. What did it mean to try
to capture or trace the outlines and contours of the city’s fabric and spaces?
Is textual visualisation a particular genre, with its own history and changing
conventions; or does it constitute a specialised form of narrative? From the
eighteenth century onwards, one solution to this is to make the narrator a
mobile spectator.
It is obvious that one should not casually easily equate prints,
photographs and film with written descriptions and evocations. Yet it is
striking that early versions of the flâneur are quick to call on graphic
illustration to flesh out and add a sense of observational detail to different
kinds of discursive account. Indeed, Jonathan Conlin suggests that Gabriel
de St-Aubin was an artist-flâneur almost a century before Baudelaire came
up with his own formulation of what a “painter of modern life” should do
and why it was Constantin Guys who fulfilled this programme. While St-
Aubin’s images are meticulously notated and empirically grounded, they
are characteristically often somewhat fantastical. This might seem to chime
in with a personalised, episodic form of vision and transcription which can
be thought of as corresponding to a flâneur’s outlook, but he operated in an
essentially private register, in which his sustained scrutiny and reinvention
of scenes from Parisian life becomes part of an introverted palimpsest.
In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, attention given to
daily life as a symptom of the state of a city became a familiar theme in
journalism in the form of descriptive vignettes, sometimes accompanied by
prints. Christian Deuling’s chapter gives an account of a journal whose sole
concern was to provide reportage on London and Paris for an audience
based in Germany. However, the fact that the journal existed at a time
when the impact of the French Revolution was working its way through
European social and political systems provided an urgent demand for news
and comment. The prints which were part of this journal can be seen as
sharing a satirical vocabulary which crossed frontiers between Germany,
France and Britain. This imagery is evidence of an appetite for imaginative
travel narratives and anecdotes, and the well-established role of comparison
in making sense of the unfamiliar. Such an outlook was indeed germane to
reflecting on the transferability of homegrown forms of pedestrian
observer. Interestingly, the prints oscillate between being plausibly
descriptive and obviously satirical, thus nicely illustrating the way
reportage was an eclectic, indeed heterogeneous discourse which required
attentive decoding.
6 Introduction
The flâneur travelled as much, if not more so, on the page, as on foot.
Huart’s Physiologie du flâneur (Paris, 1841) has long been a classic text, if
tending to be referred to in passing, or as an obligatory, if somewhat
decontextualised, reference. Jo Briggs explores this canonical monograph
in detail, by means of an analysis of the degree of dependence on or
deviation from it found in Albert Smith’s The Natural History of the Idler
upon Town (London, 1848). She addresses the way both texts rely on a
steady sequence of prints, in varied formats – chapter headings, vignettes,
full-page ‘portraits’ – to accentuate distinctions between flâneur, musard,
and mooner. Her particular thematic focus is the relation of these observers
to work as an urban spectacle, which offers a precise antithesis to the
leisured observers who circulate or drift between such points of visual
curiosity. Briggs places imagery in the foreground, asking how this
corresponds to text, while also highlighting different graphic idioms, in so
far as Smith is palpably a variant form of Huart, but with its own
independent, local outlook and attitudes. Their strong connections add to
the argument that the flâneur was not a Parisian monopoly, and neither was
there any means to constrain its adaptation. The logic and identity of
flâneur and idler is set against attitudes to the visibility of work in public
places. Nonetheless, as Briggs underlines, for all the Idler’s repackaging
and relocating in a London context, Smith borrows wholesale from the
Parisian prototype, marrying mimicry with chauvinism.
The political status of the flâneur was a primary concern of certain
papers across a range of periods and locations. Deuling notes how
“Winckler's reports from Paris lack the aimless searching movement of the
casual stroller. His flâneur is a political analyst.” As a witness to the
unfolding events and conflicts of the Revolution, this was inevitable, but
such an outloook was not automatic, being entwined with preconceptions
about Paris as capital of luxury and vice, literary and theatrical culture.
Deuling’s aperçu in fact highlights the very limited degree to which such a
reading of the flâneur has been considered previously, in so far as
Benjamin’s alienated consumer strolling through passages, or the flâneur
as gendered observer have been taken to be the most substantive critical
revisions to the stereotype and its meaning. Indeed, as Laurent Turcot
points out, when the flâneur crystallised in the mid-nineteenth century, it
was explicitly identified with forms of public life which were detached
from institutionalised political culture – an aspect also underlined by Jo
Briggs in her comparison of texts by Louis Huart and Albert Smith from
the 1840s. Commentators on Benjamin’s idiosyncratic reconstruction of the
flâneur such as Susan Buck Morss have of course related flânerie to matters
of political fragmentation in the early twentieth century, the context which
fed Benjamin’s own motivation for excavating modernity’s sources and

figures.vii However, accounts of early flâneurs tend to equate their political
significance in terms of the physical conditions which defined the scope of
their pedestrian engagement with the congested, heterogeneous flux of city
life.viii That there might be connections between the world of national, that
is Paris-based, government, and civic administration seems absent.
Between these two phases, Kevin Robbins account of L’Assiette au
beurre surveys a remarkably elaborate vein of imagery – a genre which
takes on the heritage of Daumier, Gavarni and their peers, and creates new
vocabularies for social critique and satire. While Daumier was a virtuoso of
the monochrome lithograph, Assiette au beurre could unleash a vivid
palette of colour to expand the impact of its graphic reportage from the
streets of Paris. Moreover, the diverse artists who contributed to the journal
created an unpredictable, eclectic alternation of idiom, manifest in shifts of
focus from the everyday miseries to be espied in urban interstices, to the
full glare of high life, and its scandalous extravagances and inequalities.
Street scenes form a staple setting for denuciatory sentiment – articulated
through images which only had captions by way of explication. The lack of
fuller commentary was possible because readers could be relied upon to
bring their own partisan opinions regarding social inequalities to what at
first sight might seem trivial anecdotes and fragmentary “choses vues.”
The relationship of a politics of vision to a particular medium, and one
at a specific phase of its use and exploration, is abundantly evident in
James Harvey-Davitt’s analysis of Chantal Akerman’s film, News from
Home. While this study addresses a late twentieth-century film, the way it
opens up, indeed necessitates, reflection on the politics of viewing, the
identification of a subject position, and how this might be translatable into
cinematic form, is manifestly relevant to the phenomenon of the flâneur
from its very inception (wherever one situates this). Akerman’s scrutiny of
a city (New York), through the tableaux she constructs, embodies her
sustained, unsettling attention to an apparently commonplace spectacle.
The film articulates a selfpossessed refusal to recycle readymade visual
cliché, facilitated by Akerman’s outsider status. Indeed, the use of slow
tracking or continuous static shots forces the viewer to shift out of a casual
viewing position into a selfquestioning approach to the business of taking
in the narrative of the film. The viewer is unsure what to expect, and
equally unsure of how they should respond to what they see. I think this
can be related to the outlook enshrined in what may be the earliest forms of
the flâneur in Restoration Paris, in which the sceptical edge and polemical
pungency given to observations recounted is rendered all the more resonant
by virtue of being understated, usually anonymised, as if these are the
8 Introduction
result of an almost accidental state of viewing. More generally, it is

essential to understand certain forms of walking and viewing in public
space as being determined by prevailing spatial ideologies, whether post-
revolutionary France or 1970s New York.
As well as Harvey-Davitts’ analysis of a way of looking being
transposed from Europe – if not Paris – to a foreign location, and thereby
creating a novel politics of place, several essays consider alternative
settings, and how the role of the flâneur is assimilated or adapted to these
alien environments, and what implications this has for indigenous, pre-
existing forms of viewing, walking and inhabiting the space of the
promenade or street, square, boulevard or bar.
Kathrin Yacavone illuminates our reading of Benjamin’s approach to
the flâneur by focusing on his writings on Berlin. In particular, his
recollections of childhood show how these ideas are “complexly related to
memory and imagination on the part of the child-flâneur, as the alter ego of
the adult writer.” This provides a perspective within which to understand
the way in which “the flâneur as an observer of modern life gives way to
mnemonic flânerie as a critical and creative approach towards
autobiographical writing, which in turn reveals a profoundly redemptive
dimension of the flâneur motif in Benjamin’s œuvre as related to the
attempted saving of that which is about to vanish or has already
disappeared.”
In the case of later eighteenth-century Madrid, as discussed by Simon
Lee, one manifestation of the inherently political nature of walking in
public is the conjunction of popular and élite sociability, at least in the
sense of the former being an object of scrutiny for the latter by means of
fine art (in this case tapestries and their cartoons); whereas the parade of
carriages was a reciprocal type of spectacle, shared by pedestrians and
those being wheeled along in a ritual form of leisure. The development of
the paseos, themselves a form of ordering and framing, was at once an
expression of social order and aesthetic distancing. The association of city
life and status with fashion and its excesses provides a bridge to ideas
about the viewing of Parisian public life. Lee also illustrates the way that
great cities such as Madrid were part of a wider selfconscious or
comparative cosmopolitan discourse. It is interesting to compare the later
Parisian coupling of flâneur and passage with the Madrilenian
development of a space for codified leisure. If both aspire to a form of
modernity, in Madrid this occurs under the aegis of royal power and as a
form of collective sociability, rather than the solitary meandering of the
flâneur.
Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo discusses the role not of tapestry cartoons
but the illustrated press, a medium in which eclectic forms of journalism

cohabited with a diverse array of vignettes, tableaux, and character studies,
each of which contributed to the sense of a glimpsed scene from public
spaces in Madrid. As with Lee’s study, these representations were
symptoms of uneasy, contested attitudes to modernity and its insertion into
an older urban environment. Rodriguez-Galindo’s examination of the
equivalence of Spanish vocabulary as an indigenous alternative to foreign
words and ideas exemplifies the way the flâneur had a pungent significance
which, whether out of doors or in the pages of a journal, could elicit
derision as much as it seduced would-be strolling observers to style
themselves in this manner. The particular distinction she emphasises is
between Southern cities with their different customs of collective
sociability, performed in open spaces – not merely a consequence of
climate but extensions of social self-image (family, courtship, rivalry,
etc.).10 One might see these images, in which the flâneur and its cognate
forms are delineated, as being just as ritualised as the forms of promenade
by means of which social groups had registered their own coherence in the
eighteenth century, and challenged that of others. Such images spoke to
different audiences, defined in terms of degrees and modes of visual
literacy and varying degrees of recognition or identification with the
figures on show. That said, while they are rooted in a particular urban
imaginary and lexicon, they yet share a family resemblance with
contemporary illustrated journals elsewhere in Europe.
Like Lee and Rodriguez-Galindo’s texts, the two texts centred on
aspects of St Petersburg highlight the interplay or tension between
continuities within a given context, and the possibility of the spectacle of
urban life being subject to both technical innovations and imaginative
recasting. Tatiana Senkevitch investigates the relation between the
panoramic images of Sadovnikov and the patterns of social life as played
out on Nevsky Prospect and in the pages of Gogol. In so doing, she
analyses how the architectural framework or urban stage allowed or
required particular forms of viewing and pedestrian movement. This was
what we might call a prismatic space designed to reveal the identities,
characteristics, and actions of native citizens to their peers, while also
being the result of a grand vision for a newly coherent, ordered city space.
Claire Gheerardyn reveals how, in his 1916 novel Petersburg, “Bely
evokes a city of unrealities, permeated with fog, a city of greenish waters
teeming with germs, where streets transform passers-by into shadows.” The
city is the stage for an existential struggle between some kind of
psychological release achieved through walking, and the anxiety and horror
which permeate the locale. Walking becomes a means to externalise
10 Introduction
various personal and national symptoms of malaise. The pedestrian is

denied the pleasures of flânerie; indeed, pedestrian mobility and the
frightful spectacles it reveals become pathologised. The city is cloaked in
fog, and in consequence illuminated by treacherous pools of half-light. The
co-ordinates of material appearance are dissolved, here as in Alexander
McCabe’s account of existentialist castigation of the banal every-day. The
notion of walking is no simple visual metaphor for being, but subject to
disassociation and dislocation. Walking is a highly performative, stylised
activity; in Bely’s novel it becomes a knotty metaphor for a disturbed
imagination, itself the literary projection of a social and political critique,
or at least a form of ruminative dissent.
The flâneur’s afterlife has been versatile and vigorous. In addition to
the well-established genre of novels of the city, new media (photography,
film and TV) have successively adopted the peripatetic as a mode of vision,
that is, projected into static and moving images, expressing either the city
as seen by the flâneur, or the flâneur as wandering protagonist whether on
foot or on board modern forms of transport. When the modern flâneur has
migrated into other media, how has this reinforced or reinvented the motif?
In Kevin Milburn’s reflections on the migration of the flâneur across
media, the focus returns to the individual, condemned to his own isolated
surveying of a bleak, nocturnal world. This theme provides the narrative
for Frank Sinatra’s songs and associated graphics in postwar North
America. As Turcot and Conlin note, the flâneur thrives after dark. In the
case of the albums focused on here, it is precisely the solitary predicament,
with its associated emotional edge that is conjured in the lyrics and cover
imagery. While it would be too easy to align this ethos with the purgative
sense of angst and disgust through which Sartre and Camus theatricalise
their protagonists’ rejection of social norms and values, nonetheless,
Sinatra chooses to inhabit a bleak, isolated space cut off from the envelope
of alcohol and nicotine-fuelled up-tempo sociability associated with night-
life. However, that this was a cultural and stylistic choice is manifest from
the contrasting emphasis on romantic brio in his other work from adjacent
years. The album designs discussed by Milburn also illustrate how the
image and persona of the flâneur were assimilated into twentieth-century
commercial rhetoric (sharing with his nineteenth-century Parisian
predecessor the quintessentially male, ruminative attribute of the
cigar/cigarette, with its ribbon of curling, floating smoke).
The question of how fully or faithfully there may be a process of
transfer between text and image, and the role played by prints in the
crystallisation and dissemination of the image of the flâneur is one in need
of further research. However, in this volume, several authors (Briggs,
Conlin, Deuling, Robbins, Rodriguez-Galindo, Senkevitch) address aspects

of this topic. On the one hand, such images – interestingly diverse in their
format and vocabulary – can play a significant role in persuading viewers
of the reality of flânerie and its cognate activities as a practice, if not
indeed a way of life. That said, we are confronted with the ambiguous
limitations of print culture for doing this. The diversity of images included
in Huart and Smith’s compendia is in part a consequence of the evolving,
eclectic nature of illustrated popular (but no less sophisticated) literature in
which contemporary streets and public spaces were depicted. In these
cases, the nuances articulated in the habits and characteristics of their
protagonists are firmly anchored in anecdote; that is, while the images have
a life of their own, and are, as Briggs shows, connected to conventions
current in fine art, they nonetheless rely on the surrounding narrative to
make full sense of them. On the other hand, such images might be said to
give a deceptive sense of concretisation, as if they were a form of witness
to an objectively observable phenomenon. That is, there are aspects of the
history of the flâneur which would be hard to depict, in so far as they
depend on states of mind, and kinds of viewing positions which cannot be
easily translated into pictorial form, and come to life more in the form of
subjective aperçus, which can be more fully spelt out as part of
characterisation and narrative. In a French context, we can relate the
currency of the flâneur to the growth of political and social caricature.
Caricature was an integral part of the growth of political culture in the
Revolution, and survived as a means to attack and mock the status quo,
despite Napoleonic repression. There is a particular sense in which the
flâneur sees or conjures up episodes as if they were reportage, which later
become transformed into myths of the everyday. As ever, ambiguity seems
to be deeply inscribed within the flâneur’s outlook.
One fundamental aspect of the international currency of the flâneur is
the degree to which this term was integrated within indigenous languages,
or adapted to form a neologism. Thus, as Senkevitch notes, “the term
flâneur in relation to a particular city type was already in use in Russian in
the 1830s. Dostoyevsky, for example, used it ironically in his 1847
‘Petersburg Chronicle’.”9 We find interesting parallels in Karla Huebner’s
account of Czech attitudes to pedestrian wandering and observing, where
getting about Prague could be a carefully calibrated cultural enterprise.
Moreover, while there was an acute awareness of Parisian precedents, this
reference became a matter of some polemical import in so far as it was “not
their sole source for the practice.” As Huebner points out: “there are
multiple Czech terms for walkers, but although the Czech language has
adopted many French words (for example, garaž, pasaž, montaž), “flâneur”
12 Introduction
is almost nonexistent, while chodec is frequently used in contexts where

one might expect “flâneur” (particularly in the work of Nezval).” Huebner
also notes how, in Prague, flânerie could be a shared experience, as indeed
it could be in Paris – what we might call as a form of second-order flânerie.
While it is true, as Turcot observes, that the flâneur as an inherited idea was
dispersed into forms of collective strolling, and as Huebner notes in
Prague, flânerie à deux became an accepted variant, and O’Hanlon
underlines the essentially collaborative nature of Béraud’s ability to move
about Ireland, it was perhaps primarily the appeal of solitary nature of this
figure, expressed in its idiosyncratic but essentially autonomous degree of
mobility and solipsistic gaze, which allowed it to achieve an international
reach throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Notes
i
Paris au cinéma: lieux, personnages, histoire. Au-delà du flâneur, part of the
research programme on City and Cinema, Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art,
Paris, 6-7 December 2012. A similar sense of exegetical exhaustion was expressed
in Tom Gretton, “Not the Flâneur again: reading magazines and living the
metropolis around 1880,” in Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds), The
Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century
Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 94-112. A variant on this
is the idea that the flâneur became extinct; see Elizabeth Rechniewski, “When and
why did the flâneur die? A modern detective story,” Literature and Aesthetics, 17:
2 (2007): 91-104.
ii
Notable critiques of Benjamin are Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth
Century. European Journalism and its Physiologies, 1830–50 (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), Martina Lauster, “Walter Benjamin’s myth of the flâneur,” The
Modern Language Review, 102: 1 (Jan. 1, 2007): 139-56.
iii
See Ting Chang, “Disorienting Orient: Duret and Guimet, Anxious Flâneurs in
Asia,” in D’Souza and McDonough (eds), The Invisible Flâneuse?, 65-78, a topic
further developed by the same author in Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian
Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2013).
iv
Anna-Louise Milne, “From Third-Worldism to Fourth-World Flânerie? François
Maspero’s Recent Journeys,” French Studies, no. 60 (2006): 492-502.
v
“In the Waiting-Room of History,” London Review of Books, 26: 12 (24 June
2004): 3-8. See also Adebayo Williams, “The postcolonial flâneur and other
fellow-travellers: conceits for a narrative of redemption,” Third World Quarterly,
18: 5 (1997): 821-41, and Liesbeth Minnaard, “The Postcolonial Flâneur: Ramsey
Nasr’s ‘Antwerpse Stadsgedichten’,” Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries
Studies, 37: 1 (March, 2013): 79-92, in which postcolonial flânerie refers to “a
particular way of processing the, at times, overwhelming experiences of the
increasingly globalized metropolis” – in this case Antwerp, by Ramsey Nasr, a
writer of PalestinianǦDutch background who was appointed “City Poet of
Antwerp” in 2005. See also Hazel Hahn, “The Flâneur, the Tourist, the Global
Flâneur, and Magazine Reading as Flânerie,” Dix-Neuf (special issue: ‘Rethinking
the Flâneur: Flânerie and the Senses’, guest editor Aimée Boutin), 16: 2 (July
2012): 193-210.
vi
Robert Adlington, Composing Dissent: avant-garde music in 1960s Amsterdam
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
vii
Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The
Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique, no. 39, Second Special Issue on
Walter Benjamin (Autumn, 1986): 99-140.
8
Pamela Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution. Writing the Nineteenth-Century
City (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California University Press, 1994), 80-114.
Symptomatically, she reproaches Christopher Prendergast (in his Paris and the
Nineteenth Century (Blackwell: Cambridge MA. and Oxford, 1992), 102-25) for
accounting for Flaubert’s treatment of flânerie “entirely in political terms” (242
note 8).
9
See Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 99-100.
10
Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo notes the following studies: Dorde Cuvardic García,
“El flâneur y la flâneire en el costumbrismo español,” Filología y Lingüistíca,
XXXV (1) (2009): 23-38; Edward Baker, Materiales para escribir Madrid:
Literatura y espacio urbano de Moratín a Galdós (Madrid: Siglo 21 de España
Editores, 1991), 26-32; Vicente Pla Vivas, La ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX
(Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2010), 123-42; Dorde Cuvardic García, El
flâneur en las prácticas culturales, el costumbrismo y el modernismo (Paris:
Éditions Publibook Universitaires, 2012).
CHAPTER ONE
“THIS PUBLICK SORT OF OBSCURITY”:

THE ORIGINS OF THE FLÂNEUR IN LONDON
AND PARIS, 1660-1780
JONATHAN CONLIN
In his book Imagining the Modern City James Donald discusses the
modern city as at once a text and a built environment. The city is made up
of both bricks and mortar and that imagined city that we all carry around
with us in our imaginations. The city of the imagination weaves its web of
metaphors, associations and fantasies around the actual buildings, streets
and spaces. Meanwhile the buildings’ design shifts to reflect those
fantasies, in turn spawning new ones. Crucial to this mutually-reflexive
evolution is the city’s “textuality.” This textuality is confirmed, Donald
writes, by the fact of the city's “representative figures.”1 Chief among
these figures is the flâneur. The flâneur “embodies a certain perspective
on, or experience of, urban space and the metropolitan crowd.” He sells
the city to a bourgeois audience as a set of vignettes, characters and
caricatures.2
The figure of the flâneur has (as Donald himself notes) become
something of a cliché, a stereotype. The word itself was first defined by
the newspaper Figaro in 1831 as a male who visited all free spectacles,
who made the street his salon and shop windows his furniture. But it does
not seem to have been much in use in Paris until the 1840s, when Louis
Huart published his Physiologie du flâneur (1844), part of the fad for such
physiologies of urban types.3 Writing in 1843, Jules Janin seems to have
been the first Frenchman to claim that one could only be a flâneur in
Paris.4 Historians, art historians and literary scholars have repeatedly
drawn on two essays: one by Baudelaire (“Le Peintre de la vie moderne,”
1845) and one by the Frankfurt School sociologist Walter Benjamin
(Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, 1935). The flâneur has been canonized as
the patron saint of the nineteenth-century city and of modernity itself, all
The Origins of the Flâneur in London and Paris, 1660-1780 15
thanks to a piece of Salon criticism addressing a minor artist, Constantin

Guys. Though Guys himself was not an impressionist, Baudelaire’s
commentary has been transferred to members of the latter school, largely
thanks to the oft-cited tome The Painting of Modern Life (1985) by T. J.
Clark. Feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock have reproached
Clark with neglecting women artists and overlooking the appropriation of
public parks and other spaces by bourgeois women. But they have not
questioned the significance of the flâneur, who for Pollock “embodies the
gaze of modernity which is both covetous and erotic.”5 Born outsiders,
today’s historians and critics are happy to preen themselves as latter-day
flâneurs.
The solipsistic, arrogant pose of the flâneur is one that we continue to
find very attractive. To quote Baudelaire’s famous 1863 essay, for the
flâneur:
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... The spectator is a prince
who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.6
The flâneur is a solitary walker who patrols the city with a certain
hauteur. One might define him thus: a solitary, disembodied being of the
masculine gender who roams the streets in silence, gathering impressions
in order to relay them later on to his peers. The adjective “solitary” is
important. Though it is possible to find earlier texts celebrating urban
walks (by John Donne, for example), those walks are in company - a
profoundly different and by its very nature more social proposition.7
The flâneur is characterized as a quintessentially Parisian figure, a
product of the nineteenth century. Benjamin states clearly that “the flâneur
is a creation of Paris.”8 Benjamin is willing to contemplate the hypothesis
by which the flâneur might have emerged in other cities, but Rome is the
only apparent contender. To continue quoting from one of his index cards
on “Der Flaneur”:
The striking thing is that it didn’t happen to Rome. Why? Do not one’s
very dreams follow the streets there? Why, is not that city so crammed
with temples, quiet squares and folk idols that every paving stone, shop
sign and entryway affords the passer-by such stuff as dreams are made of?
... It was not the foreign visitor but the Parisians themselves who made it
16 Chapter One
the promised land of the flâneur, that “landscape made of life itself,” as
Hoffmannsthal once called it. A landscape: that is exactly what the city is
for the flâneur.9
Paris created the flâneur, and in so far as Paris is the capital of the
nineteenth century, so the flâneur is, ipso facto, a phenomenon of the
nineteenth century. This city is his aquarium, and anywhere else at any
other historical period he is, as it were, a fish out of water. As Théophile
Gautier himself claimed: “The flâneur is a being unknown in London.”9
This essay proposes to seek the flâneur in the wrong place (London) and at
the wrong time (the eighteenth century). Far from being a product of the
nineteenth century, of Benjamin's arcades and Haussmann’s boulevards,
this apparently eccentric exploration discovers the solitary urban
promenader walking the streets more than a century before his supposed
birth - and not in Paris, but in London.
In the fourth issue of his journal, The Spectator, Joseph Addison’s Mr
Spectator strikes a familiar pose:
One would think a silent Man ... should be very little liable to
Misinterpretations; and yet I remember I was once taken up for a Jesuit, for
no other Reason but my profound Taciturnity. It is from this Misfortune,
that to be out of Harm's Way, I have ever since affected Crowds. He who
comes into Assemblies only to gratifie his Curiosity, and not to make a
Figure, enjoys the Pleasures of Retirement in a more exquisite Degree,
than he possibly could in his Closet; ... To be exempt from the Passions
with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude. I can very
justly say with the antient Sage, I am never less alone than when alone...
There are so many Gratifications attend this publick sort of Obscurity, that
some little Distastes I daily receive have lost their Anguish; and I did the
other Day, without the least Displeasure, overhear one say of me, That
strange Fellow; ... There are, I must confess, many to whom my Person is
as well known as one of their nearest Relations, who give themselves no
further Trouble about calling me by my Name or Quality, but speak of me
very currently by Mr. What-d'ye-call-him.10
Just as Baudelaire’s “man of the crowd”12 so Mr Spectator revels in his

anonymity and eccentricity. He never speaks, but nonetheless betrays a
desire to “to communicate the Fulness of my Heart” in writing for us.
Mr Spectator is a writer who recounts his own traits as he gathers
impressions and anecdotes of the city, to the extent that he erases himself
in the very act of sharing those impressions and anecdotes with us. Indeed,
he declares himself resolved “to Print my self out, if possible, before I
die.”11 As he notes in another issue of the journal (written by Addison’s
collaborator, Richard Steele): “It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a

little of the world, and be of no character or significancy in it. To be ever
unconcerned, ever looking on new objects with an endless curiosity, is a
delight known only to those who are turned for speculation.”12
The Spectator’s approach would, as we shall see, eventually find a
Parisian echo in the work of Rétif de la Bretonne, in particular his massive
fourteen-volume work Les Nuits de Paris (1789), a diary of 363 nights
spent wandering round the city alone. In searching for similar observers,
however, we need not confine ourselves to writers. This essay also
considers three eighteenth-century flâneur-artists, William Hogarth and the
brothers Charles-Germain and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. These figures were
among the first to celebrate the urban promenade as a source of delight
and mystery in its own right, rather than (as so many had conceived it
previously) as an unpleasant passage through the city’s monstrously
distended body, undertaken only by those unfortunate enough to lack a
carriage. They were the first to exhibit the flâneur's most paradoxical trait:
his juxtaposition of an often comically self-important desire to police the
city with a nostalgic eye for vanishing traces of “the old city,” the city of
disorder and uncanny juxtapositions. Part of him wishes to impose order,
the other part revels in his own defeat.
Walter Benjamin was right, at least in part. The city-as-spectacle did
indeed reveal itself first as a landscape, or rather as two specific forms of
landscape architecture developed in Paris and in London at the close of the
seventeenth century: the pleasure garden (or “wauxhall,” in French) and
the boulevard. Contrary to Benjamin, I do not consider the flâneur to
possess the strength necessary to support the vast superstructure of
modernity which historians have placed on his narrow, if well-dressed,
shoulders. This essay does not, however, seek to settle a score between
Paris and London, two cities whose mutual fascination would last until our
own day, and which would help shape city living for all of us.13
Instead it argues that this new peripatetic vision of the city emerged on
both sides of the Channel in more or less the same way. Whether the
flâneur appeared first in one city or the other is, it suggests, of less
significance than we might otherwise presume, precisely because the
flâneur was and remained a peripheral figure: solitary, evanescent and
insubstantial.14 As Richard Sennett has noted, the “bourgeois man in the
crowd developed in the [nineteenth] century a shield of silence ... out of
fear ... [out of] undifferentiated anxiety about not knowing what to expect,
about being violated in public....”15 To make this figure the hero of so
many of the stories we like to tell about cities tells us more about the
18 Chapter One
editors, artists and latter-day historians’ obsessions than it does about the
city itself.
Going Nowhere: Boulevards and Pleasure Gardens

It is difficult to “flâne” in dirty, unpaved streets, or to enjoy the spectacle
of the city when one is exposed to the risk of being killed or mutilated by
carriages or when one runs the danger of being attacked by thieves lurking
in unlit corners. Thus the emergence of the flâneur is partly a function of
“police,” as the eighteenth-century moral philosopher Adam Smith would
have understood the term. As Smith noted in his 1766 lectures on
jurisprudence, police was itself a French word “which properly signified
the policey [sic] of civil government, but now it only means the regulation
of the inferiour parts of government, viz. cleanliness, security, and
cheapness or plenty.” 16 Historians such as Tim Hitchcock, Heather Shore
and Arlette Farge have encouraged us to view police as the enemy of street
life, as robbing city residents of the opportunity to interact with one
another and to claim the street as a stage for ritual, for leisure and for
display.
“The new domestic and street architectures of the Georgian period,”
Hitchcock and Shore write of London, “with their railings, bollards and
pavements, when combined with the bureaucratic and legal forces created
to cope with disorder, effectively forced the inhabitants of the streets out
of the thoroughfares.”17 Hester Piozzi visited Paris in 1775 and noted that
from the window of her lodgings in the Rue Jacob she had seen more
“Quarrels, Overturns, and Confusion [in a month’s stay] ... than London
will exhibit in a Year’s walking the Street at decent hours only.”18 Less
tragic readings of this same process are surely possible. By creating the
conditions in which street life could be celebrated as spectacle and in
which the middling and upper classes could escape the prison of their
carriages it could be argued that this process made the street more - not
less - of a collective public space. One of the reasons the flâneur appeared
in London earlier than in Paris was the cleanliness of its streets, with their
elevated pavements (what Americans call sidewalks) and bollards
protecting pedestrians from carriages and carts. Meanwhile those who
tried to promenade in Paris put their lives in danger, hence the vituperative
tone taken by eighteenth-century Parisian flâneurs with those who went
about in carriages instead of on foot. “You mad dog,” cries Rétif in his Les
Nuits de Paris, “who gave you the right to cover us with mud?”19
Such street furniture appeared in the major streets of the City of
London after the Great Fire of 1666. In the closing decades of the century
and in the first quarter of the eighteenth century the developers behind
large West End estates such as the Bedford Estate laid down rules
governing paving and street cleaning (scavenging).20 The 1762
Westminster Paving Act transferred responsibility for paving from the
individual proprietor to a body of paving commissioners with the authority
to impose a rate on the parish as a whole. French visitors wondered at the
resulting streetscape even as they struggled to make readers understand
just how pavements, gutters and roadways were laid out. There is a sense
of wide-eyed wonder at something which seems so commonplace to us
today, but which was then so foreign to the Parisian experience. Such
descriptions put paid to the theory that the Pont Neuf (constructed 1578-
1607) saw the introduction of the pavement (as in a sidewalk or trottoir) to
Paris. Those raised platforms were primarily intended for shops, and so
were not imitated. The first trottoirs only appeared in the 1780s, with
Donald Olsen citing the Rue de l’Odéon as the first example (1781).21
Priorities seemed to be topsy-turvy in London. In his Parallèle de
Paris et de Londres (c. 1780) Mercier wrote of how much more pleasant it
was to walk in the suburban villages of London than in the banlieues of
Paris.
Going for a walk outside the city is even more agreeable. Thanks to the
sidewalks you can walk there without any trouble or exertion. Should it
have rained you won’t get yourself coated in mud travelling round the
edges of town the way you will at the customs barriers of Paris. Walking
from one village to another you always find thousands of little sidewalks,
well-maintained, with barriers and bollards to keep the coaches and horses
from infringing them. The pedestrian can promenade everywhere.22
Rather than having a single gutter in the centre of each street the Paris
authorities should, Mercier insisted, order it so that there were “none of
those smelly little streams running down the middle of the street, but
rather one running down each side, along the sidewalks… Widen its
streets, at whatever cost, or London will forever shame Paris.”23
The mud of Paris was proverbial in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century France, and even today the flâneur’s pleasure is compromised by
the need to always keep an eye out for dog excrement. The bourgeois of
former times avoided the streets as much as they could, travelling
everywhere by coach. In his 1640 manual Les Lois de la Galanterie
Charles Sorel noted that the first question asked of any entrant to society
was “does he own a carriage?” To walk was tantamount to lowering
oneself to the level of the mob, to encanaillement.24 It was, oddly perhaps,
only by entering a carriage that one could form part of the scene, could
20 Chapter One
savour the pleasure of “seeing and being seen,” at the Cours-la-Reine in

Paris, for example.
In the seventeenth century this was equally true of London and Paris.
When the physician and savant Balthasar Monconys visited London in
1663 he saw the same ritual performed in “Iparc” [Hyde Park], “a large
open space where the cours convenes.”25 As he explained in Hyde Park
“They make the cours in a circle, in such a way that one does not see all
the other carriages unless one changes direction.” What did strike
Monconys as strange was the sight of rented carriages mixed in among all
the rest. As he remarked on two occasions, in London those promenading
in their own carriages did not endeavour to humiliate those in rented
carriages, as was usual in Paris. Anyone daring to appear at the Cours-la-
Reine in such an inferior vehicle would be whistled at until they left in
shame.26
As Laurent Turcot notes in his history of the promeneur, the word
“cours” (referring to the ritual circulation of carriages at a certain time of
day, or more specifically the place in which this circulation took place)
entered the French language around 1690, denoting a place to assemble at
certain times. Louis XIII’s mother established the first Parisian cours
along the Seine, south of today’s Champs-Elysées, in the early seventeenth
century, and it remained popular until the early eighteenth century. This
cours was composed of a central allée 38 metres wide and two kilometres
long: enough room for five lanes of carriages. Two ranks of trees divided
the carriages from the contre-allées, intended for pedestrians. One entered
by entrances monitored by Swiss guards, who had orders not to allow
entry to those in livery or those lacking the dress or deportment of a
bourgeois.
As the terminology (allée, contre-allée) indicates, this complex for
promenading was conceived as a kind of garden. To quote Dézallier
d’Argenville’s 1709 Théorie et la pratique du jardinage:
Allées in gardens are like streets in a town. They allow communication

between one place and another, and act like guides or routes leading one
around a garden. They form one of the principal beauties of gardens when
they are well laid-out and well maintained, quite apart from their
convenience and utility for promenading.27
Once inside the complex carriages and pedestrians alike went round in
circles, the latter by means of a sort of roundabout or gyratory. After 1660
Cours-la-Reine was linked to the Tuileries to the northeast, the latter
having been redesigned by Mollet, again with a large central allée 300
metres long. As with the Cours, there were only two entrances to the
Tuileries, both guarded by Swiss troops. In 1678 another important

innovation appeared: the bench. The eight benches initially installed had
increased to a hundred and one by 1686. This and later increases in
number indicate a rising demand for pedestrian rather than vehicular
flânerie. During the fashionable hours of the late afternoon the Tuileries
were so packed that, as the Baronne d’Oberkirch noted: “One suffocates,
one almost has to fight one’s way through.”28 Though less fashionable
with the élite, the Luxembourg and Arsenal Gardens were other popular
places for flânerie on foot. Even if the royal parks were less frequented by
the turn of the eighteenth century, the boulevards laid out on the old city
walls from 1670 adopted a similar layout.29
Around this time, the commercially-operated pleasure garden emerged,
over in London: a kind of amusement park with music, rope-dancers,
fireworks and other spectacles. The most renowned was situated in the
suburb of Lambeth, on the south or Surrey bank of the Thames. Here as in
other London pleasure gardens one went nowhere, or rather one went in
circles. As at the Cours or Tuileries in Paris, so here one entered by a
gateway – except here one had to pay to gain admission – and then set
about circulating to see and be seen. Monconys visited in May 1663 and
was impressed. After attending vespers at Westminster Abbey:
We took a boat across the Thames to see two gardens to which the
fashionable world repair in order to promenade and enjoy the refreshments
served in little cafés found scattered around the place… I admired the
beauty of the allées that were turfed, and the gentility of those which were
sanded. The resort is divided up into a number of square plots 20 or 30
paces across, enclosed by hedges of blackcurrant bushes, planted with
strawberries, rose bushes and other small trees, herbs and vegetables… The
allées are all lined with lilies, gilly-flowers or jonquils.30
As in Paris lackeys and those in livery were excluded, and there were rules
governing the correct hours at which it was fashionable to be seen
promenading there. The most famous of these was that which determined
the direction of travel in the rotunda at Ranelagh. Here the crowd
circulated clockwise in the morning; at noon a bell was rung, at which the
crowd changed direction, and began walking counter-clockwise. Such
pleasure gardens were planted with French-style allées on a grid that
would survive well into the nineteenth century (Vauxhall closed in 1859),
even as the flowing lines more commonly associated with English
landscape gardening came to predominate elsewhere. Carefully-arranged
displays of patriotic sculpture and painting by Louis-François Roubiliac,
Francis Hayman and others encouraged patrons to experience the mingling
22 Chapter One
of middling and upper-class visitors as a spectacle of national cohesion.

Parisian visitors were initially surprised by their social inclusiveness,
which they saw as characteristically “English.” This did not stop Parisian
entrepreneurs and their élite backers from setting up several “Wauxhalls”
in Paris in the 1760s and 1770s.31
At first glance the boulevards planted by Louis XIV on the old city
ramparts seem quite different: an experiment in urban planning rather than
a green space detached from the city around it. Between 1670 and 1676
the first segment of boulevard was laid out between the Porte Saint-
Antoine and the Porte Saint-Martin. Walks flanking a central allée 30
metres wide were laid out on top, with service streets in the old fosse
below, lined with artisanal workshops, tennis courts and stalls. Gradually
the boulevards were extended on either side, in particular to the growing
residential district of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the west. The
boulevards would eventually extend over more than 4.5 kilometres. The
City authorities added 84 stone benches in 1751 and sold licenses to those
renting out chairs from 1776, as well as allowing the construction of small
temporary stalls, cafés and parades (a genre of street-theatre, acted on a
narrow, elevated scaffold). The hack writer and journalist Rétif de la
Bretonne returns to them again and again in his Nuits de Paris. “I
developed a lively taste for this promenade,” he notes in Night 117,
“where I had many adventures.”32 Here his “Spectator-Owl” could wander
without fear of being run over by carriages or having his fine clothes
spattered with mud off their wheels. As Mercier noted, the boulevard was
“one vaste promenade … open to all ranks.”33
The owners of hotels backing on to the boulevards soon began to
bombard the City authorities with requests for permission to open new
roadways into the boulevards, or to construct new residential
developments between their hotels and the boulevard. Religious
foundations such as the Grands-Augustins joined in. Architects such as
François-Joseph Belanger experimented with unfamiliar housing types in
the 1780s, including terrace-style houses with basement “areas” in front
intended to create “la Nouvelle Londres” in the Saint-Honoré.34
Throughout the eighteenth century municipal administrators endeavoured
to preserve the boulevards, to keep them for the exclusive use of
promenaders and flâneurs, rather than allowing their integration in the
city’s traffic system.35 Percées of new streets were permitted on the inside
of the boulevard (but not on the outside, the suburban side) under edicts of
1724, 1726 and 1765. Heavy goods vehicles were restricted, the transport
of live animals banned and speed restrictions imposed.
The boulevards were conceived as gardens, with sanded walks.

Unfortunately their popularity rendered them muddy in winter and dusty in
summer. In August 1777 the City resolved to pave them.36 A triumph of
the city over the garden? Hardly. In 1787 Ethis de Corny, Procureur de la
Ville, set a minimum width of 11.8 metres for all new streets in Paris, with
1.9 metres for pedestrians. He cited the boulevards as his model. The
contre-allée inspired the Parisian sidewalk.37
Children of a New Hour: Geographies of Time

Driven into the streets by his troubled spirit, Rétif’s “Spectator-Owl” of
Les Nuits de Paris describes himself as a public-spirited observer who is
helping the reader by revealing what goes on outside during the hours we
ourselves are indoors tucked up in bed. His adopting of the title
“Spectator” may be a deliberate reference to Addison’s Mr Spectator: well
known in Paris thanks to the many translations of The Spectator that began
appearing as early as 1716. In his introduction he addresses first his owl-
self (Fig. 1-1), and then us:
Owl! How often your cries have sent a thrill down my spine, in the
shadows of the night! Solitary and sad, like you I wander alone amid the
shadows of this immense capital. The réverbères shape, but do not
eliminate these shadows, they make them even more striking: it's the
chiaroscuro of the Old Masters! I wander alone, to know Man ... How
much there is to see, when all eyes are shut! Good citizens, I kept watch
for you, I patrolled the night for you! I was resolved to see everything - for
you!38
Night after night Rétif’s “Nocturnal Spectator” paces the city streets,
revelling in the contrast between the daytime and nighttime faces of the
city. Where Mr Spectator usually keeps such detail to a minimum Rétif’s
accounts indicate his route in such detail that it is possible to retrace his
steps. Rétif has more of the detective about him than Mr Spectator. On any
one night he has several unexplained “cases” underway; a character first
encountered several nights before reappears, only to vanish again.
The cafés and “idle spectacles” of the boulevards have a special appeal
for Rétif, and inspire that sort of alienated attentiveness characteristic of
the nineteenth-century flâneur:
24 Chapter One
Fig. 1-1. Anon, frontispiece to Rétif de͒La Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris (1789),
engraving. Private Collection.
I walked at random, letting my glances stray where they would, and

everywhere they spied varied scenes, more or less diverting. It was an
ever-changing picture: always the same, and always different. This is
hardly the place for reflection, but it fills the spirit with ideas and facts,
which return to one later, in solitude.39
That air of superiority common to flâneurs derives in part from the

knowledge that the same place is inhabited by different groups at different
times of day, each occupied with different activities. These groups do not
recognize one another, being installed in the space at different times. Only
the flâneur sees them come and go, and draws a kind of proprietorial pride
from this, even if his own physical person remains invisible. One is
reminded of Benjamin’s observation that the flâneur is a reaction against
the specialisation of labour which created this economy of time.40
With Rétif this sense of a temporal geography is rather schematic.
There is a binary opposition between night and day, with the “Spectator-
Owl” promenading at night, when we are asleep. The familiar streets
through which he strolls are rendered unfamiliar and strange by the
shadows and the Caravaggesque lighting of the réverbères (a variety of
streetlight, suspended above the centre of the street). Mercier for his part
notes the tacit convention by which the public promenades were
intensively used at certain times, and entirely abandoned at others.41 But
there is no sense of the same space being used for different purposes by
different types of people. With Addison, Steele and Hogarth the sense of
the city as a space haunted by revenants is more evolved. In number 454
of The Spectator we find a detailed account of a sleepless night spent
roaming the city, beginning in Richmond, a polite suburb to the west of
the city centre. Woken at four in the morning by that congenital weakness
of the flâneur – anxiety - Mr Spectator resolves to make a tour of London.
The result is, in effect, the first flânerie.
I … took boat for London, with a Resolution to rove by Boat and Coach
for the next Four and twenty Hours, till the many different Objects I must
needs meet with should tire my Imagination, and give me an Inclination to
a Repose more profound than I was at that Time capable of… The Hours
of the Day and Night are taken up in the Cities of London and Westminster
by Peoples as different from each other as those who are Born in different
Countries. Men of Six-a-Clock give way to those of Nine, they of Nine to
the Generation of Twelve, and they of Twelve disappear, and make Room
for the fashionable World, who have made Two-a-Clock the Noon of the
Day.42
26 Chapter One
Mr Spectator floats downriver with boatmen delivering fruit from the

market gardens at Nine Elms, disembarks and travels to Covent Garden.
He then takes a coach for the West End, returns to Covent Garden to listen
to a ballad-seller, walks around the Royal Exchange to see the stock-
jobbers, returns by way of a ribbon-seller and spends the evening and early
hours of the following morning eaves-dropping on other people’s
conversations in various coffee-houses.
Mr Spectator delights in the syncopated routines and contrapuntal
rhythms of various trades and professions that call London their home,
such as the cabmen of the previous night hurrying home to sleep before a
new day dawns. In 1738 Hogarth made a visual flânerie of a similar kind
in his series of engravings entitled The Times of Day. His voyage begins at
7.55 a.m. in front of St Paul’s church in Covent Garden (Fig. 1-2). An old
woman is making her way to morning service, accompanied by a boy
carrying her prayerbook. Her walk is interrupted by the spectacle of rakes
carousing in Tom King’s Coffee House. Today is still yesterday, for them.
Much as Mr Spectator serves as man-midwife to countless generations of
what he calls “children of the hour,” the endless new figures that appear
with every passing hour. In Night we newcomers arrive by the “Salisbury
flyer” while others pile all their belongings onto a cart and make a moonlit
flit, leaving arrears of rent unpaid.
Mr Spectator had hit upon a way of categorizing the city as a place that
never sleeps, an urban trope which persists to this day. His twenty-four
hour flânerie would be repeated in Victorian London, most notably in
George Augustus Sala’s Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of Day and
Night in London (1859). As Bretonne noted, improvements in street
lighting such as the 6,000 réverbères introduced to Paris in the 1780s did
little to dispel the chiaroscuro of nocturnal flânerie. Though a number of
pamphlets appeared bemoaning their supposed effect of preventing the
city’s prostitutes and their clients from making the most of the urban night,
otherwise the réverbères seem to have added to the city’s nocturnal
magic.45 Indeed, by encouraging more people to walk around the city at
night they actually made the nocturnal city visible to many residents for
the first time.
Fig. 1-2. William Hogarth, The Times of Day: Morning, 1738, engraving, 34.1 x
23.5 cm. ͒© The Trustees of the British Museum.
28 Chapter One
Signs of the “Old City”:

Order, Nostalgia and the Urban Uncanny
The pre-eminent flâneur-artist of eighteenth-century Europe was surely
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780), son of a master embroiderer. Though
his style is more galant than that of Hogarth (born in 1697), the pair shared
an eye for scenes of everyday urban life. In addition to filling the margins
of Salon and auction catalogues with tiny sketches of the paintings listed
Gabriel also filled sketchbooks with scenes sketched on the boulevards, in
guinguettes (extramural taverns popular in the summer months) and pleasure
gardens. As his elder brother Charles-Germain noted, “If [Gabriel] took a
stroll, his pencil made use of the passers-by.”46
Saint-Aubin was fascinated by the movement of urban crowds. On the
boulevards he captured impressions of the groups that arranged and
rearranged themselves on benches and on the chairs hired from the
aforementioned loueurs. The National Gallery, London has a rare painting
in oils by him, of a parade stage on the boulevard. He sketched the
boulevard water cart as well as the theatres and cafés that thrived beyond
the tax wall that encircled the city. Although he produced some
engravings, Paris’s print culture was just too restricted and tightly
censored for him to enjoy the sort of opportunities which enabled Hogarth
to reach a wide public. In contrast to his brothers, who knuckled down to
the modestly rewarding pursuit of portraiture or embroidery (following in
their father’s footsteps), Gabriel seems to have drifted. Although a few
sketches were turned into etchings, otherwise outlets for his variety of
urban impressionism were few and far between: a tabatière here, a trade
card there, illustrations to a memorandum on the police of Paris. He may
even have managed to find buyers for his illuminated sale catalogues,
perhaps as aides-mémoire for collectors.47 At the tender age of twenty-
three he became Professor of Figure Drawing at the academy run by the
architect Blondel, whom he may have assisted with some designs, albeit
without receiving any official acknowledgment.
The “Livre de caricatures tant bonnes que mauvaises” is the most
intriguing testament to his skill as an obsessive collector of political
rumour, design motifs, inventions and visual puns. A palimpsest which
contains contributions from Gabriel’s elder brothers as well as his sister,
we are only just beginning to tease apart the web of calembours, in-jokes,
literary and political references and orientalising bizarreries that hold the
Livre together. Potentially dangerous as well as highly amusing, the Livre
was clearly not intended for consumption outside a narrow circle of
intimates. The annotations, additions and rebuses kept this tightly-knit
family coming back to the Livre, adding layer upon layer, from the 1740s
up until the 1780s.
Folio 358 of the Livre (attributed to Charles-Germain), entitled “les
enseignes de Paris abattües” (Fig. 1-3), shows the suppression of signs à
potence (i.e. those signs which hung out over the street, rather than being
mounted flat against the building’s facade) under a police ordonnance of
1761. An archer or constable staggers under the weight of an immense
sword, while another attacks the sign of the “Great Boot.” Other signs and
over-size shop symbols lie around. Clearly the Saint-Aubin were struck by
the uncanny nature of such signs. The Westminster Paving Act of 1762
required the same suppression in the City of Westminster, and with the
same justifications: the signs were accused of blocking the circulation of
air and of squeaking loudly in the wind.48 The signs’ destruction takes its
place in the Livre alongside the arrival of the penny post and the
réverbères as landmarks in the history of the Parisian flâneur.
In The Spectator, in Lord Shaftesbury’s philosophical treatise
Characteristics (1711), as well as in later novels by Henry Fielding, signs
had been celebrated, somewhat ironically, as an English art form that
broke all the proprieties. The signs’ monstrous proportions, kaleidoscopic
bestiary and ludic (or simply incoherent) juxtapositions were celebrated as
just one part of the urban uncanny. Like the vocabulary of hand gestures
which Mr Spectator observes in use among hackney coachmen (by which
they silently signal their destinations and expected fares to each other), this
is a sign language. Hackney coachmen and signs both served to guide
residents and visitors alike through a maze of streets, but they encoded the
city in a language all their own, one impenetrable, shocking or uncouth
(very uncouth, in the case of coachmen, known for their “saucy, impudent
behaviour”) to outsiders.49
These are urban languages that the flâneur respects, even if he is not
fluent in them. For his part Hogarth believed shop and inn-signs to be a
“genre” at which the British excelled, and he may have been involved in
helping organize a satirical exhibition of shop and inn signs staged by a
fictional “Society of Signpainters” (in reality, the journalist Bonnell
Thornton) in 1762. Thornton displayed more than 110 shop and inn signs
in rented rooms in Bow Street between April 22 and 8 June, charging
members of the public one shilling on the door. Although some signs may
have been altered by Hogarth himself, otherwise these signs were typical
of those which could be seen for free on any street, signs in danger of
being taken down as a result of the 1762 Westminster Paving Act. Those
who paid their shilling apparently believing that they were going to look at
an exhibition of “real” art reacted strongly - some applauding the organisers’
30 Chapter One
Fig. 1-3. Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, “Bâtir Est beau, mais detruire est
Sublime,” 1761,͒ watercolour, ink and graphite on paper, 18.7 x 13.2 cm., Livre de
Caricatures tant bonnes que mauvaises, Waddesdon Manor, The Rothschild
Collection (The National Trust), acc. no. 675.358. Photo: Imaging Services
Bodleian Library © The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor.
wit, others enraged at the imposture. Aspects of the exhibition seem to

anticipate twentieth-century movements, including Dada and Outsider
Art.50
Nineteenth-century flâneurs accused Haussmann of having homogenized
the city in suppressing those traits which distinguished one neighbourhood
from another. One finds a similar sentiment in the ambivalent response of
Addison, Mercier and Saint-Aubin to the suppression of signs (enseignes à
potence, to be exact) in Paris and London. In 1711 Mr Spectator offered
his services as superintendent of signs, an idea already proposed by
Molière in Les Fâcheux (1662).51 Mr Spectator complained that there were
too many signs which exhibited a false or irrational relationship with the
products or services they served to advertise. “What can be more
inconsistent than to find a whore at the sign of The Angel?”52 Other signs
defied reason by displaying animals which could not be found in nature
(blue boars, for example). For all this, Mr Spectator’s frustration at the
apparent chaos confronting him is, one senses, not entirely sincere. He
rejoices in deciphering such signs. Like the Tatler’s Mr Bickerstaff before
him, he does not in fact presume to lay down the law: “[I] who am only a
Student, and a Man of no great Interest, I can only remark Things, and
recommend the Correction of ’em to higher Powers.”53
Mercier’s Tableau de Paris is equally ambivalent about signs. He
begins by attacking the signs as a nuisance, welcoming the ban on
enseignes à potence. This was the latest in a series of attempts to limit the
size of signs that dated back to 1666, when those putting up signs were
supposed to pay a fee to the Bureau de la voierie.54 The specific examples
cited by Mercier are uncannily similar to those featured in the earlier
Saint-Aubin image, suggesting that these particular signs may have been
renowned among Parisians:
These signs are for the most part of colossal proportions. They afford the
most stunted people in Europe the prospect of a race of giants. You can
find a scabbard six feet high, a boot as big as a barrel, a spur the size of a
carriage wheel, a glove which could house a three-year old child in each
finger, monstrously distended heads, sword-wielding arms which traverse
the width of the street. Rid of these gross appendages the city shows, as it
were, a new face, genteel and clean-shaven.55
In an earlier chapter on “Public Orthography” Mercier notes the sloppy

spelling found on so many signs, and (like Isaac Bickerstaff before him)
wonders if Molière’s proposal “in all seriousness to appoint a censor to
rectify these gross errors” isn’t in fact worth pursuing.56
32 Chapter One
As with his fellow London flâneurs of the eighteenth century, however,

Mercier is pulled both ways. Part of him desires to clear away obstructions
to the circulation of air and of people, and to the legibility and surveillance
of la ville policée. Another part of him delights in the semantic slippages
to be found in such signs’ witty juxtapositions of word and image, and in
the sparks that fly when the connections between word and image,
between a sign and the goods or services sold beneath it short-circuit.
“Ignorance sometimes makes bizarre connections, and one takes delight in
such trivialities, because it is trivialities above all which capture the
Parisian’s attention.”57 Just as Hogarth was wont to wander those streets
where signpainters and dealers in signs were to be found,58 so Mercier
delighted in wandering about the dealers in signs on the Quai de la
Mégisserie:
There the crowned heads of all the earth slumber side-by-side: Louis XVI
and George III give each other a fraternal kiss; the King of Prussia sleeps
with the Empress of Russia, the Holy Roman Emperor is on a level with
the Electors, there at last the [Papal] tiara and the [Islamic] turban mingle.
A café-owner walks up, pokes about among their majesties with his foot,
picks up the King of Poland, hangs him up outside his establishment and
scrawls underneath: The Mighty Conqueror.59
Mercier even imagines what these signs might say to one another, were
they able to speak. High and low, allies and enemies, conquerors and
conquered swop places and single images do double or even triple duty,
ending up “performing their final task, that is guiding the stumbling steps
of drunkards.”60 The King of Poland, recently robbed of his realm by the
Partition of Poland, is reborn as a triumphant hero.
Before the numbering of buildings and the standardisation of street
signs merchants and strangers alike were directed “to the sign of the x” or
“opposite the sign of the y.” Of course, these signs served as advertising
for an enterprise, but they also functioned as aids to navigation. In the
wake of their suppression Londoners and Parisians founds themselves lost,
strangers in their own home cities. It would take another ten or twenty
years for house numbering to be introduced in Paris and London.61 In the
meantime their passing was lamented as an impoverishment of the urban
palimpsest. These isolated, nostalgic responses would grow into a chorus
around the time of the Haussmannian percéments of the following century.
New boulevards such as the Avenue de l’Opéra left Parisians feeling
unsettled, ill at ease. As Benjamin would later write, they were becoming
more and more conscious of the inhuman character of the city.62
Epitaph for a Flâneur

The eighteenth-century dilettante Horace Walpole famously remarked that
in introducing a less regimented, naturalistic style to England the
landscape architect William Kent had jumped the fence, and found that all
nature was a garden. One might attribute a similar transformative effect to
the aforementioned pleasure gardens and boulevards. For the first time the
city became a space in which the middling rank and noble élite could
promenade as easily afoot as in a carriage, where the crowd was a pleasing
spectacle and where one could perch on a bench to watch “the world go
by.” The eighteenth-century flâneur had jumped the boulevard, and found
that the city was a garden – and that it was possible, to cite the famous
Baudelaire quotation, to “botanize on the asphalt” (“d’herboriser sur le
bitume”).
Addison and Rétif, Mr Spectator and the “Spectator-Owl,” Saint-Aubin
and Hogarth: these were the first to celebrate urban flânerie as a source
both of pleasure and mystery, and not, as before, a dangerous and
unpleasant scramble through a stinking obstacle-course.63 Benjamin was
wrong. The flâneur was not a creature of the nineteenth century, not a
creature of Paris exclusively. He appeared in both Paris and London at the
turn of the eighteenth century. For all this added pedigree, however, the
flâneur remains a marginal figure, evanescent and difficult to grasp. This
essay began by quoting a description of Mr Spectator penned by Addison
in 1711. It seems appropriate to close with one by Mercier from the
Tableau de Paris, that describing the “Pavement Pounder” (“Batteur de
pavé”):
He is usually a Gascon trying to make his hundred pistoles of rent stretch

as far as they will go. He takes lunch in a greasy spoon, dines with a
bavaroise and vainly struts along the public walks as if he had an income
of 2,000 écus. In the morning he leaves his lodgings and can be spied
roaming all the quartiers until eleven at night. He attends every service,
albeit without any religious devotion, pays calls on people to whom he is
completely unknown, observes court proceedings which have nothing to do
with him. He observes everything going on in the city, attends all public
ceremonies, catching every variety of show, and wears out more shoe
leather than a police spy or a broker’s runner put together.64
Thanks to an exaggerated respect for this “prince,” historians, art

historians and scholars of urbanism and literature have inflated his
importance. As we have seen, most of these eighteenth-century flâneurs
were hardly princely. They were semi-comic or even tragi-comic figures.
34 Chapter One
The authors who created them maintained an ironic distance between

themselves and their creation, attracted and yet somehow repelled by the
monster they had created. Unfortunately some of their latter-day readers
have taken them en grand sérieux, in making him out (as Elizabeth Wilson
has noted) to be a “masterful voyeur.”65
This essay may have fallen into the same trap itself. After all, as Janet
Wolff has noted, critics, anthropologists and sociologists (and, she might
have added, historians) have made a fuss of this figure partly because his
curiosity, pretensions (however ironic) to scientific knowledge as well as
his isolation from other city-dwellers reminds them of their own
predicament.66 Yet it should be evident that the allées of pleasure gardens
and the boulevards were thronged with members of Paris and London’s
middling rank and noble élite. They circulated with friends or in family
groups, performing errands or trawling for prostitutes. The new street
layout and furniture gave them, too, a licence to consume the city as a
spectacle, to enjoy the delights of seeing and being seen. Only the flâneur
remained solitary and silent amid this hive of modernity, seeing but not
being seen.
For Benjamin the flâneur’s fate is to lose all personality, to become a
walking advertisement or sandwich man. It is, surely, high time the flâneur
was permitted to retire to his beloved obscurity, high time we turned our
attention to other figures, other voices. Even Mercier comes, not to praise
the flâneur, but to bury him. “Were one of these pavement-pounders to die
one might well carve the phrase cursum consummavit (Latin: “in running,
he consumes himself”) as their epitaph.”67
Notes
1
James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone, 1999), 44.
2
Donald, Imagining the Modern City, 45.
3
Margaret Rose (ed.), Flâneurs and Idlers (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007), 2, 17.
4
Claire Hancock, Paris et Londres au XIXe siècle: représentations dans les guides
et récits de voyage (Paris: CNRS, 2003), 221.
5
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories
of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 94.
6
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” [originally published in Le
Figaro, 26 and 28 November, 3 December 1863], in Charles Baudelaire, The
Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London:
Phaidon, 1964), 1–40 (9).
7
For such texts (and a claim that they in fact represent flânerie) see Karen
Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 63.
8
Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedem, 2 vols (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1983), 1: 525.
9
“Dass nicht Rom es war, ist das sonderbare. Und der Grund? Zieht nicht in Rome
selbst das Träumen gebahnte Strassen? Und ist die Stadt nicht zu voll von
Tempeln, umfriedeten Plätzen, nationalen Heiligtümern, um ungeteilt mit jedem
Plasterstein, jedem Ladenschild, jeder Stufe und jeder Torfahrt in den Traum des
Passanten eingehen zu können?... Denn Paris haben nicht die Fremden sondern sie
selber, die Pariser zum gelobten Land des Flaneurs, zu der ‘Landschaft aus lauter
Leben gebaut’, wie Hoffmannsthal sie einmal nannte, gemacht. Landschaft - das
wird sie in der Tat dem Flanierenden’’ (Benjamin, Passagenwerk, 1: 135). There
are indications in the Passagenwerk that Benjamin recognized that London might
have been more of an influence. He suspected, for example, that Poe and
Baudelaire's image of Paris as coloured by the anxieties of industrialisation may in
fact have reflected London more than the French capital; see Passagen-werk, 1:
566. On flânerie in Rome, see Richard Wrigley, Roman Fever: influence, infection
and the image of Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013),
26.
9
“Le flâneur est un être inconnu à Londres” (cited in Hancock, Paris et Londres,
170).
10
Spectator 4, 5 March 1711.
12
Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 9.
11
Spectator 1, 1 March 1711.
12
Spectator 455, 11 August 1712.
13
See Jonathan Conlin, Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Making of the
Modern City (London: Atlantic, 2013).
14
Here my argument builds on Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New
Left Review 191 (1992): 90-110 (109).
15
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 2002), 298.
16
Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P.
G. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 486.
17
Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore, “Introduction,” in Tim Hitchcock and
Heather Shore (eds), The Streets of London: from the Great Fire to the Great Stink
(London: Rivers Oram, 2003), 1-9 (7).
18
Hester Piozzi, diary entry for 23 October 1775. Hester Lynch Thrale, afterwards
Mrs Piozzi, The French Journals of Mrs Thrale and Dr Johnson, ed. Moses Tyson
and Henry Guppy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1932), 137.
19
“Chien enrag[é], d”où-vient nous couvres-tu de boue?” [Rétif de la Bretonne],
Les Nuits de Paris, ou le Spectateur Nocturne, 14 vols (London: n.p., 1788-89),
vol. 10, 2365; see also [Caraccioli], Dictionnaire critique, pittoresque et
sentencieux, propre à faire connoître les usages du Siècle, ainsi que ses
bisarreries, 2 vols (Lyon: Benoît Duplain, 1768), vol. 1, 33.
20
Daniel Cruickshank and Neil Burton, Life in the Georgian City (London: Viking,
1990), 13-18.
21
Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986), 229.
36 Chapter One
22
“La promenade pour sortir de la ville est d’autant plus agréable, que les trotoirs
[sic] vous conduisent dehors, sans fatigue ni embarras. Aus extrêmités de la Ville,
lorsqu’il a plu, vous ne vous trouvez pas enseveli dans les boues comme aux
barrières de Paris; et pour aller d'un village à un autre il y a toujours de toutes parts
mille petits trotoirs [sic], bien soignés, avec des barricades et barrières pour que les
voitures et chevaux ne les gâtent; partout l'homme de pied va promenant”
(Mercier, “Des environs de Paris. Et des environs de Londres,” in Louis-Sébastien
Mercier, Parallèle de Paris et de Londres: un inédit de Louis-Sébastien Mercier,
ed. Claude Bruneteau and Bernard Cottret (Paris: Didier, 1982), 114-15 (114)).
23
“point de ruisseaux puants, au milieu de la rue, mais coulants de chaque côté des
trotoirs [sic]. Elargir les rues à quel prix que ce soit, ou Londres fera toujours honte
à Paris” (Mercier, “Position et forme de Paris et de Londres,” in Mercier,
Parallèle, 60). See also Jacques Gury (ed.), “Journal du marquis de Bombelles,”
Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 269 (1989): 300.
24
“a-t-il carosse?” (Laurent Turcot, Le Promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Gallimard, 2007), 34).
25
“une grande place ou campagne ... où se fait le Cours” (Balthasar Monconys,
Journal des Voyages de Monsieur de Monconys, 3 parts (Lyon: Horace Boisat and
George Remeus, 1665-6), part 2 (1666), 19).
26
“Le cours se fait en rond; ainsi on ne voit pas tous les carrosses si l’on ne change
son tour” (Monconys, Journal, part 2, 21).
27
“Les Allées dans les Jardins sont comme les ruës d'une Ville, elles servent de
communication d’un lieu à un autre, et sont comme autant de guides et de routes
pour conduire par tout un Jardin. Outre l’agrément et la commodité que les Allées
offrent sans cesse pour la promenade, elles sont une des principales beautés des
Jardins, quand elles sont bien pratiquées et bien dressées” ([Antoine Joseph
Dézallier d'Argenville], La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage (The Hague: Pierre
Husson, 1711), 39).
28
Turcot, Promeneur, 84.
29
30
“nous fusmes dans un Bot de l'autre costé de la Tamise voir deux iardins, où tout
le monde se peut aller promener, et faire collation dans des cabarets qui y sont, ou
dans les cabinets du jardin.... J’y admiray la beauté des allées de gazon, et la
politesse de celles qui sont sablées. Il es di[v]i en une grande quantité de quarrez
de 20. ou 30. pas en quarré, clos par des hayes de groselliers, et touts ces quarrés
sont plantés aussi de framboisiers, de rosiers et d'autres arbrisseaux, comme aussi
d'herbages, et de légumes... Toutes les allées sont bordées ou de jonquilles ou de
geroflées ou de lis” (Monconys, Journal, part 2, p. 17).
31
Jonathan Conlin, “Vauxhall on the Boulevard: pleasure gardens in Paris and
London, 1764-1784,” Urban History, 35:1 (May 2008): 24-47.
32
“Je pris un goût très-vifs pour cette promenade,” he notes in Night 117, “où je
trouvai beaucoup d’avantures” ([Rétif], Les Nuits de Paris, 6: 1257).
33
“une promenade vaste … ouverte à tous les états” (Mercier, “Boulevards,” in
Tableau de Paris, 1:168-9 (168)).
34
Belanger was Premier Architecte to the Comte Artois, a noted Anglophile. For
his 1783 “Londres” scheme see Rachel Alison Perry, “François-Joseph Belanger,
Architect (1744-1818),” 2 vols, Ph.D. thesis 1998, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1:
167-8.
35
36
37
38
“Hibou! combien de fois tes cris funèbres ne m'ont-ils pas fait tressaillir, dans
l’ombre de la nuit! Triste et solitaire, comme toi, j’errais seul, au-milieu des
ténèbres, dans cette Capitale immense: la lueur des réverbères, trenchant avec les
ombres, ne les détruit pas, elle les rend plus saillantes: c’est le clair-obscur des
grands Peintres! J'errais seul, pour connaître l'Homme ... Que de choses à voir,
lorsque tous les yeux sont fermés! Citoyens paisibles! j’ai veillé pour vous; j’ai
couru seul les nuits pour vous!” ([Bretonne], Les Nuits de Paris, 1: 2).
39
“Je ne cherchais rien; j’abandonnais mes regards où ils voulaient errer, et
toujours ils tombaient sur des scènes variées, plus ou moins divertissantes. C’était
un tableau changeant, toujours le même, et toujours diversifié. Cet endroit n’était
pas propre à penser; mais il saturait l’âme de sémences d’idées et de faits, qui
revenaient ensuite dans la solitude” ([Bretonne], Les Nuits de Paris, 6: 1257).
40
Benjamin, Das Passagen-werk, 1: 538.
41
'Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Promenades publiques,” in Mercier, Tableau de
Paris, 5 vols (Amsterdam, 1782-3), 5: 212-17 (212).
42
Spectator 454, 11 August 1712.
45
For an example, see [Anon.], Les Sultanes nocturnes, et ambulantes de la Ville
de Paris, contre les réverbères (Paris: à la petite vertu, 1768).
46
Cited in Pierre Rosenberg, “The world of Saint-Aubin,” in Colin Bailey, Kim de
Beaumont et al. (eds), Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, 1724-1780 (Paris: Louvre, 2008),
11-17 (13).
47
Thirty-seven such catalogues have been identified, though a posthumous
inventory refers to one hundred. Suzanne Fold McCullagh, “The development of
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin as draughtsman,” in Bailey et al., Gabriel de Saint-Aubin,
59-69 (78-9).
48
Having recently heard in a street in Rye just how much noise two modestly-sized
enseignes à potence could produce in a relatively light wind, the author is
persuaded that the signs would indeed have contributed to the eighteenth-century
urban soundscape.
49
Daniel Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd (London, 1724), 125.
50
For this exhibition see Jonathan Conlin, “‘At the expense of the public’: the Sign
Painters’ Exhibition of 1762 and the public sphere,” Eighteenth-Century Studies
36: 1 (2002): 1-21.
51
Molière, Les Fâcheux (Paris: Libraire des Bibliophiles, 1874), 66 (III, ii).
Addison was probably developing an idea found in Steele’s Tatler 18 of 21 May
1709 (Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), vol. 1:
144-7).
52
The Spectator 28, 2 April 1711.
38 Chapter One
53
Tatler 18, 21 May 1709. Bond, The Tatler, 1: 145.
54
Julie Ann Plax, Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 163. See also Richard Wrigley,
“Between the Street and the Salon: Parisian shop signs and the spaces of
professionalisation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” Oxford Art
Journal, 21:1 (1998): 43-67.
55
“Ces enseignes avoient pour la plupart un volume colossal et en relief. Elles
donnoient l'image d'un peuple gigantesque, aux yeux du peuple le plus rabougri de
l'Europe. On voyoit une garde d’épée de six pieds de haut, une botte grosse comme
un muid, un éperon large comme une roue de carrosse; un gant qui auroit logé un
enfant de trois ans dans chaque doigt, des têtes monstrueuses, des bras armés de
fleurets qui occupoient toute la largeur de la rue. La ville, qui n'est plus hérissée de
ces appendices grossieures, offre, pour ainsi dire, un visage poli, net et rasé”
(Mercier, “Enseignes,” in Tableau de Paris, 1: 215-16).
56
“de créer sérieusement un censeur qui rectifiât ces fautes grossieures” (Mercier,
“L’Orthographe publique,” in Tableau de Paris, 1: 107-110 (107-8).
57
“L’ignorance produit quelquefois des rapports bizarres, et dont on s’amuse,
parce que les riens ont droit avant tout d’intéresser le Parisien” (Mercier, Tableau
de Paris, 1: 108).
58
See Jennifer Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber, 1997), 518.
59
“Là tous les rois de la terre dorment ensemble: Louis XVI et George III se
baisent fraternellement; le roi de Prusse couche avec l'impératrice de Russie,
l’empéreur est de niveau avec les électeurs; là enfin la thiare et le turban se
confondent. Un cabaretier arrive, remue avec le pied toutes ces têtes couronnées,
les examine, prend au hasard la figure du roi de Pologne, l’emporte, l’accroche et
écrit dessous: au Grand Vainqueur” (Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 5: 123-6 (123)).
60
“à leur dernier emploi enfin, qui est de guider les pas chancelans des ivrognes”
(Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 5: 123-6 (125)).
61
Heather Shore, “‘At Shakespear's-Head, Over-Against Catharine-Street in the
Strand’: Forms of address in London streets,” in Hitchcock and Shore (eds), The
Streets of London, 10-26. In Paris, as Mercier noted, street numbering had stopped
when owners of large hôtels particuliers objected to the levelling tendency of
giving all houses a number, regardless of the importance of the people inhabiting
them. See Mercier, “Les Ecriteaux des rues,” Tableau de Paris, 2: 202-4 (203).
62
Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 1: 57.
63
For an example of early mock-heroic accounts of the city as obstacle course see
Clare Brant and Susan Whyman (eds), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-century
London: John Gay's Trivia: or, the art of walking the streets (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
64
“C’est ordinairement un Gascon qui mange ses cents pistoles de rente, tant
qu'elles peuvent s’étendre; qui dîne à la gargote, soupe avec une bavaroise, et plein
de vanité, se carre aux promenades, comme s'il avoit dix mille écus de rente: il sort
dès le matin de sa chambre garnie, et le voilà errant dans tous les quartiers jusqu’à
onze heures du soir. Il entre dans toutes les églises sans dévotion; fait des visites à
des personnes qui ne se soucient point de lui; est assidu aux tribunaux, sans avoir
de procès. Il voit tout ce qui se passe dans la ville, assiste à toutes les cérémonies
publiques, ne manque rien de ce qui fait spectacle, et use plus de souliers qu’un
espion ou qu’un agent de change” (Mercier, “Batteur de pavé,” Tableau de Paris,
1: 250-1).
65
Wilson, “Invisible flâneur,” 106.
66
Janet Wolff, “Gender and the haunting of cities (or, the retirement of the
flâneur),” in Aruna D'Souza and Tom McDonough (eds), The Invisible Flâneuse?
Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006), 18-31 (24).
67
“Quand un de ces batteurs de pavé décède on pourroit lui mettre pour épitaphe:
cursum consummavit” (Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 5: 251).
CHAPTER TWO
DID THE FLÂNEUR EXIST?

A PARISIAN OVERVIEW
LAURENT TURCOT
That the flâneur is a typically French, more specifically Parisian, creation

has been taken for granted ever since Walter Benjamin’s intervention on
the subject. The present volume shows the different variations and
adapations of the flâneur in national and regional contexts, and we can
immediately see that Benjamin’s account requires adjustment. At the heart
of his theory is the idea that the type of the flâneur could only be realised
in nineteenth-century industrial society. Although his Paris, capitale du
XIXe siècle remained unfinished, others have tried to complete his project,
or at least to continue his work, albeit that he had explained the theme of
the flâneur particularly well in his Charles Baudelaire, un poète lyrique à
l’apogée du capitalisme.1 Several scholars have sought to use an analysis
of the literature, poetry, and visual culture of nineteenth-century Paris to
confirm Benjamin’s hypothesis. There is not space here to give a
comprehensive account of all the studies of the Parisian flâneur in the
nineteenth century, but although numerous, their underlying ideas can be
summarised. It is worth recalling the main studies in order to understand
the framework within which the figure of the flâneur has been positioned,
concentrating on Benjamin’s point of origin, the Paris of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
Notable works by Keith Tester, Richard Burton and Catherine Nesci2
have the advantage of focusing on certain forms and modes of the flâneur
in nineteenth-century Paris, but there remains a lack of reflection on a
crucial aspect of the phenomenon, which is, moreover, at the heart of
whatever it is to be a flâneur, namely its unity and particularity beyond its
purely poetic existence. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, who take the flâneur
as a figure who embodies the transformations of Paris in the nineteenth
century, maintains that: “Flânerie, in conventional usage, conjures up
visions of an urban far niente, of ambles through city streets that offer the
Did the Flâneur Exist? A Parisian Overview 41
fortunate individual delights of the cityscape and the perhaps even greater
pleasures of suspended social obligation.”3 It seems to me that we too
often take the flâneur as a simply identifiable urban type, who has his own
manners, habits, dress code, style, usefulness and function. Yet nothing is
less clear. In another essay in this volume, Jonathan Conlin has rightly
questioned its function while trying to minimise its place in the
superstructure of Parisian modernity: “It is high time that the flâneur
withdrew into the obscurity which he so likes, and that we turn out
attention to other figures, other voices.”4 However, it seems to me that
Benjamin, as many of his successors, has a tendency to adopt shortcuts to
affirm that the flâneur alone embodies resistance to changes wrought by
the industrial revolution. Furthermore, it is commonly asserted that the
flâneur has a unique identity which gave to those who claimed to fulfil or
inhabit this role a singular, particular, and typical significance.
Manuel Charpy’s recent thesis emphasises the context and above all
the social, economic and cultural conditions of the flâneur’s emergence in
the nineteenth century.5 Charpy reveals the forms of “collective production
of fashions through his focus on the urban locations where they were
visible, the emerging figures of taste, and the new forms of publicity and
advertising which were employed in the city.”6 The flâneur is embodied in
the dense mass of industrial production; the city becomes a shop window
and the flâneur a window-shopper; but there are also more and more
individuals who adopt the flâneur’s attitude to wandering through the city.
Charpy shows a whole social and economic context which allowed the
flâneur to make Paris its playing field. Haejeong Hazel Hahn has also
followed this route in underlining how the flâneur is, in fact, a kind of
consumer of everyday city life : “This culture of the spectacle, increasing
apace at the end of the century, little by little included new forms of street
advertising which addressed the inhabitants of the crowded pavements”7 –
an idea not dissimilar from T.J. Clark’s account of nineteenth-century
painting in Paris.8
It remains striking that the majority of studies on the flâneur, at least
the most significant to date, have been produced by anglophone
researchers working outside French universities. Yet it was Alain Corbin,
in an interview given as part of the Foire Internationale du Livre de Tokyo
in January 1997, who recognised the primordial interest of the subject:
“The development of flânerie, as opposed to ‘promenade bourgeoise,’ with
its precise rituals, is thus linked to a new way of looking at the city, a
mobile gaze, spatially and olfactorily close up. The flâneur’s gaze, a
myopic form of attention, attentive to details and signs, is linked to the
microevent which is constituted by the ‘fait-divers,’ and to the new
42 Chapter Two
anxieties which went along with the intensification of security-conscious

ideology.”9 Robert Beck has suggested how the promenade was taken up
by the common people in the nineteenth century, but without wholly
taking account of the urban, social, economic and political changes which
made that possible.10
In this paper, I propose to relocate the emergence of the flâneur by
considering the conditions which made it possible for this role to be
adopted by a wide range of individuals. However, at the outset, we need to
be precise about chronology and language. Since the term flâneur is
intimately linked to the nineteenth century, it would be mistaken to
suggest that the figure could have come into being before this period or to
associate the word with earlier usage, as some scholars have done.11 None
of the great French dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
mentioned the words “flâneur,” “flânerie” or “flâner.” In nineteenth-
century dictionaries, the word is mentioned as coming from Norman
dialect, an origin which is evident from the sixteenth century, in turn
connected without documentation to the Scandinavian word “flana” (to
run here and there). One of the first mentions in French is by David
Ferrand in 1638 in La Muse Normande: “This is why I say to you without
further dawdling [flanner]. Adieu….”12 Here the word is understood as
meaning to be lazy or to squander one’s time. Despite these examples, its
full etymology is unclear. For the entry “flâner” in his Dictionnaire de la
langue française (1872-77), Émile Littré wrote: “To walk without
purpose, at random; consume time without profit,” going on to evoke its
etymology: “Unknown origin. Yet the Icelandic ‘flanni,’ libertine has been
proposed. Norman has ‘flanier,’ miserly.”13 Moreover, no linguistic or
etymological study has succeeded in going further than these highly
incomplete citations.
However one thing is certain, the word is officially recognised in 1808.
In Dictionnaire du bas-langage, ou des manières de parler usitées parmi
le peuple by Hautel we read “Flâner”: “Prowling without purpose from
one side to another; to be idle; to lead a wandering, roving life”; and for
“Flâneur”: “A great flâneur. To mean a very lazy person; a slacker, a man
of unbearable idleness, who doesn’t know where to disport his burden and
his boredom.”14 The word seems to have been used a little earlier. The first
entry found in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France takes
us back to Observations critiques d'un flâneur sur la promenade de
Longchamps, which has been dated around the 1790s.15 The term become
more used in its modern sense with Le Flâneur au salon ou Mr Bon-
homme en 1806,16 but also Étienne-François Bazot, Les Cafés de Paris, ou
Revue politique, critique et littéraire des moeurs du siècle, par un flâneur
patenté in 181917 and the Petite Biographie dramatique, silhouette des

acteurs, actrices... des théâtres de la capitale, par Guillaume le Flâneur
by Amable de Saint-Hilaire in 1821.18 We then find various plays like
those by Henry and Jules Dulong, Le Flâneur, comédie-vaudeville en 1
acte (1825)19 or La Journée d’un flâneur by Dumersan, Brazier and
Gabriel (1827), a piece in which the final chorus resonates like a warning
for future years: “I am not the only one to stroll, I must admit it is often a
pleasure. You surely know many flâneurs, To make an appointment with
them, if you meet them on the way, Send them to stroll with us.”20 In the
first years of the nineteenth century, the word was not necessarily
associated with an aesthetic of displacement in a positive sense, referring
more to idleness; we need to wait for men of letters, as we will see below,
to define this function and thereby to give the word flâneur a meaning
associated with the idea that there could be an art to urban mobility.
I have elsewhere analysed the multiple forms of the birth of the walker
in Paris from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The present text is
not intended to make a link between that study and these observations. If
the walker in modern times corresponds to an Ancien Regime context, the
flâneur, and more particularly the forms of appropriation and transformations,
that is, the reinvention of the type of the flâneur, is something quite
distinct, being the product of the Industrial Revolution, Romantic
introspection characteristic of the early nineteenth century, and of the new
definition given to it by Huart, Lacroix and Baudelaire. Contrary to others
who have worked on the flâneur, I do not consider that we are dealing with
a unified, coherent identity - quite the opposite. The fortune of the term
flâneur shows to what degree its definition is changeable, and this in large
part because, I suggest, it is a question of a certain value being added to
another principal identity. Thus, one can be an artist (principal identity)
and a flâneur (secondary identity). The second completes the first, but
does not defines its intrinsic identity. By taking account of this
clarification, the idea I wish to explore is simple: the figure of the Parisian
flâneur tends, following a reinforcement of its (nineteenth-century)
definition to become accessible to the population as a whole (twentieth
and twenty-first century), thereby losing something of its initial function.
The flâneur is, at first, associated with a Romantic context which made it a
contemplative being whose interior expressivity dominated its external
motion. Then, the beginning of the twentieth century is identified with the
reinforcement of this image, but little by little an idea came to be
crystallised which made of individualised flânerie a collective method for
knowing, apprehending and appreciating what the city had to offer.
44 Chapter Two
The Romantic Flâneur

If we read the great flâneurs of the nineteenth century, or at least those
who consider themselves as such, flânerie is defined by individualisation
and mobility. However, there begins to be evident in society a new kind of
promenade, which makes of it a form of mass leisure. To promenade on
the Grands Boulevards becomes a commonplace custom accessible to all
classes, without necessarily implying that such gatherings carried with
them an element of distinction. Flânerie became typical of the Parisian
Sunday, giving a pattern to Parisians’ leisure. Yet this character – at once
literary and social - is explained, more or less precisely, by editors
concerned to claim the flâneur as expressing Parisian individuality. The
idea was very much to launch oneself onto the pavement in order to enjoy
the multifarious distractions offered by the city. The pavement became a
theatre, a mobile tableau, sometimes a caravanserai. The presence of the
crowd ensured the vitality of the locale, endowing public space with all its
richness. Those flâneurs who took it upon themselves to publish guides,
physiologies or descriptions of the act of flânerie are the echoes of a whole
category of Parisians who called themselves flâneurs or who adopted this
persona.
Under the name of “L’Hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin” (the Hermit of
the Chaussée-d’Antin), Etienne de Jouy21 published in the Gazette de
France every Saturday from August 1811 to April 1814 an article with the
title “Bulletin de Paris,” from 1813 “Mœurs parisiennes.” He is one of the
first to define an habitus which resembles that of the flâneur:22
“Gentlemen, now that you know more or less who I am, it remains for me
to explain what I do: nothing, absolutely nothing; I go, I come, I look, I
listen, and in the evening when I return home I make a note of what I have
seen and heard during my day.”23 Yet we have to wait some years before
we find a more systematic literary approach which more fully defines the
flâneur. The success of physiologies24 is symptomatic of the new interest
in an affordable literature which describes, that is, vulgarises, this
burgeoning form of Parisian identity. The phenomenon of the physiologies
was consolidated following the laws of September 1835 which obliged
chroniclers and draughtsmen to turn away from political caricature and
channel their talents towards inoffensive social criticism.
Various Parisian types were given their “Physiology,” such as the
Parisian urchin (“gamin de Paris”), the poet, the student, the smoker, but
they were also dedicated to more collective entities, such as balls and
theatres, institutions such as marriage, and the senses, including the
Physiologie du goût (1834) by Brillat-Savarin. The flâneur was also the
object of particular attention on the part of men of letters at this period.

Four texts from the first half of the nineteenth century give an account of
this new figure of the flâneur as it took its place in Parisian society. The
first two are part of the collection Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un (1832-
1833); their titles are eloquent: “Le Flâneur à Paris” and “Une journée de
flâneur sur les boulevarts du Nord.” In 1841 two more texts appeared: “Le
Flâneur,” from the collection Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, by
Auguste de Lacroix, and the well-known Physiologie du flâneur by Louis
Huart.
The flâneur’s condition or purpose becomes his profession, he comes
into his own in Paris, he has his own range of gestures, and knows
everything about everything. Let us listen to the anonymous author who
signs himself the “Flâneur à Paris”: “the flâneur can be born anywhere; but
only knows how to live in Paris,”25 although “the most eminent flâneurs
are sometimes born under different skies.”26 An urban being, he depends
on a symbiotic link with that which makes up the city: “he is a plant which
would be killed by a conservatory, and which only flourishes in the open
air.” “When he has touched the surface of the street, inhaled the dust of the
boulevard or the fog of the Seine, he comes alive, and it is there that we
will find him.”27 The flâneur is a being who lives by his senses, “nothing
escapes his probing gaze … everything interests him, everything for him is
a text made up of observations.” His gestures express his inner disposition:
“also, how slow is his gait, how he returns on his tracks, since he alone is
there in order to be there, while others are only there so as to get
somewhere else.”28 He privileges several places: “the Tuileries, the quai
Voltaire and by the Louvre and the Luxembourg gardens abound in
estimable flâneurs, the boulevard between the rue du Mont-Blanc and rue
de Richelieu, … is really his home territory.”29 The street, a lively, noisy
space of gestures is preferred to quiet and restful public gardens.
In his article “Le Flâneur” in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes
(1841) Auguste de Lacroix synthesised the figure of the flâneur in order to
produce a definition and to provide a kind of manual for neophytes: “We
only recognise as flâneurs that small privileged number of men of leisure
and spirit who study the human heart from nature itself, and society from
the great book of the world which lies ever open under their eyes.”30 The
streets of Paris are the book’s pages, they reveal all their charms to those
who know how to appreciate their subtleties and nuances. The flâneur is to
be distinguished from the “badaud,” who only perceives things in terms of
their exterior; the “badaud” walks for walking’s sake, he never succeeds in
detaching himelf from the corporeal envelope which constrains him, and
which prevents him from giving himself up to this gymnastics of the body
46 Chapter Two
and spirit. The metaphor of perpetual movement corresponds as much to

physique as to the soul. Even though he “walks like you or me,” the
flâneur has the characteristic “that he makes his way more slowly and
gives the impression of seeing much more.”31
A polymorphous being, he has a potential self-perfectibility which
takes the form of adaptability to the surrounding world: “the flâneur is an
essentially complex being, he has no particular taste, he has every taste; he
understands everything, he is capable of experiencing every passion, to
explain every eventuality and always has an excuse ready for all
weaknesses.”32 He is a man of letters dedicated to rational observation.
According to Lacroix, the flâneur is the inheritor of great literary figures
from past centuries: “the author of Tableau de Paris must have been a
great flâneur. What greater flâneur could there have been than La
Fontaine? Rousseau was a flâneur for two-thirds of his life.”33 Flânerie is
the action of a man deeply imbued by the ideal of walking, of a writer who
has always known how to see in his daily observations all the scenes
needed for literary inspiration and creation. Literature and flânerie form a
pair greatly appreciated by the authors of the physiologies, this association
makes up what is characterised as “right of conquest,” when Lacroix
asserts that “Paris belongs to the flâneur by right of conquest and by right
of birth.”34
The same year, Louis Huart presented to the public a work whose
manifest purpose was to “democratise” the flâneur’s function in society.
The chapter titles makes this explicit: “Is it given to everybody to be able
to be a flâneur?” “Of people who very falsely call themselves flâneurs,”
“Where it is proved that the flâneur is an essentially virtuous mortal,” and
“Advice for the use of novice flâneurs.” The style is simple, sometimes
childish, but the subject is always treated with an exemplary
seriousness: “what makes man the king of creation, is that he knows how
to waste his time and his youth in every possible climate and season,” for
“man rises above all the other animals solely because he knows how to be
a flâneur.”35
Physique is the very essence of flânerie. Neither those men who suffer
from portliness which limits the movement of the body, nor pregnant
women can be flâneur[se]s. Social condition can also be a criterion of
selection. In effect, those who are “burdened” by fifty thousand livres of
rent cannot hope “to know the delight produced by a simple walk on foot
in the mud of Paris.”36 Contact with the pavement is so much a source of
inspiration for the flâneur that he feels the need to tread the city, to listen
to the sound of his soles on the tarmac: “Oh pavement, refuge of mud and
flâneurs, I salute you; all the happiest moments of my pale youth were
played out on your paving stones, your granite, your tarmac, or your
asphalt!”.37 To be a flâneur requires a real profession of urban faith, only
Paris is capable of accommodating this being who never fails to discover
and rediscover the capital’s changing and moving spectacle. On the other
hand, little is needed: “good legs, good ears and good eyes – such are the
principal physical advantages which must be enjoyed by any Frenchman
truly worthy to be a member of the club of the flâneurs.”38 At each
moment the flâneur is but an identity, above all an attitude which allows
the city to be savoured.
Themes such as the walk, contemplative observation, and seeking
extraordinary stories are proclaimed as especially privileged topics by
many nineteenth-century writers. The promenade as a guarantor of
individuality is insisted upon as an absolute necessity; as Huart put it:
“Stick to being a flâneur – go out alone.”39 Yet one dimension seems to
elude the figure of the flâneur – politics. For example, as the author of “Le
Flâneur à Paris” noted: “political events have little relevance for the life of
a flâneur; although he might take advantage of the revolutions which
renew his field of vision, he is not sufficiently egotistical to like them.”40
Marked by a romanticism which favoured individualism over the common
good, the figure of the flâneur detaches itself from current affairs.
According to commentators on the topic, this is explained by the dilettante
character which is required of the flâneur.
These different theories can easily be illustrated and explained by the
work of various nineteenth-century authors, journalists and social
commentators. According to Victor Hugo in Les Misérables: “To wander
is human; to be a flâneur is Parisian.”41 In 1867, Charles Vitremaire
affirmed: “To write on Paris is a tempting thing for an observer. In this
great circle, one never tires of walking. One comes, goes, turns, one
ploughs in every direction, and one always finds something new. The mine
is inexhaustible.”42 For Victor Fournel, “it was from strolling in Paris that
Balazac made so many precious discoveries, heard so many words,
disinterred so many types.”43 In the Comédie humaine, there were
countless opportunities to write about this representative of individuality.
In the Théorie de la démarche, he puts into play an observer whose
purpose is to track and reveal social characters.44 In Ferragus, Balzac
mobilises the figure of the flâneur who, elided with that of the observer,
reveals himself to be the quintessence of Parisianness in a century of
acceleration and movement.45
These observers, incomprehensible outside of Paris, will probably be

seized upon by studious and thoughtful men, men of poetry and pleasure
who at any hour know how to harvest, while strolling in Paris, the
48 Chapter Two
abundance of fleeting joys found within its walls. … There are a small
number of amateurs, people who never go walking while empty-headed,
who savour their Paris, who grasp its physiognomy so well that they notice
a bolt, a button, a blush. For the others, Paris is always this monstrous
marvel, an astonishing mass of movements, of machines and thoughts, the
city of a hundred thousand novels, the fountainhead of the world. But for
these people, Paris is sad or gay, ugly or beautiful, alive or dead; for them,
Paris is a living creature; each man, each part of a house is a lobe of
cellular tissue of this great courtesan whose head, heart and fantastical
habits they know so well. So it is that these are the lovers of Paris.46
Victor Fournel adapted this definition in showing how the flâneur is an

urban palimpsest: “a mobile and passionate daguerreotype which retains
the slightest trace, and in which is reproduced, with all their changing
reflections, the flow of things, the city’s movements, the multiple
physiognomy of public attitudes, beliefs, the antipathies and enthusiasms
of the crowd.”47 A being who is always “in full possession of his
individuality,”48 the flâneur’s sole purpose is to read the “urban book”
which he walks through and observes with energy and passion: “to read
the daily occupations,” continues Fournel, “the various professions, the
intimate and domestic life which everyone reveals in some way in their
features, their manner and the tone of their voice, as do the signs of shops;
to recognise the character revealed by a gait or a physiognomy.”49
The character of the flâneur described here by Balzac and Fournel
takes the place of the spectator – a distance is interposed. For these
nineteenth-century authors, night is that which exists within a theatre
auditorium where they take their seats. Increasingly passive, the flâneur
looks at the scene he observes with a distanced point of view without
participating in it. We find this outlook in Paul Féval’s Nuits de Paris,
drames et récits nocturnes (1851).50 In his Promenade nocturne dans les
rues d’une grande ville, Jules Lefèvre-Deumier confirmed the individuality
of the figure of the flâneur: “While wandering at night in our bleak and
solitary streets, I, who am speaking to you, feel everything that I
experienced in the midst of ruins.”51 According to the anonymous author
of the Nouveau Tableau de Paris au dix-neuvième siècle: “I wandered
extensively in the markets of Paris, and all my young man’s beliefs
evaporated in the presence of this living book.”52 For Jules Vallès: “It is a
question of depicting the city as it is, to mould all its lumps and hollows,
its uneven wooden and fleshy surfaces, without excluding the glories and
the pariahs. … So it is that we traverse amorous and talkative Paris as we
do heroic and social Paris, and we walk with a smile on our lips and
passion in the heart.”53
The output of Charles Vitremaitre shows something of this new

tendency to represent Paris as a place with multiple identities. Between
1886 and 1894, he published a series of monographs: Paris oublié, Paris-
police, Paris qui s’efface, Paris-Escarpe, Paris-canard, Paris-Boursicortier,
Paris-Bohême, Paris-Omnibus, Paris-Palette, Paris impur, Paris-Cocu,
Paris-Croquement, Paris-galant, Paris-médaillé, Paris historique, etc..
Across the works of different authors and successive titles, the flâneur
remains a figure defined by the physiologies and manifest in the work of
novelists; it is worth noting some of the less well-known examples to
illustrate this widespread literary currency: Georges Touchard Lafosse’s
Les Réverbères, chroniques de nuit du vieux et du nouveau Paris (1835),
Paris la nuit, silhouettes (1842), Édouard Gourdon’s Les Mystères de
Londres (1844), and Paul Féval’s Les Nuits de Paris, drames et récits
nocturnes (1851-1852), Marc Fournier’s Les Nuits de la Seine (1852),
Edmond Texier’s somewhat better-known Tableau de Paris (1852),
Eugène de Mirecourt, Paris la nuit (1855), Alfred Delvau, Les Dessous de
Paris (1860) and Les Heures parisiennes (1866).
In 1867, Delvau gave an account of the diverse publics found in the
arcades, as in the case of the Passage Jouffroy which was “awash with
crowds of flâneurs, each day from four in the afternoon, such that one
needs to use one’s elbows vigorously to make one’s way through the
throng, who move in thick shoals like herrings in the Channel. People in a
hurry prefer to take a detour rather than taking their chances in this glass
tunnel, where one constantly risks treading on other people’s feet or
having one’s ribs crushed.”54 Strolling on the boulevards in 1841, Heinrich
Heine, wrote: “As new year day visits approach, the shops and tradesmen
outdo each other by their elaborate displays. The appearance of these
marvels can provide the lazy flâneur with the most agreeable way of
passing time … by contemplating the crowded abundance of objets d’art
and luxury goods displayed behind glistening mirror-like shopwindows,
while perhaps also casting a glance at the public who are all about. The
features of these people are so serious, so pained and so ugly, so impatient
and so menacing, that they form a disturbing contrast with the objects
which they stare at with gaping mouths.”55
Little by little the flâneur appears in novels, making him a kind of
Parisian stereotype. Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842-3) plays up the
city as a “labyrinth of dark, narrow, and irregular streets [with a] quarter
[which] served as refuge or meeting place for many of Paris’s miscreants,
who gather in the drinking-holes,”56 providing a backdrop for the literary
flâneur. Gérard de Nerval’s Nuits d’octobre (1852) in which the
“wanderers must surprise what is beyond the reach of normal observation,
50 Chapter Two
that which eludes the hurried passer-by,”57 exemplifies the kind of novel
where literature and walking form a seamless couple.
A final voice needs to be considered in order to understand the degree
of interest which the figure of the flâneur has attracted in the literature of
nineteenth-century Paris. In his poems and prose, Charles Baudelaire, the
epitome of the nineteenth-century flâneur, recounts the foundation of this
inherited urban being.58 Walter Benjamin has analysed better than anyone
else the behaviour of this flâneur whose purpose is “to botanise the
tarmac,” for “it is the flâneur’s gaze which conceals in a reassuring halo
the future distress of the inhabitants of great cities.”59 Baudelaire is the
man of the crowd, as evoked by Edgar Allan Poe, the detective in search
of poetic matter, of the sudden approach of a passing woman, of an
invitation to journey across the cobbles or into the evening twilight.
Baudelaire, whose collection Spleen de Paris might have been called
Les Nocturnes or Poèmes nocturnes, gives to the reader a figure who
engages minds and bodies, that of a flâneur poet, but equally a man
profoundly rooted in his epoch, in his city, who meanders in order to
discover, to appreciate, to contemplate, and finally to commit to paper his
impressions as well as his observations. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne,
the author of Les Fleurs du mal explains better than anyone the
implications of flânerie, but above all how to be a flâneur in the city:
The crowd is his dominion, as the air to a bird, and water to a fish. His
passion is his profession, which is to be as one with the crowd. For the
perfect flâneur, for the impassioned observer, it is a tremendous pleasure to
set up his home in the mass, in the flow, in movement, the fleeting and the
infinite. To be outside one’s home, and yet to feel at home everywhere; to
see the world, to be at the centre of the world and to remain hidden from
the world, such are some of the least pleasures of the independent,
passionate, impartial spirits, whom language can only imperfectly define.60
In Spleen de Paris Baudelaire describes the delights of flânerie, but also

how it can serve a specific end: inspiration, be it poetic, pictorial, or
some other artistic form:
It is not given to everyone to bathe in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is

an art … The poet enjoys this incomparable privilege, through which he
can be himself or another. … The solitary and thoughtful walker extracts a
singular intoxication from this universal communion. He who embraces the
crowd easily knows feverish pleasures, which are forever denied to the
egoist, closed like a casket, and the inward-looking lazy person closed like
a mollusc. As circumstances allow, he adopts all professions, all joys and
miseries as his own.61
Flânerie made being in contact with the essential elements of human

urbanity possible. It allowed the poet to enter the city, but more to enter
himself. The act of walking, associated with interiority, thus takes on a
new dimension. Baudelaire explains that to walk in the city is also to
explore one’s soul – many were to take this up and put it into practice.
Art and flânerie – at the end of the nineteenth century, these two
phenomena seem to merge. Baudelaire, better than anyone, defines the
scope of flâneur, he who could never be anything other than a flâneur.
He was a poet-flâneur, as Balzac was a novelist-flâneur; the second
element (flâneur) serves the first role, that which gives status and a
trade to man, that is, his primary function in society (that which allows
him to support himself and to define himself).
The nineteenth century presents two fundamental dimensions for the
understanding of the evolution of the figure of the flâneur. Firstly, the
individualist tendency of the promenade, in which subjectivity is made an
analytical tool, is evident in numerous authors. Then, subsequently, the
pedestrian’s gaze is strongly marked by a poetics of the city such that the
author seeks as much to understand the city as he does his mind. This is
what we have called the process of interiorisation of the figure of the
flâneur.
The Democratised Flâneur in the Twentieth

and Twenty-first Centuries
We will conclude with some remarks on the evolution that forms of
walking in the city have taken in the 20th and 21st centuries. These can be
characterised as having two aspects: a tendency towards individualisation,
and an increasing concern to make sense of the city in collective terms.
From the beginning of the twentieth century, the assumptions which
underpin the figure of the flâneur were to be taken up by several writers as
a means to confront and understand the city in order to get at its essence,
and thereby to translate it into artistic terms. For Franz Hessel, in 1929,
“flânerie is a kind of reading of the city: people’s faces, displays, vitrines,
café terraces, the trams, the cars, the trees all become like letters which,
when combined, turn into words, phrases, and pages of a self-renewing
book.”62 This quotation echoes Benjamin’s recollection of his first
encounter with the capital: “Paris taught me the art of getting lost; it made
real the dream whose earliest traces are the labyrinths scribbled in the
pages of my schoolboy notebook.”63 Yet it was in his reading of Louis
Aragon’s Paysan de Paris that Benjamin discovered the foundation of his
intellectual and social outlook: “in the evening, having gone to bed I could
52 Chapter Two
not read more than a few words without my heart beating so strongly that I
had to put the book down. … The first notes for Passagen-Werk date from
this time.”64
An account of Parisian wanderings, but more specifically in the
Passage de l’Opéra, Le Paysan de Paris is, with Breton’s Nadja, the work
which best expressed the figure of the flâneur’s individuality.65 To this we
could add Apollinaire’s Le Flâneur des deux rives or Le Piéton de Paris
by Léon-Paul Farge, which celebrates the figure of the man who devours
Paris with his eyes, but even more with his legs.66 Jean-Christophe Bailly
would also develop this idea in his “Grammaire générative des jambes”
(“Generative Grammar of the Legs”).67 In his L’Invention du quotidien,
Michel de Certeau was one of the first to think about the epistemological
significance of types of pedestrian mobility in the city. In relation to urban
habits, the promenade is associated with the “practices of space”68 which
allowed inhabitants to appropriate space by regular daily movements, in
short, by a “specific form of operations (‘ways of being’) on ‘a different
form of spatiality’ (an ‘anthropological,’ poetic, and mythic experience of
space), and an obscure, blind mode of movement within the city’s
inhabited spaces.”69
Today, personal experience of the city is the corollary to a written
practice defining the urban type of the Parisian flâneur. Recent works by
Éric Hazan, L’Invention de Paris, il n’y a pas de pas perdus and Thomas
Clerc’s Paris, musée du XXIe siècle, provide fine examples of the itinerant
scholar in search of a personal experience of space whose purpose is to
relate the meanings which each location and building has acquired over
time.70 In what he intended to be a travel journal of contemporary Paris,
Edmund White offers a personal vision; this conveys a sense of a city
which he has lived in rather than being the description by a flâneur
sensitive to the “moral” state and “character” of the capital.71
In her Wanderlust: A History of Walking Rebecca Solnit has written an
essay which is in fact more about man’s pedestrian behaviour (as the title
of the French edition, L’Art de marcher, suggests); she speaks of an
aesthetic of observation and physical stance which defines the “modern
flâneur.”72 Pierre Sansot describes the behaviour of the walker in Poétique
de la ville, where he qualifies the flâneur as an urban being characterised
by a personal, singular, and fleeting relation to the city. Urban space
encourages walking and inflects particular types of movement. The flâneur
appropriates places while endowing them with his contemplative presence:
“across the streets and boulevards that the city traverses, it allows periods
of concentration and expansion, rhythms both hurried and slower and
broader.”73 A sociological interpretation of walking in the city is provided
by David Le Breton in his Éloge de la marche, recalling that this is a

“constant realisation” of individual experience,74 a perspective adopted by
Frérédic Gros in his Marcher, une philosophie (Paris, 2009). Recently,
Karlheinz Stierle and Simone Delattre have shown how a “legibility of the
city” and “lived geography” were constituted in the nineteenth century and
survived well into the twentieth century.75
Inspired by this intellectual line of thought, Thierry Paquot has sought
to understand forms of displacement in the city.76 The transformations of
media in the twenty-first century, especially television and the internet,
where the pictorial, the dramatic and the new overlap and are reinvented at
an overwhelming rate, have led to the progressive death of the figure of
the flâneur, according to Paquot.77 Benjamin had already drawn attention
to the steady loss of function of the flâneur in emphasising that, from
Balzac to Zola, the meanings of and engagement with the city were being
transformed: it was no longer possible to take a tortoise for a walk in the
covered passages, and the department store had become the destination for
men and women looking for bargains.78 Collective pleasure, or experience
for all shared by everyone, is abandoned. Today, the street cannot compete
with the perpetual stimuli of multimedia platforms, moreover smart
phones create a more and more complete bubble around individuals.
Public spaces have become no more than a series of individualities which
communicate with each other by means of technology. So fragmented has
the sense of the city become, and so elusive the identification of the
crowd, the flâneur can no longer exist. It has become impossible to grasp
as a whole, so varied, multiple and contradictory are its meanings. There
remains a dimension which stands apart, that of the night. The nightwalker
(noctambule) a word formed in 1701 from the Latin nox, noctis (night) and
ambulare (walk), replaces the flâneur, although its identity, like that of
the flâneur, seems not to be completely and comprehensively pinned down
by a definition. Be that as it may, he approaches society against the flow,
refusing the daily calendar’s ordinary measure, leaving the shadows
thrown by the city lights to create new and arresting shapes. Perhaps the
twenty-first century will be that of noctambules?
The second major tendency of twenty-first-century Paris has been the
large-scale gatherings (White Night (Nuit Blanche), Festival of Music, the
“grande flânerie” at Belleville, collective rollerblading, Paris Plage, the
closure of riverbank routes to cars, garden festivals, etc.), which demonstrate
how the defining features of the flâneur, its way of apprehending and living
in the city, have been adapted, that is, appropriated, by the city’s
administrators. These massive gatherings, during which Parisians are
encouraged to become part of a framework which forces them to use the
54 Chapter Two
city as simple walkers, suggest that the acts of walking or flânerie are
subject to official instructions intended to increase, if not to force
inhabitants to use the city in certain ways.
The promenade is an ordinary practice in space and allows the meeting
and movement of individuals. It is no longer a matter of inhabitants’
choice to do this, but has become an administrative policy aimed at
maximising enjoyment of the city. Will the urban walk become a
consensual act? Will its deployment in contemporary society become the
sign of a major transformation of cities which are claimed to be abandoned
by their populations in favour of private space? Will the individualised
figure of the flâneur become a relic of the past where public space was the
site of ordinary confrontations or the proof that some kind of urban
lifestyle, rooted in citydwellers’ customs, survives despite everything?
It seems to me that the 1950s are marked by the use, or reinvention, of
the act of walking as a collective practice. The Situationist International,79
founded by a group including Guy Debord, author of La Société du
spectacle, aimed to “reappropriate the real.” He had several targets – we
will focus on those relevant to walking. Debord conceived of the dérive as
a form of displacement capable of generating new ideas as regards
urbanism; he explained that “the concept of dérive is indissolubly linked to
the recognition of psychogeographical effects, and the affirmation of a
constructive-ludic behaviour, which is entirely opposed to classic notions
of travel and walking.”80 Psychogeography, a new notion whose purpose is
to understand men’s actions on space “proposes the study of exact laws
and precise effects of the geographical milieu, consciously organised or
not, acting directly on the affective behaviour of individuals.”81
Guy Debord proposed the dérive, a form of flânerie with a further
urban function, whose purpose was to walk together in the city: “one or
more people engaging in the dérive renounce, for a variable duration,
reasons for movement and action that they are familiar with, relations,
work, leisure which they are used to, to allow them to be open to the
solicitations of the location and corresponding encounters.” To let
themselves respond to the terrain, enter new spaces, reinterpret the city by
walking was a programme that the International proposed to initiate. Some
examples are enough to illustrate how the urban dérive worked:
Thus, a few pleasantries of dubious taste, which I have always very much
enjoyed in my entourage, for example, to enter at night the floors of houses
being demolished, to cross Paris without stopping by hitchhiking during a
transport strike, under the pretext of aggravating confusion by having
oneself transported anywhere, to wander underground in the catacombs
closed to the public, share a general feeling which is nothing other than
that of the dérive.82
Later the author offered what he claimed to be an account of a dérive:
Tuesday 16 March 1956, G.E.Debord and Gil J. Wolman met at 10 o’clock

in the rue des Jardins-Paul, and set out in a northerly direction to
reconnoitre the possibilities of a traversal of Paris at this level. Despite
their intentions they found themselves very soon shifted to the east, and
traversed the upper part of the 11th arrondissement which, by its
standardised impoverished commercial character, is a good example of the
offputting petit-bourgeois landscape. The only enjoyable encounter was a
shop at 160 rue Oberkampf, ‘Charcuterie Comestibles A. Breton’. Having
arrived in the 20th arrondissement Debord and Wolman entered a series of
narrow passages which, crossing waste ground and halfbuilt constructions
which had an air of being abandoned, joined the rue de Ménilmontant to
rue Couronnes.83
The form taken by the Situationist dérive is directly linked to the figure of
the flâneur. Yet the approach taken is a fundamental transformation of the
idea of the promenade or urban flânerie. The intention was to move as a
group, and to use a kind of individual movement in order to produce and
make sense of real urban identities. It seems to me that this idea is not in
conflict with the larger activities referred to earlier.
In order to show that the two are not so far apart, let us consider some
examples. According to the Mairie de Paris’s own website: “The Festival
of Music is not a festival. It is a great popular, free event open to all”; and
“its particular location is the open air, the streets, the squares, the gardens,
the courtyards, the museums, or châteaux.”84 As regards the Nuit Blanche,
the Mayor of Paris wrote: “Nuit Blanche is an astonishing itinerary which
combines the nightwalker (noctambule) with artistic experiences.” His
assistant, Artistic Director for 2008, added that: “Nuit Blanche is a
invitation to a journey on one’s front door step, an adventure in the world
of the city of art, a promenade in a three-dimensional film with no scenario
or projection but with light, sound and a cinematographic climate.”85
These statements amount to an injunction to walk in the city, that this is
how it should be used. The aim is to require the inhabitant, claimed to be
inward-looking and shut up in private space, to discover, or rediscover
their own urban space. We have here the overused idea of giving Paris
back to the Parisians. Almost as if the collectivity had lost contact with its
home environment, and collective walking could re-establish a degree of
social cohesion. To achieve this, the public was asked to engage in a
genuine dérive, but in which the itineraries were fixed, as for the Nuit
56 Chapter Two
Blanche in 2005. The promenade is only on offer in terms of its given

form (the itinerary) and not its arbitrary construction (freely wandering), a
little as if someone decided to use the idea (from the 1950s) of dérive to
explore the city based on the published accounts of Debord’s activities.
Chance and unexpected discovery are completed ignored. There is thus a
real appropriation (détournement) of the individual promenade on the part
of the authorities responsible for the occasion, intended to extend its
appeal as widely as possible.
This function of walking is present in recent urban projects. Let us take
the case of the current reconstruction of Les Halles by architect David
Mangin, or at least the layout he has created. Mangin has given his project
four principal fixed points, the first being “the re-establishment of urban
continuities for pedestrians, from the boulevards to the Seine, from the
Louvre to Beaubourg, reducing, relocating, or removing the entrances and
exits of the tunnels that lead underground.”86 Another example, the 2008
Plan des déplacements de Paris (Restructuring Parisian Transport),
demonstrates the importance of the promenade as a collective form of
urban identity.87 According to the Paris Town Hall website, where the
responses of 140,000 people to an opinion poll are summed up: “The
questionnaire shows that they are very favourable to shifting priorities
towards public transport and to less intensive forms of car usage. The
priorities are thus clear, but expectations are very diverse… the future
Restructuring Parisian Transport Plan should make this a reality.”88
Finally, one can read this leitmotif of the “invitation to the promenade” on
yellow posters (“A Good Plan for Paris”), posted along the riverbanks and
certain strategic places (Mouffetard) which exhort passers-by: “Go for a
Walk!”. This initiative was given further momentum by Prime Minister
Jean-Marc Ayrault, who wanted to make part of the Left Bank a pedestrian
space. “In the spring of 2013, there will be four hectares between the
Musée d'Orsay and the Pont de l'Alma which will offer to all new
opportunities for walks, entertainment and leisure,”89 emphasised the
Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë, in article in Le Monde (13 July 2012).
Even today, it seems that Baudelaire’s invitation to the promenade still has
echoes which resonate within the walls of municipal and national
administrations.
From the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, we have seen how forms
of appropriation of the “pavé de Paris” (the streets and walkways of Paris)
have diversified: night walks, art in and of the street (theatre, poetry,
music) - there is no longer a single form of promenade but many. Each has
its own rationale and meaning, each answers people’s desire to know the
space which they inhabit in more detailed and more subtle ways. Walking
has generated a particular form of writing. It offers a point of view on the
city which allows it to be seen in completely new ways. So it is that one
could say that in some respects at least the individualised figure of the
twentieth-century flâneur is not fundamentally different from its
nineteenth-century antecedent, as championed by contemporary writers.
In conclusion, we may note that the history of the flâneur and flânerie
has been a topic of growing interest in recent years. Yet there remain
extensive sources still to be taken account of in order to establish a history
of the promenade, whether considered from the point of view of the
walker, the flâneur, or public promenades. To achieve this, a combination
of sources, such as treatises on civility, royal and municipal archives,
police reports, travel guidebooks and journals, novels, poems, plays, maps,
paintings, as well as prints and drawings would need to be involved as
befits a topic which engages several disciplines. Comparative studies
ought also to address exchanges between different cities and their
influence. Flânerie is a phenomenon which crosses frontiers and which
gives to Europe shared cultural characteristics.
Notes
1
Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997).
See also Walter Benjamin, “Le Flâneur,” in Charles Baudelaire, un poète lyrique à
l’apogée du capitalisme (Paris: Payot, 2002 [1955]), 57-100.
2
Richard E. Burton, The Flâneur and his city, patterns of daily life in Paris 1815-
1851 (Durham: University of Durham, 1994); Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Jeffrey Robinson, The Walk: Notes on
a Romantic Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Joseph A.
Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press,
2004); Catherine Nesci, Le Flâneur et les flâneuses: Les femmes et la ville à
l'époque romantique (Grenoble: Université Stendhal, 2007).
3
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris As Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-
Century City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 80. See also
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Sensualization of Flânerie,” Dix-Neuf, 16: 2
(July 2012): 211-23 (213), David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York:
Routledge, 2003) and Mary Gluck, “The Flâneur and the Aesthetic. Appropriation
of Urban Culture in Mid-19th-century Paris,” Theory Culture Society, 20 (2003):
53-80.
4
Jonathan Conlin, “Mr. What-d'ye-call-him: À la recherche du flâneur à Paris et à
Londres au 18e siècle,” in Laurent Turcot and Thierry Belleguic (eds), Les
58 Chapter Two
Histoires de Paris, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, 2 vols (Paris: Editions Hermann, 2012),

vol. 2, 73-95.
5
Manuel Chapy, “Le théâtre des objets. Espaces privés, culture matérielle et
identité bourgeoise. Paris 1830-1914”, Ph.D. Université François-Rabelais de
Tours, 2010 (2 vols). See also Kristýna Matysová, “Écrire le monde en marchant.
Une approche de la modernité en Bohême et en France du début du XIXe siècle
aux années 1940,” Ph.D., Université de Paris IV & Charles University, Prague
(within the Ecole doctorale de littératures françaises et comparées (Paris), 2011).
6
Charpy, “Le théâtre des objets,” II.
7
Haejeong Hazel Hahn, “Du flâneur au consommateur: spectacle et consommation
sur les Grands Boulevards, 1840-1914,” Romantisme, no. 134 (2006-4): 69. See
also Gregory Shaya, “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public
in France, circa 1860–1910,” American Historical Review, 109:1 (2004): 41-78.
8
Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). See also Richard Wrigley,
“Between the Street and the Salon: Parisian shop signs and the spaces of
professionalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” Oxford Art
Journal, 21:1 (1998): 43-67.
9
Alain Corbin interviewed by Estrellita Wassermann (Université de Tokyo),
(http://www.berlol.net/foire/fle98co.htm).
10
Robert Beck, “La promenade urbaine au XIXe siècle,” Annales de Bretagne et
des Pays de l’Ouest [En ligne], 116 :2 (2009), consulted 20 July 2012. URL :
http://abpo.revues.org/116. For a more literary and sociological on aspects of
walking, see Pierre Citron, La Poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de
Rousseau à Baudelaire, 2 vols (Paris, 1961). Jean-Pierre Arthur Bernard, Les Deux
Paris: les représentations de Paris dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Seyssel:
Champ Vallon, 2001) and Rachel Thomas, Les Trajectoires de l’accessibilité
(Bernin: À la croisé, 2005).
11
See particularly Laurence Mall who considers Rétif de la Bretonne to be a
flâneur, although he never used the word: “Histoire de rue: les Nuits
Révolutionnaires de Rétif de la Bretonne,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in
Modern Literatures, Summer 2008: 83-97.
12
“Ch’est pourquay ie te dis sans flanner davantage. Audieu, men poure fieux, ma
lessiue s’enfit” (David Ferrand, La Muse normande, ed. A. Héron, vol. 2 (1638),
177). See also Jacqueline Picoche, Dictionnaire étymologique du français (Paris:
Robert, 1979), 297, and Josette Rey-Debove (dir.), Le Robert Brio. Analyse des
mots et régularités du lexique (Paris: Robert, 1982 (2004)), 702.
13
“Se promener sans but, au hasard; user son temps sans profit. … Origine
inconnue. Pourtant on a proposé l'islandais flanni, libertin. Le normand a flanier,
avare” (Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872-77)).
14
“Rôder sans motif de côté et d’autre; fainéantiser; mener une vie errante et
vagabonde. … Un grand flâneur. Pour dire un grand paresseux; fainéant, homme
d’une oisiveté insupportable, qui ne sait où promener son importunité et son ennui”
(D’Hautel, Dictionnaire du bas-langage, ou des manières de parler usitées parmi
le peuple; ouvrage dans lequel on a réuni les expressions proverbiales, figurées et
triviales; les sobriquets, termes ironiques et facétieux; les barbarismes,

solécismes; et généralement les locutions basses et vicieuses que l’on doit bannir
de la bonne conversation, 2 vols (Paris: Hausmann, 1808), vol. 1, p. 395).
15
Observations critiques d'un flâneur sur la promenade de Longchamps ou
Examen joyeux des voitures qui doivent s'y rendre pendant trois jours (Paris:
Aubry [circa 1790]).
16
Le Flâneur au salon ou Mr Bon-homme; examen joyeux des tableaux mêlé de
vaudevilles (Paris: Aubry, [1806]).
17
Étienne-François Bazot, Les cafés de Paris, ou Revue politique, critique et
littéraire des mœurs du siècle, par un flâneur patenté (Paris: Lécrivain, 1819).
18
Amable de Saint-Hilaire, Petite Biographie dramatique, silhouette des acteurs,
actrices... des théâtres de la capitale, par Guillaume le Flâneur (Paris: Lemonnier,
1821).
19
Henry and Jules Dulong, Le Flâneur, comédie-vaudeville en 1 acte (Paris,
Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, 13 juillet 1825).
20
“Je ne suis pas le seul qui flâne, Je vous l’avouerai, c’est souvent un plaisir.
Vous connaissez bien des flâneurs sans doute, Pour leur donner un rendez-vous, Si
vous les rencontrez en route, Envoyez-les flâner chez nous” (Theophile Marion dit
Dumersan, Nicolas Brazier, Nicolas and Jules-Joseph Gabriel, La Journée d'un
flâneur, comédie en 4 actes (Paris: Barba, 1827), 35).
21
Étienne de Jouy, L’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin, ou observations sur les
moeurs et les usages français au commencement du XIXe siècle, 5 vols (Paris:
Pillet, 1814-1818).
22
See Judith Lyon-Caen, “L’actualité de l’étude de mœurs. Les Hermites
d’Etienne de Jouy,” Orages (Besançon: Poétiques journalistiques, 2008). See also
Lise Andries, “Premiers tableaux parisiens,” in Laurent Turcot and Thierry
Belleguic (eds), Les Histoires de Paris, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, 2 vols (Paris: Editions
Hermann, 2012), vol. 2, 429-40.
23
“Maintenant, Messieurs, que vous savez, à peu près qui je suis, il me reste à vous
apprendre ce que je fais: rien, absolument rien; je vais, je viens, je regarde,
j’écoute, et je tiens note, le soir, en rentrant, de tout ce que j’ai vu et entendu dans
ma journée” (L’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin, vol. 1, “Le 17 août 1811,” 41).
24
Simone Delattre, Les Douze Heures noires. La nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), 42. See also D. Oster and J.M. Goulemot (ed.), Écrire
Paris (Paris: Éditions Seesam, 1990).
25
“le flâneur peut naître partout ; il ne sait vivre qu’à Paris” ([Anon.], “Le flâneur
à Paris,” Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un, vol. 16 (Paris: Ladvocat, 1832), 98). See
also Amaury Duval, “Une journée de flâneur sur les boulevarts du Nord,” Paris, ou
le livre des Cent-et-Un (Paris: Ladvocat, 1833), vol. 12).
26
“les flâneurs les plus recommandables sont nés quelquefois sous d’autres cieux”
(ibid., 99). The author also writes that the flâneur “est un des effets de la division
du travail dans nos sociétés qui se croient perfectionnées, parce qu’elles sont
vieillies” (ibid., 97-8).
60 Chapter Two
27
“c’est une plante que la serre tuerait, et qui ne prospère qu’en plein vent. …
Quand il a touché le sol de la rue, humé la poussière du boulevart ou le brouillard
de la Seine, il entre en action, et c’est là que nous nous en emparons” (ibid., 100).
28
“rien n’échappe à son regard investigateur … tout l’intéresse, tout est pour lui un
texte d’observations”; “aussi, comme sa marche est lente, comme il revient sur ses
pas, comme lui seul est là pour y être, tandis que les autres n’y sont que pour se
rendre ailleurs” (ibid., 101).
29
“les Tuileries, le quai Voltaire, celui du Louvre et le Luxembourg abondent en
flâneurs que j’estime, le boulevart, entre la rue du Mont-Blanc et la rue de
Richelieu, où je suppose que vous avez laissé le nôtre, est proprement sa patrie”
(ibid., 104).
30
“Nous ne reconnaissons pour flâneurs que ce petit nombre privilégié d’hommes
de loisirs et d’esprit qui étudient le cœur humain sur la nature même, et la société
dans ce grand livre du monde toujours ouvert sous leurs yeux” (Auguste de
Lacroix, “Le flâneur,” Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris : L. Curmer,
1841), vol. 3, 66).
31
“marche comme vous et moi … qu’il chemine plus lentement et passe pour y
voir beaucoup mieux” (ibid., 66).
32
“le flâneur est un être essentiellement complexe, il n’a pas de goût particulier, il
a tous les goûts; il comprend tout, il est susceptible d’éprouver toutes les passions,
explique tous les travers et a toujours une excuse prête pour toutes les faiblesses”
(ibid., 67).
33
“l’auteur du Tableau de Paris a dû flâner énormément. Quel plus grand flâneur
que La Fontaine? Rousseau à flâné pendant les deux tiers de sa vie” (ibid., 69).
34
“Paris appartient au flâneur par droit de conquête et par droit de naissance”
(ibid., 67).
35
“Des gens qui s’intitulent très-faussement flâneurs”; “Où l’on prouve que le
flâneur est un mortel essentiellement vertueux”; and “Conseils à l’usage des
flâneurs novices”; “ce qui fait de l’homme le roi de la création, c’est qu’il sait
perdre son temps et sa jeunesse par tous les climats et toutes les saisons possibles
… l’homme s’élève au-dessus de tous les autres animaux uniquement parce qu’il
sait flâner” (Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (Paris: Aubert, 1841), 7).
36
“connaître la jouissance que procure une simple promenade faite pédestrement
dans les boues de Paris” (ibid., 13-14).
37
“O trottoir, asiles de la boue et des flâneurs, je vous salue; tous les moments les
plus heureux de ma jeunesse très-blonde se sont écoulés sur vos dalles, votre
granit, votre bitume, ou votre asphalte!” (ibid., p. 75).
38
“bonnes jambes, bonnes oreilles et bons yeux – tels sont les principaux
avantages physiques dont doit jouir tout Français véritablement digne de faire
partie du club des flâneurs” (ibid., 53).
39
“Tenez-vous à flâner – sortez seul” (ibid., 113).
40
“les événements politiques ont peu de prise sur la vie du flâneur; il pourrait
même faire son profit des révolutions qui viennent renouveler son champ
d’observation; mais il est assez peu égoïste pour ne pas les aimer” ([Anon.], “Le
flâneur à Paris,” Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un, vol. 6, 107).
41
“Errer est humain; flâner est parisien” (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Paris,
1862), vol. 1, 780).
42
“Écrire sur Paris est toujours une chose tentante pour un observateur. Dans ce
grand cercle, on ne se lasse pas de marcher. On va, on vient, on tourne, on le
sillonne en tous les sens, et c’est toujours du nouveau qu’on y rencontre. La mine
est inépuisable” (Charles Vitremaitre, Les Curiosités de Paris (Paris: Lebigre-
Duquesne, 1867), VII).
43
“c’est en flânant dans Paris que Balzac a fait tant de précieuses trouvailles,
entendu tant de mots, déterré tant de types” (Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les
rues de Paris (Paris: Dentu, 1867), 268).
44
Honoré de Balzac, Théorie de la démarche, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Conard,
1938 [1830-1835]), 627.
45
See Christophe Studeny, L’Invention de la vitesse. France XVIIIe-XXe siècle
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995).
46
“Ces observateurs, incompréhensibles au-delà de Paris, seront sans doute saisies
par ces hommes d’étude et de pensée, de poésie et de plaisir qui savent récolter, en
flânant dans Paris, la masse de jouissances flottantes, à toute heure, entre ses
murailles. … Il est un petit nombre d’amateurs, de gens qui ne marchent jamais en
écervelés, qui dégustent leur Paris, qui en possèdent si bien la physionomie qu’ils y
voient une verrue, un bouton, une rougeur. Pour les autres, Paris est toujours cette
monstrueuse merveille, étonnant assemblage de mouvements, de machines et de
pensées, la ville aux cent mille romans, la tête du monde. Mais, pour ceux-là, Paris
est triste ou gai, laid ou beau, vivant ou mort; pour eux, Paris est une créature;
chaque homme, chaque fraction de maison est un lobe de tissu cellulaire de cette
grande courtisane de laquelle ils connaissent parfaitement la tête, le cœur et les
mœurs fantasques. Aussi ceux-là sont-ils les amants de Paris” (Honoré de Balzac,
Ferragus, chef des dévorants (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 48-9).
47
“C’est un daguerréotype mobile et passionné qui garde les moindres traces, et en
qui se reproduisent, avec leurs reflets changeants, la marche des choses, le
mouvement de la cité, la physionomie multiple de l’esprit public, des croyances,
des antipathies et des admirations de la foule” (Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans
les rues de Paris, 268).
48
“en pleine possession de son individualité” (ibid., 270).
49
“livre urbain,” “lire les occupations quotidiennes,” “les professions variées, la
vie intime et domestique dont chacun porte l’empreinte en quelque sorte affichée
sur son front, dans ses allures et le ton de sa voix, comme sur l’enseigne d’un
magasin; de rechercher le caractère qu’indique une démarche ou une
physionomie” (ibid., 277).
50
Paul Féval, Nuits de Paris, drames et récits nocturnes (Paris, 1851), I.
51
“J’éprouve, moi qui vous parle, en rôdant la nuit dans nos rues mornes et
solitaires tout ce que j’ai ressenti au milieu des ruines” (Jules Lefèvre-Deumier,
Promenade nocturne dans les rues d’une grande ville (Paris, 1842), cited Simone
Delattre, Les Douze Heures noires, la nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin
Michel, 2000), 59).
62 Chapter Two
52
“J’ai rôdé longtemps par les halles et les marchés de Paris, et toutes mes
croyances de jeune homme se sont évanouies en présence de ce livre
vivant” (Anon., “Halles et marchés,” Nouveau Tableau de Paris au dix-neuvième
siècle, 7 vols (1834-18355), vol. 5, 235).
53
“Il s’agit de peindre la ville comme elle est, et de la mouler avec ses bosses et
ses creux, ses reliefs de chair et de bois, sans trier les glorieux et les parias… Ainsi
nous parcourons le Paris amoureux et blagueur tout comme le Paris héroïque et
social, et nous nous promenons le sourire aux lèvres et la passion au cœur” (Jules
Vallès, Tableau de Paris, réunis et présentés par Marie-Claire Bancquart (Paris:
Éditions Messidor, 1989), 32).
54
“couru par la foule des flâneurs que, chaque jour, dès quatre heures de l’après-
midi, il faut sérieusement et résolument jouer des coudes pour arriver à se faire
jour à travers les allants et venants, qui vont par bancs épais comme les harengs
dans le détroit de la Manche. Les gens pressés aiment mieux faire un détour que de
s’aventurer sous ce tunnel de verre, où l’on risque à chaque instant d’écraser les
pieds de ses voisins ou d’avoir les côtes enfoncées par eux’ (Alfred Delvau, Les
Plaisirs de Paris, guide pratique (Paris: Achille Faure, 1867), “Les passages,” 53-
9).
55
“Dans ce moment qu’approche la nouvelle année, le jour des étrennes, les
boutiques des marchands se surpassent par la variété de leurs riches étalages.
L’aspect de ces merveilles peut procurer au flâneur oisif le passe-temps le plus
agréable … en contemplant l’abondance bigarrée des objets d’art et de luxe
exposés derrière les glaces miroitantes des magasins, et en jetant peut-être aussi un
regard sur le public qui se tient là à ses côtés. Les figures de ce public sont si
sérieuses, si souffrantes et si laides, si impatientes et si menaçantes, qu’elles
forment un contraste sinistre avec les objets qu’elles contemplent la bouche
béante” (Heinrich Heine, Lutèce: lettres sur la vie politique, artistique et sociale de
la France (Paris: Lévy, 1866), 11 December 1841.
56
“dédale de rues obscures, étroites et tortueuses [avec un] quartier [qui] sert
d’asile ou de rendez-vous à un grand nombre de malfaiteurs de Paris, qui se
rassemblent dans les tapis-francs” (Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris (Paris:
Éditions Princesse, 1982), 7).
57
“rôdeurs doivent surprendre ce qui est interdit au regard commun, ce qui
échappe au passant pressé” (Gérard de Nerval, “Les Nuits d’octobre,” in Flâneries
parisiennes (Paris: Éditions de Paris, 2008)).
58
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, un poète lyrique à l’apogée du
capitalisme (Paris: Payot, 1990 [1950]), 57-100.
59
“d’herboriser le bitume,” “c’est le regard du flâneur dont le mode d’existence
dissimule dans un nimbe apaisant la détresse future de l’habitant des grandes
villes” (Walter Benjamin, Passages, 42).
60
“La foule est son domaine, comme l’air est celui de l’oiseau, comme l’eau celui
du poisson. Sa passion et sa profession, c’est d’épouser la foule. Pour le parfait
flâneur, pour l’observateur passionné, c’est une immense jouissance que d’élire
domicile dans le nombre, dans l’ondoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif et
l’infini. Être hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez soi; voir le monde,
être au centre du monde et rester caché au monde, tels sont quelques-uns des
moindres plaisirs de ces esprits indépendants, passionnés, impartiaux, que la
langue ne peut que maladroitement définir” (Charles Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la
vie moderne,” L’Art romantique, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961),
1160-1).
61
“Le poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu’il peut à sa guise être lui-même
et autrui. … Le promeneur solitaire et pensif tire une singulière ivresse de cette
universelle communion. Celui-là qui épouse facilement la foule connaît des
jouissances fiévreuses, dont seront éternellement privés l’égoïste, fermé comme un
coffre, et le paresseux interné comme un mollusque. Il adopte comme siennes
toutes les professions, toutes les joies et toutes les misères que la circonstance lui
présente” (Charles Baudelaire, “XII. Les foules,” Petits Poèmes en prose, le spleen
de Paris (Paris: Garnier, 1980), 54).
62
“la flânerie est une sorte de lecture de la ville: le visage des gens, les étalages,
les vitrines, les terrasses des cafés, les rails, les autos, les arbres deviennent autant
de lettres égales en droit, qui, lorsqu’elles s’assemblent, constituent les mots, les
phrases et les pages d’un livre toujours nouveau Franz Hessel” (Promenade dans
Berlin (1929), 145). Stefan Zweig, speaking of Paris, wrote: “Tu sais ce que
j’apprécie le plus ici? flâner dans les rues, bouquiner – je ne me laisserai pas priver
de ça par des rendez-vous et des engagements. Dieu que cette ville est belle”
(Stefan Zweig, letter to Friderike Maria Zweig, 26 January 1924, Correspondance,
1920-1931 (Paris: Grasset, 2003), 162).
63
‘ce rêve dont les plus anciennes traces sont le labyrinthe sur les feuilles de papier
buvard de mes cahiers d’écolier” (Walter Benjamin, “Chronique berlinois,” Écrits
autobiographiques (Paris: Bourgois, 1990), 249-50.
64
“le soir après m’être couché je ne pouvais pas en lire plus de quelques mots sans
que mon cœur se mette à battre si fort que je devais poser le livre […] Les
premières notes du Passagenwerk remontent d’ailleurs à cette époque” (quoted in
Susan Buck Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge MA: MTI Press), 33).
65
Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1972 [1926]).
66
Léon-Paul Fargue, Le Piéton de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 2001 [1932]).
67
Jean-Christophe Bailly, “La grammaire générative des jambes” (1981), La Ville
à l'œuvre (Paris: Éditions de l’imprimeur, 2001), 21-33.
68
Michel de Certeau, “Pratiques de l’espace, marches dans la ville,” in L’Invention
du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 135-64.
69
“une forme spécifique d’opérations (des ‘manières de faire’) à ‘une autre
spatialité’ (une expérience ‘anthropologique,’ poétique et mythique de l’espace), et
à une mouvance opaque et aveugle de la ville habitée” (ibid., 142).
70
Éric Hazan, L’Invention de Paris, il n’y a pas de pas perdus (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
See also Georges Perec, Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (Paris:
Bourgois, 1982).
71
Edmund White, The Flâneur, A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (New
York and London: Bloomsbury, 2001).
64 Chapter Two
72
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Viking Penguin,
2000); L’Art de marcher (Paris: Acte Sud, 2002).
73
“à travers les rues et les boulevards qu’elle [la ville] traverse, elle se plaît à
alterner les périodes de resserrement et d’élargissement, des rythmes plus
précipités et des rythmes plus lents et plus larges” (Pierre Sansot, Poétique de la
ville (Paris : Méridien Klincksieck, 1984), p. 159). See also Jardins publics (Paris:
Payot, 1993).
74
“mise en jeu constante’ (David Le Breton, Éloge de la marche (Paris: Métailié,
2000), 121).
75
Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes, Paris et son discours (Paris: Éditions
des la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001), and Simone Delattre, Les Douze
Heures noires, la nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).
76
Thierry Pacquot, Des Corps urbains. Sensibilités entre béton et bitume (Paris:
Autrement, 2006).
77
Thierry Paquot, “Le sentiment de la nuit urbaine aux XIXe et XXe siècle,” Les
Annales de la recherche urbaine, no. 87, September 2000, 9.
78
Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capitale du XIXe siècle, 434.
79
A form of experimental behaviour linked to the condition of urban society: a
technique of rapid movement through different situations. The term also
particularly applies to the duration of a continued application of this action. See
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). For an
overview of Situationist activities, see Jean-François Martos, Histoire de
l’Internationale situationniste (Paris: Lebovici, 1989) and Gianfranco Marelli,
L’Amère Victoire du situationnisme: pour une histoire critique de l'Internationale
situationniste, 1957-1972 (Arles: Sullivier, 1989).
80
“le concept de dérive est indissolublement lié à la reconnaissance d’effets de
nature psychogéographique, et à l’affirmation d’un comportement ludique-
constructif, ce qui l’oppose en tous points aux notions classiques de voyage et de
promenade” (Guy-Ernest Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” Les lèvres nues, no. 9
(November 1956): 6).
81
“se proposerait l’étude des lois exactes et des effets précis du milieu
géographique, consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant directement sur le
comportement affectif des individus” (Guy-Ernest Debord, “Introduction à une
critique de la géographie urbaine,” Les Lèvres nues, no. 6 (September 1955): 11).
82
“une ou plusieurs personnes se livrant à la dérive renoncent, pour une durée plus
ou moins longue, aux raisons de se déplacer et d’agir qu’elles se connaissent
généralement, aux relations, aux travaux et aux loisirs qui leur sont propres, pour
se laisser aller aux sollicitations du terrain et des rencontres qui y correspondent.
… Ainsi, quelques plaisanteries d’un goût dit douteux, que j’ai toujours vivement
apprécié dans mon entourage, par exemple s’introduire nuitamment dans les étages
des maisons en démolition, parcourir sans arrêt Paris en auto-stop pendant une
grève des transports, sous le prétexte d’aggraver la confusion en se faisant
conduire n’importe où, errer dans ceux des souterrains des catacombes qui sont
interdits au public, relèveraient d’un sentiment plus général qui ne serait autre que
le sentiment de la dérive’ (Guy-Ernest Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” 8).
83
“Le mardi 6 mars 1956, G.E. Debord et Gil J. Wolman se rencontrent à 10h dans
la rue des Jardins-Paul, et partent en direction du nord pour reconnaître les
possibilités d’une traversée de Paris à ce niveau. Malgré leurs intentions ils se
trouvent rapidement déportés vers l’est, et traversent la partie supérieure du XIe
arrondissement qui, par son caractère de standardisation commerciale pauvre, est
un bon exemple du paysage petit-bourgeois repoussant. La seule rencontre
plaisante est, au 160 de la rue Oberkampf, le magasin ‘Charcuterie-Comestibles A.
Breton.’ Parvenus dans le XXe arrondissement Debord et Wolman s’engagent dans
une série de passages étroits qui, à travers des terrains vagues et des constructions
peu élevées qui ont un air d’abandon, joignent la rue de Ménilmontant à la rue
Couronnes” (ibid., 12).
84
“La Fête de la Musique n’est pas un Festival. C’est une grande manifestation
populaire, gratuite, ouverte à tous, … son territoire privilégié est le plein air, les
rues, les places, les jardins, les cours d'immeubles, de musées, ou de châteaux”
(http://fetedelamusique.culture.fr/47_Qu_estce_que_la_Fete_de_la_Musique_.html
, consulted 16 December 2008).
85
“Nuit Blanche est une invitation au voyage au pas de sa porte, une aventure dans
le monde de la ville et de l’art, une déambulation dans un film en trois dimensions
sans scénario ni pellicule mais avec des lumières, des sons et un climat
cinématographiques” (http://www.paris.fr/loisirs/les-grands-rendez-vous/nuits-
blanches/p6806, consulted 25 July 2012)
86
‘le rétablissement des continuités urbaines pour les piétons, des Boulevards à la
Seine, du Louvre à Beaubourg, en supprimant, déplaçant ou diminuant les entrées
ou sorties de tunnels des voies souterraines”
(http://www.paris.fr/portail/Urbanisme/Portal.lut?page_id=101&document_type_i
d=4&document_id=13460&portlet_id=20988&multileveldocument_sheet_id=148
9, consulted 16 December 2008).
87
http://www.paris.fr/portail/deplacements/portal.lut?page_id=14, consulted 16
December 2008).
88
“Le questionnaire le démontre: fortement impliqués, ils sont favorables à
accorder la priorité aux transports publics et aux modes de circulation douce par
rapport à la circulation automobile. Les priorités sont donc claires, mais les attentes
restent nombreuses ... le futur Plan de Déplacements de Paris devra les traduire
concrètement” (ibid.).
89
“Au printemps 2013, ce sont plus de quatre hectares qui offriront à tous, entre le
Musée d’Orsay et le pont de l'Alma, des occasions nouvelles de promenades,
d'animations et de loisirs”
(http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2012/07/13/voies-sur-berges-a-paris-
ayrault-met-fin-au-blocage-du-projet_1733580_823448.html#xtor=AL-32280270,
consulted 25 July 2012)).
CHAPTER THREE
PROMENADES IN ENLIGHTENMENT MADRID:

THE TAPESTRY CARTOONS
AND NEW SOCIAL SPACES
SIMON LEE
Under the reign of Charles III (1759-1788), Madrid underwent an

ambitious re-building programme designed to beautify and embellish the
city and to turn it into a modern European capital. Since its creation as
capital by Philip II in 1561, the city had not been treated as an autonomous
municipality, but as an inadvertent extension of the court.1 While
Hapsburg Madrid was a canvas for displaying royal authority in processions
and temporary ceremonial architecture enacted before a passive populace,
Borbón Madrid was fashioned into a permanent reminder of a modern and
enlightened monarchy that invited open air public participation and
interaction. Thomas Reese has suggested that Charles III was stimulated to
modernize Madrid after experiencing the antique-inspired temporary
ceremonial architecture erected to celebrate his arrival in the capital on
13th July 1760, which consisted of thirteen locations adorned with arches,
colonnades, statues and bas-reliefs dedicated to the new monarch (Fig. 3-
1).2
Central to the project to modernize Madrid was the provision of new,
well-ordered social spaces that were at once a relief from the cramped
baroque city centre, a setting for new institutional buildings and an
expression of Enlightenment civility and civic pride.3 The culmination of
Charles III’s reforming urban projects was the construction of a sequence
of avenues along the eastern side of the city, the Paseo de Recoletos, the
Paseo del Prado (sometimes known by its previous name of the Paseo de
San Gerónimo) and the Paseo de Atocha.
These Paseos were built over roads that had been laid out and partially
developed from the late sixteenth century, particularly during the reign of
Philip IV and were adjacent to the city wall and gateways. But by the
Promenades in Enlightenment Madrid 67
middle of the eighteenth century they had fallen into a state of disrepair
and some had lost their recreational and ambulatory functions. Indeed the
Paseo del Prado had acquired a somewhat sordid and sinister reputation as
a location for illicit nocturnal liaisons and criminality.4 The new Paseos
thus improved the existing road system and urban landscape and were also
expressions of the Rousseauian ideal of linking the city with nature.5
The Paseos also formed impressive approaches to numerous newly-
erected monumental city gates that had replaced their modest
predecessors.6 The building and re-modelling of the periphery of Madrid
was not an isolated project, but part of a far-reaching plan to renovate all
of the kingdom’s highways, particularly those that led to and from royal
palaces and residences.7 Purchasing of land began in the Summer of 1767
and these ambitious urban improvements were promoted in Espinosa de
los Monteros’ 1769 map of the city, Plano Topographico de la Villa y
Corte de Madrid (Fig. 2), which provided two views of the city’s eastern
Paseos (Fig. 3-3).8 An insert at the lower right showed the Paseos from
Puerta de Recoletos to the Puerta de Atocha before building work had
started and was captioned: “Plan of the old Paseo of San Jeronimo as it
was in the year 1768 when its demolition was begun on the orders of His
Excellency the Count of Aranda, Captain-General of the Army and
President of the Council and put into the form shown in the large map”9
(Fig. 3-4). The map proper was an aspirational document and included the
Paseos as projected with broad avenues that were to be planted with
hardwood species of black poplars and acacias. In preparing the map,
Monteros evidently had access to the definitive plan prepared by José de
Hersomilla in 1767, the military architect who had been charged with the
task by Aranda.10
The ensemble of these new avenues was mapped for the first time in
Tomás López’s Plano Geométrico de Madrid of 1785, dedicated to the
king and, as the caption reveals, presented to the monarch by his Prime
Minister, the Count of Floridablanca11 (Fig. 3-5). One notable addition
from the 1769 map is the Botanic Garden, opened in 1781 with a
distinguished Doric portal on the Paseo de Atocha, designed by Francesco
Sabatini and a further example of King Charles’ desire to provide
improving and scientific amenities for the city situated on the new Paseos
(Figs 3-6 and 3-7). The inscription on the frieze leaves the viewer in no
doubt concerning the royal bounty and Charles is identified as the father
of the nation and restorer of botany for the health and recreation of his
subjects.12
As redeveloped and reconstructed, these wide and well-paved avenues
had double, treble or quadruple rows of trees and were embellished with
68 Chapter Three
fountains, statues and stone and iron seats. The stream that ran along the
Paseo del Prado, that was variously a dry ditch, an open sewer and a fast-
flowing brook, was enclosed in culverts with metal grilles.13 Three
impressive fountains were also planned, each designed by Ventura
Rodríguez and dedicated to a classical deity- Cybele, Neptune, and Apollo
- which also incorporated the Four Seasons. Neptune and Cybele, which
each formed the centrepiece of a square at a crossroads, were completed in
1782, while the Apollo, located along the avenue between the two, was
only finished in 1802.14
The stretch of the Paseo between Cybele and Neptune was called the
Salón del Prado and was intended to evoke a Roman hippodrome with two
longitudinal arms closed by exedrae. The axis of symmetry was the Apollo
fountain and in front of this a two storey columned portico, also in the
form of an exedra, and also designed by Ventura Rodríguez, was planned
with a central pavilion serving coffee and chocolate. This had the dual
function of providing strollers with shade and shelter from the elements
and of spanning the change in level between the Paseo del Prado and the
grounds of the Buen Retiro palace.15 Unfortunately this was never built -
although the idea of a grand columned portico was to inspire Juan de
Villanueva in his designs for the new Museum of Natural History situated
on the Paseo del Prado - which later became the Prado Museum.16 In the
second edition of his Viage de España, published in 1782, Antonio Ponz
wrote that with their accommodating width, stone benches and avenues of
trees, the Prado and Atocha Paseos were the major adornment of the
capital and, once finished with statues and fountains, it would be difficult
to imagine any other city having such a magnificent and agreeable
amenity within its precincts.17
Of course the paseo was at once an urban thoroughfare and an activity
- the leisurely late afternoon or evening stroll or promenade, and the new
avenues became the focus for native pedestrians and for the wheeled
perambulations of the aristocracy. They also provided an opportunity for
the observation of these phenomena, often by visiting foreigners. Jean-
François Bourgoing, the Secretary to the French Ambassador noted the
great activity on the Paseo del Prado and observed that: “I have sometimes
seen four or five hundred carriages filing off in the greatest order, amid an
innumerable crowd of spectators, a spectacle which at once is a proof of
great opulence and population.”18 The combination of traffic jams and the
custom of bowing the head in acknowledgement of the occupants of
carriages coming in the opposite direction meant that that it took more
than two hours to proceed one mile. The German-Danish visitor Daniel
Gotthilf Moldenhawer observed that the spectacle on the Prado every
night was comparable to what could only be seen in other European cities
on Sundays and holidays.19 Bourgoing added that most people were very
soberly dressed- with the women always in black, and observed “the
Prado, with all its beauty seems to be the theatre of Castilian gravity.”20
This sense of spectacle only increased in later years and an 1815 Paseo
por Madrid ó Guía del forastero en la corte commented:
The most frequented part is that called the Salon, where a prodigious
concourse of people gather from all parts, on foot and in coaches, to enjoy
the agreeable prospect offered by the many and various objects that present
themselves. Here is where the opulent rich come to flaunt their shiny
carriages, the young men on horseback to show off their gallantry and skill,
the women to display their jewellery and graces, and where the public
flock to contemplate these spectacles. During summer afternoons and
evenings people of all classes and both sexes come to this spacious
Salon....21
The new social spaces and the social spectacles and rituals they
engendered and hosted provided the subject matter for numerous designs
for tapestry cartoons commissioned by the Royal Tapestry Factory of
Santa Barbara for the interiors of the royal palaces of El Escorial and El
Pardo. The Tapestry Cartoons were paintings produced by crown-
employed artists to act as full-size models for the factory’s weavers to
follow. In the 1770s and 1780s apartments occupied by the Royal
Princesses and by the heir to the throne, the Prince of Asturias, the future
Charles IV, and his wife Maria Luisa were the main recipients of
tapestries and the subject matter frequently focused on the popular
amusements and pastimes of the lower classes against the backdrop of
urban Madrid.22 Francisco Goya is the artist most usually associated with
the production of Tapestry Cartoons and he produced 63 cartoons between
1775 and 1792. These works distinguished him as the most acute and
critical observer of the street life, social interactions and urban navigation
of Madrid, prompting Bourgoing, to comment on “Don Francisco Goya,
who possesses a peculiar talent for giving an accurate representation of the
manners, the diversions, and costume of his native country.”23 However,
none of Goya’s Madrileñan subjects featured the new paseos on the
Eastern side of the city and this aspect of social observation was left to his
less well-known contemporaries who were also employed by the Tapestry
Factory.
For tapestries to embellish the dining room of the Royal Princesses in
the palace of El Pardo, in 1785 Ginés Andrés de Aguirre produced The
70 Chapter Three
Alcalá Gate and the Cybele Fountain (Fig. 3-8). The 1786 inventory of
the Tapestry Factory provided a full description of the scene:
The Alcalá Gate seen from the corner of the Calle Alcalá close to the
Cybele [Fountain]. In the foreground, a gentleman and lady with a girl by
her side and at the gentleman’s side a boy playing with a dog. Behind them
the Cybele Fountain with a line of trees and some people all around. From
these, the trees can be seen in perspective up to the aforementioned gate.
Close to the fountain a man leads a horse by the bridle, and behind another
horseman with his mount who is drinking… On the other side, four soldiers
in conversation and behind them, a line of trees.24
Such long descriptions were typical of Tapestry Cartoons. As the painters

were paid per piece, and remuneration was subject to its valuation by an
official of the Tapestry Factory, upon submission artists usually gave long
and detailed descriptions of their handiwork that enumerated the figures
and boasted of their skill in composition and perspective. These accounts
were often copied verbatim for the Factory’s records.
Within the same frame are located not only the recently completed
fountain, but also what was considered to be one of the finest and most
elegant pieces of modern architecture, the Alcalá Gate. Designed by
Francesco Sabatini and completed in 1778, the monumental gate provided
the approach to the city from Catalonia and Aragon with a dominant
triple-arched landmark that was adorned with a dedicatory inscription to
Charles and was in many ways a permanent and more impressive version
of the temporary architecture that had greeted the new monarch in 1760.25
All visitors seem to have been impressed by the spaciousness of the Calle
Alcalá, broad enough, it was said, for twenty coaches abreast and the often
described as the widest street in Europe.26 The exterior of the city’s
recently renovated bull ring can also be glimpsed through the trees at the
right.27 Bourgoing noted of the setting: “The inhabitants from all quarters
resort hither on foot, or in carriages to meet and breathe beneath the shade
of the long alleys, an air freshened by waters spouted from the fountains,
and embalmed by exhalations from the fragrant flowers.”28
Aguirre’s painting mainly depicts fashionable and leisured middle-
class strollers as well as a fine coach with a lackey on the rear. Traditional
Spanish and more modern French-inspired fashions are worn by both men
and women. The utilitarian rather than decorative function of the Cybele
fountain is indicated by the horses, one drinking and the other being led
away by a groom after being watered. The rider appears to be a hunter,
perhaps furnishing fresh game for the city. The right hand side of the
painting is entirely occupied by men, from the two groups of figures in
animated conversation in the background to the quartet of soldiers in the

foreground. Although the soldiers might have provided a comforting and
protective presence to Royal viewers, to Madrileños they would have been
a potentially disquieting and threatening inclusion. In eighteenth century
Spain the military formed an estate in themselves and were notorious for
their arrogance, bullying and drunken and boorish behaviour and were
thus detested by large sections of the populace.29 In 1788 Madrid had a
garrison of 8-10,000 in 32 barracks and so soldiers were a frequent sight
on the streets.30 With Spain at peace, officers had become bored and their
minds had been diverted to what Bourgoing called “unworthy objects.”31A
number of simplifications were made when the cartoon was turned into a
tapestry and figure groups at both left and right were removed-
presumably to make the weaver’s task easier as the overlapping of figures
was very difficult to achieve in coloured thread (Fig. 3-9).32 Aguirre’s
image, and indeed all of the tapestry cartoons that have a specific setting
in the new Madrid, focus on the social interaction and display of the
figures and on the variety of classes and street types. There was no
panoramic optic as was frequently the case in topographic painting and
printmaking (Fig. 3-10).
While the paseos were the domain of the populace, the aristocratic
pedestrian gravitated to the more genteel and well-policed gardens of the
Royal Park of the Buen Retiro, situated adjacent to the new Paseo del
Prado and the Calle de Alcalá. From 1767, shortly after Charles III quit
the Buen Retiro to take up residence in the new Royal Palace, the gardens
were opened to the public in the summer and autumn from the mid-
afternoon until 9 p.m. Codes of dress and behaviour had to be observed
and were enforced by guards. Men could not enter wearing caps or
hairnets and capes and overcoats were also prohibited. Women were not
supposed to wear a mantilla, although some did so and risked having them
removed by the park guards. These provisions effectively excluded the
majority of the lower classes.33
In 1779 José del Castillo produced The Gardens of the Buen Retiro
towards the wall of the bronze horse as a cartoon for a tapestry destined
for the Dressing Room of the Princess of Asturias in the El Pardo palace
(Fig. 3-11). It was described as:
a view of the Royal Site of the Retiro seen towards the garden of the horse,
where, besides the wall a man and a woman on a parapet can be seen
looking at it, with a boy trying to climb up. Two women seated in
conversation are on the same parapet. A wet nurse in the shade of a tree,
breastfeeding a baby, at her side a standing woman, her mantilla on her
shoulders, having some sort of get-together. Not far away is a gardener
72 Chapter Three
with a basket of fruit on his head and in the foreground, another gardener,
dressed as a majo, presents various flowers to a woman, whose maid
receives them in a white cloth. Behind the gardener is the lady’s escort,
shortsighted and searching for change to pay the requested sum. Climbing
the steps which lead to the parterre is a petimetre arm-in-arm with a
gowned lady. On the right of the picture, a soldier, dressed in blue and
leaning on a walking stick, looks at a statue of Isis on a pedestal. Seated on
the ground next to him is a lady wearing a pink gown and beside her, and
seen from behind, a soldier dressed in red wearing a hat, sitting on a step.
There is also a variety of trees in the foreground and middleground.34
Castillo elucidated the clear class distinctions between the two common
male urban types, the majo and the petimetre. Bourgoing observed: “The
Majos are beaux of the lower class, or rather bullies whose grave and
frigid pomposity is announced by their whole exterior. They have an
accent, habit and gesture peculiar to themselves.”35 Mostly drawn from the
ranks of artisans and tradesmen, majos were fiercely proud and considered
themselves of pure Castilian blood, untainted by foreign intermarriage.
They frequently wore the long cape and the broad brimmed hat
(chambergo), that together were thought to facilitate the concealment of
weapons and provide anonymity for criminals.36 An attempt to ban this
costume in March 1766 by one of Charles III’s favoured Neapolitan
ministers, the Marquis of Esquilache, led to the so-called Esquilache Riots
where the Madrileños rose up in protest at such “foreign” intervention in
Spanish customs. The king soon capitulated and withdrew the regulation
and Esquilache and his wife were forced to leave Madrid.37
Petimetres, from the French petits-maîtres, were the late eighteenth-
century equivalent of fashion victims, continually ridiculed in literature
and in the theatre for their obsession with the latest, and often comically
outlandish dress. By taking their sartorial inspiration from France, they
were sometimes considered effete and lacking in manliness, and were thus
the antithesis of the majo.38 Castillo makes reference to the masculine
allure of the majo compared to the bewigged petimetre and the lady
appears to be more interested in the gardener than in the blooms he offers
(Fig. 3-12). While failings or weaknesses of the senses were often equated
with moral corruption,39 here the petimetre’s shortsighted search for coins
alludes to his ignorance of the threat posed by the majo.
During daylight hours the Paseo del Prado and the Buen Retiro
Gardens were the sites of fashionable flirtation and pastries, fresh fruit and
flowers were favourite gifts from gallants to their ladies, all supplied by a
small army of street vendors plying their illegal trade.40 The setting of
amorous couples in a parkland adorned with statues ultimately derived
from Watteau’s fêtes galantes via French prints of the later eighteenth
century, such as Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger’s Park at Marly.41
The royal imprint of both the Borbón and Hapsburg dynasties pervades
the cartoon through the sculptural presences. Under Charles III, the
kingdom of Naples became renowned for its archaeological riches and the
first royal publication of ancient art from Herculaneum had a frontispiece
of the monarch posing as the noble sponsor of intellectual and cultural
enlightenment.42 Thus, the inclusion of antique sculptures ensured
associations with the Borbón dynasty - even though none were on display
in the Buen Retiro Gardens at the time.
At the right is a Hadrianic statue of Isis, bought by Pope Clement XII
from Cardinal Alessandro Albani in 1733 and shortly after presented to
the Capitoline Museum (Fig. 3-13).43 While the two gentlemen are
absorbed in contemplating the statue, the lady gazes at her red-coated
companion. Castillo also sets up a visual correspondence between the
statue of Isis and the seated lady. Her headwear mimics the statue’s solar
disc, lotus flower and lotus bud headdress and her fichu, finished with a
large bow, appears like the knot between Isis’s breasts. Isis’s sistrum is
also replaced with a fan. Castillo perhaps comments both on the contrast
between living, fashionable femininity and distant, sculptural antiquity
and on masculine intellectual seriousness that ignores the blandishments
of feminine charms.
The statue at the left is the large version of the Woman of Herculaneum,
a vestal dug up by workmen in 1711 at Resina and which heralded the
discovery of the ancient city of Herculaneum. This sculpture never
actually formed part of the Spanish Royal Collections and was acquired
by Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna and is now in the Albertinum in
Dresden. 44 Although a fictive arrangement of ancient statuary doubtless
derived from widely available contemporary prints, the painting gives a
clear idea of how an understanding of the sculptures of antiquity had
permeated Spanish society.45 By contrast, the bronze horse glimpsed from
behind on the parterre was located in the Gardens. This was the equestrian
statue of Philip IV by Pietro Tacca, completed in 1640 and which since
1844 has dominated the Plaza de Oriente outside the Royal Palace in
Madrid.46
Not all tapestry cartoons concerned with Madrid urban life contained
markers of royal authority, benevolence or surveillance. In 1784 Ramón
Bayeu painted the cartoon for the Paseo de las Delicias destined to
become a tapestry for the room of the Prince of Asturias in the Pardo
Palace (Fig. 3-14). Ramón’s painting was a full-size version of a sketch
74 Chapter Three
provided by his elder brother Francisco, then considered the most

important painter in the kingdom.47 The painting was inventoried as:
A view of the Paseo de Delicias, with its plantations, and the countryside
and farmhouses, that can be glimpsed, populated by various people who
have come to promenade, like ladies and gentlemen, some wearing military
fashion, others capes. All figures recede according to the perspective of the
said plantation.48
The Paseo de las Delicias (Promenade of the Delights) had been

constructed under Charles III’s elder brother, Ferdinand VI and was
considered an extension of the Paseo del Prado (Fig. 3-15). The Delicias
consisted of two long sections of promenade flanked by double rows of
elm trees from Atocha to the Manzanares river. The walks were built on
earthen embankments higher than the surrounding terrain and according to
Ponz, one section was for pedestrians, the other for coaches and
carriages.49 Further away from the city there were circular features and
fountains. At its end the Paseo approached the Mazanares canal, although
Bourgoing, noted that here the promenade little deserved its name of
‘Delights’ because of the stench from the stagnant water of the
uncompleted Manzanares canal.50
This Paseo was not a city thoroughfare but given over entirely to
leisure and display and was evidently not quite so crowded as the Paseo
del Prado.51 The cartoon depicted the pedestrian section of the Paseo and
focused on the gallantry and civility of the men dressed in military or
French fashion. Francisco Bayeu evidently consulted a French source - the
print by Pierre-François Courtois after Augustin de Saint-Aubin’s
Promenade on the Ramparts of Paris of c.1760.52 Two majos are also seen
as marginal figures at the right and excluded from polite interaction (Fig.
3-16). They are also smoking the characteristic small cigars associated
with the majos and this act in itself might indicate criminality. Tobacco
was a Royal monopoly in Spain and although stiff and even capital
penalties existed to prevent smuggling, much contraband tobacco was in
circulation.53 This pair might then not only be refusing to adopt
fashionable foreign dress but further demonstrate their independence from
the apparatus of state. Another, albeit minor, act of civil insubordination is
indicated by one of the trees in the central plantation which appears to
have been pillaged for firewood - an act of ignorant vandalism much
deplored by Ponz.54
Of course the cartoons in no sense depicted a snapshot of street life
and the social exchanges and salient details were synthesized to create an
entertaining composite for the royal audience. There were also practical
considerations. As the cartoon was a full-size template for weavers to

follow, an uncluttered design with clear outlines was called for. Sometimes
cartoons were rejected because they were considered too complicated to
replicate in thread and an official report of 1786 noted the difficulty of
making tapestries from “the pictures they paint these days of majos and
majas, with so many ornaments of hairnets, ribbons, frog fastenings,
chiffons, and other trivialities, that one wastes great quantities of time in
fussy detailing.”55
But despite the wide and convivial expanses of the new avenues of
Caroline Madrid, the natural gregariousness of the Spanish temperament
discouraged solitary and detached observation and so the artist himself
became a type of flâneur in the Tapestry Cartoons. Indeed the visions of the
new spaces of Enlightenment Madrid and of the different social and
provincial types that appear in the paintings locate the artist as both a proto-
flâneur and a surrogate for members of the Royal Family who were unable
to witness the spectacle of the city and had to be content with a vicarious
experience within the courtly surrounding of palace apartments.56
Illustrations
Fig. 3-1. Lorenzo de Quirós, Triumphal arch erected in the Calle de Carretas for
the Entry of Charles III, 1760, oil on canvas, 112 x 167 cm.. Museo de Historia,
Madrid.
76 Chapter Three

Corte de Madrid, 1769, 165 x 234 cm.. Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Corte de Madrid, 1769, detail of the Paseos del Prado and Atocha.
78 Chapter Three

Corte de Madrid, 1769, detail of the insert showing the former state of the Paseo
del Jéromino (Paseo del Prado).
Fig. 3-5. Tomás López, Plano Geometrico de Madrid, 1785, 65 x 95 cm..

Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Fig. 3-6. Tomás López, Plano Geometrico de Madrid, detail of the Paseos del
Prado and Atocha, including the Botanical Garden, 1785.
80 Chapter Three
Fig. 3.7. Francesco Sabatini, Portal of the Botanical Garden, Madrid, Paseo del
Prado, Madrid, 1781.
Fig. 3-8. Ginés Andrés de Aguirre, The Alcalá gate and the Cybele Fountain,
1785, oil on canvas, 442 x 345 cm.. Madrid Museo del Prado, on loan to the
Fig. 3-9. Ginés Andrés de Aguirre, Tapestry of the Alcalá gate and the Cybele
Fountain, c. 1786/87, 291 x 473 cm.. Borbón Apartments, Escorial Palace.
82 Chapter Three
Fig. 3-10. Fernando Brambilla, View of the Cybele fountain and Alcalá Gate,
c.1790-1800. Private collection.
Fig. 3-11. José del Castillo, The Gardens of the Buen Retiro towards the wall of the
bronze horse, 1779, oil on canvas, 260 x 363 cm.. Museo del Prado, on loan to the
Fig. 3-12. José del Castillo, The Gardens of the Buen Retiro, detail of the
petimetre and majo with the statue of the Woman of Herculaneum in the
background.
84 Chapter Three
Fig. 3-13. José del Castillo, The Gardens of the Buen Retiro, detail of the statue of
Isis and bronze horseman statue.
Fig. 3-14. Ramón Bayeu, The Paseo de la Delicias, 1784, oil on canvas, 255 x 385
cm.. Museo del Prado, on loan to the Museo de Historia, Madrid.
86 Chapter Three
Fig. 3-15. Pierre-François Tardieu and Debuisson, Madrid map c.1780, detail of
the Paseo de Delicias.
Fig. 3-16. Ramón Bayeu, detail of The Paseo de la Delicias, the two majos.
88 Chapter Three
Notes

1
David Ringrose, “A Setting for Royal Authority: The Reshaping of Madrid,
Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries,” in Gary B. Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo,
Embodiments of Power. Building Baroque Cities in Europe (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2008), 230-48.
2
Thomas F.Reese, “Hipódromos, Carros, Fuentes, Paseantes, y la diversión
pública en la España del siglo XVIII: un programa agrario y de la antigüedad
clásica para el Salón del Prado,” in IV Jornadas de arte: El arte en tiempo de
Carlos III (Madrid: Editorial Alpuerto, 1989), 1-47. These decorations were the
work of the architect Ventura Rodríguez, the sculptor Felipe de Castro and the
academicians Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes and Vicente Gracia de la Huerta
and consisted of triumphal arches and arcades embellished with statues of virtues
and allegorical personifications, narrative reliefs, military trophies, garlands, and
swags. Laudatory inscriptions to the new monarch and his wife were contained
within cartouches and overall effect was calculated to evoke the splendour and
authority of antiquity. The temporary architecture was described in Relación de los
arcos, inscripciones y ornatos de la carrera por donde ha de passar el Rey
Nuestro Señor D. Carlos Tercero en su entrada publica. Escrita de orden del
Corregidor y Ayuntamiento de Madrid (Madrid: Joachin Ibarra), 1760. As Duke of
Parma, Charles had previously experienced temporary classical architecture on a
more modest scale in Livorno on 28 December 1731 when the British community
paid for the erection of a triumphal arch, designed by Ferdinando Ruggieri. Jesús
Urrea, Itinerario Italiano de un Monarca Español. Carlos III en Italia, 1731-1759,
exhib. cat. (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1989), 39-41.
3
The most immediate and urgent measures required at Charles’ accession were for
the improvement of the city’s sanitation and hygiene arrangements through new
water and sewerage works, rubbish collection and dispersal, and street paving. For
an overview of the re-building of Madrid under Charles III, see Santos Julía, David
Ringrose, and Cristina Seguna, Madrid: Historia de una capital (Madrid: Alianza
Editorial, 2007), especially Chapter 4 “La Ciudad como Corte: planificación
absolutista y crecimiento espontáneo” and Chapter 5 “Dos Madrid: la ciudad física
y la ciudad mágica,” both by David Ringrose. See also Charles C.Noel, “Madrid:
City of The Enlightenment,” in History Today, vol. 45, Issue 10 (October 1995):
26-32.
4
For a comprehensive architectural and sociological history of the Paseo del Prado
see Concepción Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado de Madrid: arquitectura y
desarrollo urbano en los siglos XVII y XVIII, (Madrid: Fundacion de Apoyo a la
Historia del Arte Hispánico, 2006). The developments under Charles III are
covered in Chapter VIII “La gran transformación del Prado a partir de 1767” and
the Paseo del Prado as a locus for social interaction is discussed in Chapter XIII
“Aspectos sociológicos del Prado.” See also Reese, “Hipódromos” and Charles
Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid 1750-1800 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1932), 17-24.
5
Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 208.

6
Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 208. See also José Antonio Álvarez y
Baena, Compendio historico, de las grandezas de la coronada villa de Madrid,
corte de la monarquia de España (Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1786), 33-44.
7
Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 208.
8
Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, Plano Topographico de la Villa y Corte de
Madrid, (Madrid, Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, 1769). The dedicatory
cartouche reads “Al Excmo. Señor Conde de Aranda Capitán General de los
Exercitos y Presidente del Consejo. Antº Espinosa de los Monteros Académico de
la Real de las Nobles Artes.” On Espinosa’s map, see Miguel Molina Campuzano,
Planos de Madrid de los siglos XVII y XVIII, (Madrid, Instituto de Estudios de
Administración Local, 1960), 425-54.
9
“Plano del Paseo antiguo de San Gerónimo segun se hallaba el año 1768 en el que
se empezó á demoler de órden del Excmo. Sr. Conde de Aranda Capitan General
de los Ejertos y Presidente del Consejo, y poner en la forma que demuestra el
Plano grande.”
10
Hersomilla’s drawing is in the Bibliotheca Nacional, Madrid, Call Number
Dib/15/86/51. See also Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 209-14.
11
Tomás López, Plano Geométrico de Madrid (Madrid: Tomás López, 1785). On
López’s map, see Molina Campuzano, Planos de Madrid, 455-90, and Antonio
López Gómez and Carmen Manso Porto, Cartografía del Siglo XVIII. Tomás
López en la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia,
2006), 288-9.
12
The inscription reads “Carolus III P.P. Botanices Instaurator Civium Saluti et
Oblectamento Anno MDCCLXXI” (Charles III, father of the nation, restorer of
botany for the health and diversion of his subjects).
13
Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 17 and Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del
Prado, 212-13.
14
Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 235-47, Reese, “Hipódromos,” 9-36 and
Ramón Guerra de la Vega, El Madrid de Carlos III, Guía de Arte y Architectura,
Siglo XVIII, vol. II (Madrid: Ramón Guerra de la Vega, 2002), 108-22.
15
Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 251-2 and Reese, “Hipódromos,” 33.
16
The building was designed in 1785 and after many delays in construction was
eventually opened to the public as the Real Museo del Prado in 1819. Lopezosa
Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 268-274 and Guerra de la Vega, Madrid, 150-65.
17
Antonio Ponz, Viage de España, en que se da noticia de las cosas mas
apreciables, y dignas de saberse, que hay en ella Vol. V, 2nd edn (Madrid: Joachin
Ibarra, 1782), 27.
18
Jean-François Bourgoing, Modern State of Spain: Exhibiting a complete view of
its topography, government, laws, religion, finances, naval and military
establishments: and of society, manners, arts, sciences, agriculture and commerce
in that country, vol. I (London: John Stockdale, 1807), 247-8.
19
Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 18.
20
“Bourgoing’s Travels in Spain,” in William Fordyce Mavor, A General
Collection of Voyages and Travels, including the most interesting records of
navigators and travellers from the discovery of America, by Columbus, in 1492, to
90 Chapter Three

the Travels of Lord Valentia, vol. XXXIII (London, Sherwood: Neely and Jones,
1813), 124.
21
“La parte mas freqüentada es la que se llama el Salon, donde se reune un
concurso prodigioso de gentes que vienen de todas partes, á pie y en coche, á
disfrutar de la agradable prespectiva que ofrece la notable diversidad de tantos y
tan variados objetos como allí se presentan. Aquí es donde la opulenta riqueza
viene á ostentar sus brillantes carrozas, los jóvenes a caballo á mostrar su gallardia
y destreza, las mugeres á lucir sus joyas y gracias, y a donde el pueblo va llegando
en tropel á contemplar, este espectáculo. Durante las tardes y noches de verano se
ven en este espacioso salon personas de todas clases y de ámbos sexos…”
([Anon.], Paseo por Madrid ó Guía del forastero en la corte (Madrid: Repullés
1815), 98).
22
Tapestries were only woven for the Autumn and Winter palaces of El Escorial
and El Pardo. The Spring palace of Aranjuez and the Summer palace of La Granja
contained no tapestries or upholstery and instead featured lavish collections of
paintings and exquisite gardens. On the Tapestry Cartoons and their subject matter
see Jutta Held, Die Genrebilder der Madrider Teppichmanufaktur und die Anfänge
Goyas (Berlin: Mann Verlag, 1971). See also Janis Tomlinson, Francisco Goya.
The Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid (Cambridge, New
York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8-25. Tomlinson (178-
9), adduces some didactic purpose to the selection of certain tapestry subjects for
the apartments of the future monarchs.
23
Bourgoing, Modern State of Spain, vol. I, 273.
24
“La Puerta de Alcalá mirado desde la esquina de la Calle de Alcalá inmediata a
la Cibeles: En el primer término un caballero y una Señora con una niña al lado, y
a el lado del caballero un niño entretenido con un perro, y detrás de estos la fuente
de la Cibeles con la línea de árboles y algunas gentes alrededor y de ella siguen
salir de los árboles en perspectiva hasta la citada Puerta, y cerca de la fuente un
hombre que lleva un caballo del diestro, y detrás otro caballero con su jinete y
caballo que está bebiendo… Al otro costado cuatro militares en conversación y
detrás de estos la línea de árboles.” The painting, 442 x 345 cm., is in the Museo
de Historia, Madrid. Alfonso Pérez Sanchez and José Diez García, Museo
Municipal [Madrid], Catálogo de Pinturas (Madrid, Ayuntamiento de Madrid,
1990), 109; Madrid Pintado. La imagen de Madrid a través de la pintura, exhib.
cat. (Madrid, Museo Municipal, 1992), and Held, Madrider Teppichmanufaktur,
86.
25
On the Alcalá gate see Guerra de la Vega, Madrid, 90-101. The inscriptions on
both the city and country sides of the gate read “Rege Carlo III Anno
MDCCLXXVIII” (King Charles III reigns Year 1778).
26
Richard Twiss, Travels through Portugal and Spain in 1772 and 1773 (London:
Robinson, Becket and Robson, 1775), 140 and Bourgoing, Modern State of Spain
vol. I, 247.
27
The Bull-Ring at the Puerta de Alcalà, Madrid’s first permanent taurine arena,
was financed by Ferdinand VI to help fund the General Hospitals of Madrid.
Constructed from 1749, it occupied a site once used for the burning of victims of

the Inquisition and was designed by the chief architect to the city, Juan Bautista
Sachetti with contributions from Ventura Rodríguez and Fernando Moradillo. An
unadorned circular functional building consisting of a three-storey enclosing wall,
covered galleries, raked seating and an arena, it was renovated in 1772 under the
supervision of Antonio Plo and was in use until 1870. The present calles Claudio
Coello and Conde de Aranda occupy its former site and it is also commemorated
by a plaque on a building next to the Buen Retiro metro station. Urban and sanitary
improvements meant that the Puerta de Alcalà Bull-Ring was replaced by the Plaza
de Toros de Goya, inaugurated in 1874. This in turn was replaced by the Las
Ventas Bull-Ring, opened in 1931 and which is still in operation.
28
“Bourgoing’s Travels in Spain,” 123.
29
Charles Esdaile, The Peninsular War. A New History (London: Penguin, 2003),
20 and 42, and Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 232-7.
30
Guía del forastero, XXII and Plano Geométrico de Madrid, index.
31
Bourgoing, Modern State of Spain, II, 75.
32
The tapestry of Aguirre’s The Alcalá Gate and the Cybele Fountain is located in
the Borbón apartments of the Escorial Palace. Held, Madrider Teppichmanufaktur,
86.
33
Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 24-5.
34
“que representa una vista del Real Sitio del Retiro mirando azia el Jardin del
cavallo, el qual se ve par encima de la tapia; un hombre y una mujer subidos sobre
un pretil que allí ay para poder verle con un muchacho que intenta subirse: Dos
señoras sentadas en conversación sobre el mismo pretil; una pasiega sentada a el
pie y sombra de unos árboles dando de mamar un niño, yo su lado una mujer en
pie, con la mantilla sobre los hombros haciéndole alguna fiesta. No lejos se ve un
jardinero con un cesto de fruta sobre la cabeza; y en primer término otro jardinero
vestido de majo presentando a una señora varias flores, que recibe su criado en un
panuelo blanco; detras del jardinero se ve un acompañante de la señora, corto de
vista que busca alguna moneda para gratificar a el dicho; subiendo los escalones
por donde se baja a el parterre va un petimetre con una señora de bata asidos del
brazo. A la izquierda del quadro se ve sobre un pedestal la estatua de Isis, a la que
está mirando un militar vestido de azul apoyado sobre un bastón y junto a éste
sentada en tierra, está una señora con bata de color rosa y a su lado y vuelto de
espaldas, un militar vestido de encarnado con el sombrero puesto sentado en un
escalón: Hay asimismo variedad de árboles en primero y segundo termino” (Pérez
Sanchez and Diez Garcia, Museo Municipal Catálogo, 116, Madrid Pintado, 118
and Held, Madrider Teppichmanufaktur, 139). The painting, oil on canvas, 260 x
363 cm., is in the Museo de Historia, Madrid and the tapestry, which reverses the
design of the cartoon, is in the Borbón apartments of the Escorial Palace. Another
example of this tapestry is housed in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
35
“Bourgoing’s Travels in Spain,” 306.
36
“Bourgoing’s Travels in Spain,” 306-7. See also Kany, Life and manners in
Madrid, 220-3 and Tomlinson, Goya Tapestry Cartoons, 31-5.
37
John Lynch, Bourbon Spain 1700-1808 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 261-8.
38
Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 174-88.
92 Chapter Three

39
On the links between vision, moral corruption and satire in Enlightenment Spain,
see Andrew Schulz, Goya’s Caprichos. Aesthetics, Perception and the Body
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 120-39.
40
Lopezosa Aparicio, El Paseo del Prado, 467-9 and Kany, Life and Manners in
Madrid, 21-2.
41
Held, Madrider Teppichmanufaktur, 53, illustration 53.
42
Le antichità di Ercolano esposte, vol. 1 (Naples: Accademia Ercolanese di
Archeologia, 1757). The frontispiece engraving of Charles III was engraved by
Filippo Morghen after Camillo Paderni. See Royal Splendor in the Enlightenment.
Charles IV of Spain as Patron and Collector, exhib. cat. (Dallas, Meadows
Museum / Patrimonio Nacional, 2010), 133-4, no.5.
43
Henry Stuart Jones (ed.), A Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures Preserved in the
Municipal Collections of Rome. The Sculptures of the Museo Capitolino (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1912), 6, 354, no.15 and 394, no. 25. The statue’s head
decoration appears to be a solar disc and lotus flower rather than the globe, snakes
and palmette as suggested in the Jones catalogue. My thanks are due to Dr Vanessa
Mackenzie of the University of Warwick for her iconographic suggestions.
44
Jens Daehner, The Herculaneum women: history, context, identities (Los
Angeles: Getty Publications, 2007), 4-10 and 20-36.
45
Jorge Maier Allende, “Las Antigüedades en palacio: Ideología y función de las
colleciones reales de arte antiguo en el siglo XVIII,” Reales Sitios, Año XLVII, no.
183, Primer Trimestre 2010, 17.
46
The demolitions to form the Plaza de Oriente began under the brief reign of
Joseph I. Under Isabel II of Borbón, Tacca’s statue of Philip IV was placed on a
newly designed pedestal with bas-reliefs by Francisco Elías Vallejo and José
Tomás. Elías was also responsible for the bronze lions at the foot of the pedestal
and the marble figures of the rivers Jarama and Manzanares. The ensemble was
inaugurated on 10 October 1844. Eulalia Palomeque, Ordenación y transformaciones
urbanas del casco antiguo madrileño durante los siglos XIX y XX (Madrid:
Instituto de Estudios Madrilenos, 1976),197-9.
47
Madrid Pintado, 130-3 and Francisco Bayeu 1734-1795, exhib. cat. (Zaragoza:
Ibercaja, 1996), 204-5. Francisco’s sketch, oil on canvas 0.37 x 0.56 m., is in the
Museo del Prado and Ramón’s cartoon, also oil on canvas, 255 x 385 cm., is on
deposit in the Museo de Historia, Madrid, from the Prado. The tapestry hangs in
the Antesala de Embajadores in the Escorial Palace.
48
“Una vista del Paseo de Delicias con sus arboledas, y el campo que se alcanza a
ver, y caserías, está poblado de varias gentes que han salido a paseo como señoras
y señores, unos a lo militar y otros con capa, todas las figures en su degradación
según pide la perspectiva de dichas arboledas” (Alfonso Pérez Sanchez and José
Diez García, Museo Municipal Catálogo, 112).
49
Ponz, Viage de España, vol. V, 28-9, Madrid Pintado, 130 and Francisco
Bayeu, 204.
50
Bourgoing, Modern Spain, vol. IV, 241.
51
Paseo de Madrid, 99 and Frederick Augustus Fischer, Travels in Spain in 1797
and 1798 (London: Longman and Rees, 1802), 150-1.

52
Held, Madrider Teppichmanufaktur, 54, illustration 55.
53
Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 224-7 and Bourgoing, Modern State of
Spain, vol. II, 7-11.
54
Ponz, Viage de España, vol. V, 30.
55
Concha Herrero Carretero, “An Introduction to Goya’s Cartoons and
Tapestries,” in Goya: Images of Women, exhib. cat., ed. Janis Tomlinson
(Washington, New Haven and London: National Gallery of Art and Yale
University Press, 2002), 96-7. See also Tomlinson, Goya Tapestry Cartoons, 146.
56
That the monarchy took paseos as part of court life, within the precincts of royal
palaces, is testified to by Joseph Townsend. At the Palace of Aranjuez he
observed: “In the evening, after the siesta, the princesses, attended by their guards,
the grandees, and some of the foreign ministers, enter their coaches, and move
slowly on, saluting each other as often as they pass. By the side of this long
extended mall, is a pleasant walk, well filled with company, and in which the
princesses occasionally walk” (Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain in the
years 1786 and 1787, 3 vols (London: C. Dilly, 1791), vol. 1, 334).
CHAPTER FOUR
EARLY FORMS OF FLÂNERIE IN THE GERMAN

JOURNAL LONDON UND PARIS (1798-1815)
CHRISTIAN DEULING
Between 1781 and 1788, Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) had

published his Tableau de Paris and set a new standard for describing the
metropolis. Instead of depicting the totality of the big city, Mercier offered
a large number of miniatures and urban scenes. Each of those could be
read for itself but also contained references to other, disparate scenes, thus
expressing the modern paradox of the big city: its totality as well as its
fragmentary character. As Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann has pointed out
in her research study on the “tableau,” the unity of the text is not to be
found in the contents but - if at all - in its discourse.1 For didactic reasons,
Mercier had structured his text in short chapters and stresses single traits
rather than general regularities. The “point central” is the police of Paris
and their secret activities. The “fragmentary universe” which is Mercier’s
Paris nonetheless holds together, each detail being exemplary or
immanently aesthetically relevant.2
In 1798, the German publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747-1822),
an important entrepreneur in classical Weimar, published several new
journals in a period of expansion of the literary market, one of them being
London und Paris. This journal seems to correspond, in its comparative
approach, to a manuscript of Mercier from 1781, which he never
published. In that manuscript, published in 1982,3 Mercier drew a negative
picture of Paris and its society and contrasted it with a utopian vision of
London. In his Tableau de Paris, Mercier's “tableau” becomes an aesthetic
term which is able to overcome the paradox of fragmentation and totality.
Within the “tableau,” all single sketches of the metropolis find their place
within a loose structure. Mercier wants to paint a moral physiognomy of
the city which is also the physiognomy of its time.
London und Paris is the attempt to transfer Mercier's concept of the
“tableau” to another medium: the journal. It thus corresponds to the
Early Forms of Flânerie in the German Journal London und Paris 95
inexhaustability of writing the physiognomy of the big city. Moreover, the

concept is also applied to London, and a comparative perspective is added.
Its editors, Friedrich Justin Bertuch and the ancient philologist Carl
August Böttiger (1760-1835), were sure that they could accelerate the
process of contributing to the discourses of the two big cities thanks to its
periodic appearance which allowed them always to remain topical. The co-
existence of a London- and a Paris-part and a third, satirical part
comprising the commentaries on the attached caricatures written by
Böttiger, accounted for the comparison of states of affairs in both cities.
Thematical correspondences were not obligatory but often arranged by the
editors who decided on which of the journalists' material they wanted to
publish.
In their programmatic “plan and announcement” of the very first issue
in 1798, the editors Bertuch and Böttiger wrote that they wanted to
generate a “Tableau mouvant” of these two cities, immediately recorded
and put into effect by experienced observers on site, and renewed
periodically, thus providing a sketch of those two “theatres” which were,
as they pointed out, rehearsing daily performances at the expense of the
rest of Europe.4 They were sure that their undertaking was worthwhile,
morally acceptable, and would never be boring.
In one of the first reports from London by Johann Christian Hüttner
(1766-1847), the journalist describes how a traveller approaches the city.
He starts with some general objective remarks about London and goes on
to exemplify a traveller's experience by making up an observing first-
person narrator who uses exclamations to underline the authenticity and
the immediacy of his experiences:
London is such a monstrosity, extending itself beyond its boundaries, that

you can never say: Now I am there! – this is true from which direction you
enter the city. At little notice you are in the middle of things. How large,
what a crush of pedestrians! There, my fellow citizens, also the Jews of
Frankfurt! - That is a really beautiful shop! - At the end of the street, there
is a dreadful turmoil. Everybody is running to that point: surely, someone
has been assassinated. No! It was a ballad-monger.5
Hüttner here evokes the illusion of conveying his impressions of London

to the reader at the same moment he is experiencing them.
Crime and prostitution is dealt with from the perspective of the state
and its police throughout the journal: the alleged low moral standards,
especially of the lower classes, in both London and Paris are repeatedly
lamented. Authorities like the Scottish writer Colquouhn, who had written
a book on London's police, are mentioned frequently. The journal seems to
96 Chapter Four
ask how crime, prostitution and begging could be fought most effectively.
The moral codes of the time did not allow Hüttner to write freely on
prostitution in Britain's capital; instead, he claimed to have entered a
brothel without realising it.
Having seen a public leisure location a couple of days ago, I wanted to find
a place for dinner before going home, as it was already late, when I heard
something like dancing music. ... When I went around the corner, I saw
several people standing in front of a house and realized that this was the
location I was searching for. When I had approached the house, a girl who
I immediately recognized as being one of the good-willing, assured me that
I would find it warmer and more agreeable upstairs than in the cold street.
These girls know how to talk to you and persuade you in a way that I found
myself in a fairly illuminated room before I could have told you how that
had happened. The dynamics of people there were more than funny and I
soon realized what kind of people had assembled here. ... - I was extremely
glad to have made so much experience for only one single pound, a golden
chain and a few pieces of jewellery and to have witnessed what you call a
hop.
N.B. About 14 days after this had happened to me, the owner of the
establishment and many of her guests, male and female, were arrested by
the nowadays quite effective police who had finally destroyed this and
other locations.6
Although Hüttner's outrage seems to fit the moral codes of his time, his
enumeration of a pound, a golden chain and a few pieces of jewellery
seems to suggest that he may have had more than just dinner in that
establishment, thus undermining the moral standards he had to officially
stick to, and providing a thrilling read.
Friedrich Theophil Winckler (1772-1807), the Paris-correspondent,
wrote about prostitution in a similar way, defending his higher moral
perspective:
Indeed, they had been living by their public indecency to a very high
degree. In the evening, you could not pass many streets without being
addressed in a very direct way. They would grab you by the arm and try to
drag you in their holes. No other place was worse than La Place des
Italiens, at the corner with rue St Marc. They were standing here in their
dozens (I don't exaggerate): and passing there in the evening meant rowing
through sirens, for one would offer herself on your left, another on your
right side, and many times (as I had to pass there every evening), I feared
the worst for my sleeves due to their tight grab. ... Since then, the police
had made several such arrests, and it seems as if they seriously wanted to
have an eye on public decency at least.7
The social question is asked by neither of the journalists. They did not ask
why these women worked as prostitutes and under what conditions they
had to live. Prostitution, as begging and crime, was seen as a social curse
that had to be restricted by the police.
In his reports from Paris, Winckler repeatedly links accounts from
daily life to their political implications, for example when he writes about
newspaper sellers, their announcements and headlines:
What they announce publicly (which they do despite the fact that it is
forbidden) is normally arranged in a way that you would assume
something juicy behind it and buy it immediately. As soon as you read it,
you realize that the story is either a commonplace or just the opposite of
what had been promised in the headlines or a reprint of another article with
a strange title. ... When Bonaparte had his ceremonial reception at the
Directoire, those streets through which Bonaparte was expected to proceed,
together with the names of those persons who were expected to form his
entourage, were being shouted out the whole morning. ... Everyone bought
the paper and the people were gathering in the streets that had been
announced before. In the end, it became clear that not a single word of it
had been true.8
Very often, the reports of Hüttner in London and Winckler in Paris are
abstractions of many walks through the cities, summing up the main
characteristics of the journalists' experiences and showing what is typical
rather than offering one specific and unique experience. In this way,
Hüttner informs his readers about family life in London on Sundays:
It’s nine o'clock. The milkwomen crying milk are only now appearing and
Fanny or Betty has them measure up milk for breakfast for a farthing. The
milkmaid would make a streak of chalk at the door, or on a piece of wood,
in order to add it up after 14 days’ time. Then the family gets dressed
properly and the father goes for a walk with his children while dear mother
prepares a delicious meal or carries it to the baker. But don’t they go to
church? Yes! In other cities of England and in the country. But in London,
the craftsman doesn't go to church very often, on average. But still, this
very same man will go to see the debating society tomorrow night where
the Methodists will be attacked.9
At the end, however, the publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch (or his leading
editor Carl August Böttiger) calls into question in a footnote what Hüttner
has just stated before, rejecting what other German authors had written
about Britain: “But all in all, many middle-class people are still very
devout. Wendeborn is too strict, Küttner too lenient and excusing against
the ruling church. The editor.”10
98 Chapter Four
Hüttner is constantly under pressure to surpass the model of Mercier's

Tableau de Paris, finding characteristic details and examples to sketch the
social classes of London. At one point, he sketches a social typology of the
different classes by differentiating among different doorknockers and
different ways of knocking at the door.11 Hüttner witnesses the active
political participation of the Londoners who laugh about and discuss
political and social caricatures by James Gillray, Isaac Cruikshank,
Charles Williams and others, either by flattening their noses on the
windows of the caricature shops, by borrowing series of caricatures in a
folder that they had the shop-owner send to a coffee house for a shilling,
or even by buying them, if they could afford it (Fig. 4-1). He observed
changes in reading habits and reading facilities, such as reading rooms:
In the last six weeks, at least twenty different reading rooms have opened
in London where you can read all newspapers and many plays for only one
or two Pence. The people's demand for news and the increase in newspaper
prices have led to the adoption of this French custom.12
Both journalists, Hüttner and Winckler, and the editors, F.J. Bertuch
and C.A. Böttiger (from 1804 on, Bertuch’s son Carl took over the task of
editing the journal from his father), often referred to the concept of
national character and national humour and wit with all stereotypes
involved. They never really call those stereotypes into question and think
about them in relative terms only if certain caricaturists had gone too far.
Contrasting the London- and the Paris-chapter of one of the eight issues of
London und Paris, which were published per year, was always an option.
Sometimes, however, the journalists themselves drew parallels between
the two big cities, especially if their comparison was concerned with
English people living in Paris and the French living in London, most of
them royalist émigrés:
There are many French restaurants in London now. They can be compared
to the English restaurants according to the French and English national
character. In the French houses, there is much noise, people talk to each
other freely and listen to the latest news for free, mixed with aristocratic
remarks. In English houses, it is calm, you are being served well, you can
hardly hear anyone talking at a large table, and you should not be afraid of
being addressed. The English restaurants are clean; as for the French, you
have to turn a blind eye on them.13
Fig. 4-1. Carl Starcke after James Gillray, John Bull taking an luncheon, hand-
coloured etching, London und Paris, vol. 2, issue 7, 1798, No. XXIV.
The Alsatian Friedrich Theophil Winckler (1772-1807) worked as an

assistant for Louis-Aubin Millin (1759-1818), head of the Musée des
Médailles at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He had established two salons in
his house: one literary salon where many French and German learned
people met regularly and where they could read topical French and
German newspapers and journals, and one musical salon, more than twice
as large as the first, located at Millin's library, where the women
contributed to the salon life by playing the piano or the violin and by
singing. Forty to fifty people met regularly at Millin's salons once a
month. The importance of Millin, who was also the editor of the Magasin
encyclopédique, as a mediator and transmitter within the cultural transfer
between France and Germany has only recently become evident, thanks to
the edition of the letters between Millin and Carl August Böttiger by
Geneviève Espagne and Bénédicte Savoy.14
100 Chapter Four
Winckler was especially interested in the French vaudeville theatre

plays and their combination of music and text. He collected and edited two
volumes of vaudevilles for the German editor Friedrich Frommann in
Jena, published in 1800-1801.15 Bertuch criticized the fact that this
collection only comprised the urban vaudevilles whereas the more rural
pieces were missing. Winckler contrasts the French vaudevilles with the
English caricatures, arguing that French humour had manifested itself in
the vaudeville theatre whereas the English humour expressed itself in the
genre of caricature. At one point, Winckler recommends to Bertuch a
vaudeville entitled: Il faut un état, ou la revue de l'an six. Proverbe en un
acte, en prose et en vaudevilles. He calls it a sort of “tableau de Paris” and
regards it therefore as being especially apt for the present journal.16 The
close relations of the different forms of satire become evident in the fact
that one vaudeville reflects upon caricatures and their artists such as Carle
Vernet, the founder of the famous series of incroyables and merveilleuses,
social caricatures that refer to ridiculous forms of fashion and style.17
In the first two years of the journal, the journalists, especially Hüttner
in London, had been testing experimental ways of writing, reflecting on
themselves and their moods when walking the streets. In later years,
examples like the following cannot be found. Obviously, their daily
routine or instructions by the editors had led to their concentrating on
contents rather than on their emotions:
If I am in a huff, exhausted or not able to develop ideas; - when I walk

down the streets, a hundred details attract my attention and entertain me.
So the promising and cute labels of the shops are worth reading sometimes.
“Shops” do not exist anymore: There are only magazines and warehouses.
So there are shoe-, hat- and glove-magazines and boot-, skirt- and linen-
warehouses. I am not denying that many of such shops really deserve those
names; but I am talking about the small arches, which have not more than a
dozen pieces in stock which are even deceivingly expanded and presented
in an illuminated window whereas the “magazine” is not more than a tube.
Near Holborn you can read on a large shop sign in golden letters: “The
best-priced hat-warehouse in the world.” Above there is a terrible hat and a
large lantern. All Saturdays this shop is being illuminated by I don't know
how many lights, so that the light is shining widely over the street and
from above a large candle is throwing a halo over the hat. That man knows
the Londoners: They want to be dazzled. On these evenings, his shop is
full of people who are returning from their work. - The well-known
Lackington, who has worked his way up from a shoemaker to a bookseller
and who has written an autobiography, calls his shop, which is constructed
in a fashionable way in the form of a rotunda and filled with many
thousand books, “the temple of the muses.”18 (Fig. 4-2)
Fig. 4-2. [Anonymous English artist] Temple of the Muses, hand-coloured etching,
London und Paris, vol. 4, issue 8, No. XXIV. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha,
classmark Opp 8° 708/1 (4).
In London, freedom of speech and freedom of the press were granted to a

much larger extent than in Paris, where the Police exerted tight measures
on print shop owners when they were selling too critical prints. As a very
attentive observer, Winckler goes on to identify measures of oppression in
daily life. At one point, he writes about the “cris de Paris,” the sellers of
goods or journals some of whom he believes are paid by the police:
I suppose that some of the Crieurs de Journaux and ballad-mongers are

spying for the police. They used to be spies then. And indeed: Those
people can remain standing in front of a house without causing suspicion.
This thought came to my mind when I heard a ballad-monger singing in
front of a house, the other day, for at least one hour, although he had sold
almost nothing. And before he left, another ballad-monger started to sing at
102 Chapter Four
the other end of the street who also stayed there for a very long time, as if
he had taken over the other man's shift.19
In another Paris article in the second issue of 1799, the editor adds a
footnote concerning the “cris de Paris”:
As almost every large city has its own exclaimers of goods with certain
costumes and melodies, so it has long been a speculation for print sellers to
reproduce them and sell whole suites of them. You have such collections
from Vienna, St. Petersburg, London and Leipzig, which suit the
caricatures very well. But the idea to set their cries to music was nowhere
more adaptable than with the street criers of Paris, to whom Mercier had
already dedicated their own chapter in his older Tableaux de Paris (ch.
379, T.V. p. 67) .... Some of our readers will enjoy finding those
dissonances on a print attached to this page. The editor.20
An anonymous French artist created a political caricature and disguised

it as such a “cris de Paris” print (Fig. 4-3). What we see are workers who
say in their speech bubbles that they were delighted that they no longer
had to carry the robes of the 750 members of the parliament, an allusion to
Bonaparte’s coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire. According to Winckler, the
print shop owner had told him that the Bureau Central not only confiscated
all copies of the print but also the copper plates which were destroyed. So
Winckler bought the only copy left and sent it to Weimar where it was
copied again to be reprinted in London und Paris.21
Hüttner uses the form of a fictional dialogue in order to convey the
atmosphere of an evening in London to his readers. In an article entitled
“An evening walk in London,” August 31st, 1798, it is the illumination of
shop windows that attracts the attention of the passing strollers:
Isn't it a marvellous sight, my friend said, if you look down a main street of
London; the large crystal lamps illuminate everything just as if it was
daylight. - Even more so the shops, I interrupted him. Just look how one
arch stands next to the other, and how one is even more beautiful, and
more richly illuminated than the other. [...] You really believe to look into
an ocean of light in some shops, especially if white cloth is generally
reflecting the beams.22
Fig. 4-3. [Carl Starcke (?) after an anonymous French artist] Les Nouveaux Cris de
Paris, hand-coloured etching, London und Paris, vol. 5, issue 1, 1800, no. II.
Hüttner calls the partners in dialogue A and B, thus indicating its fictional
character:
A. What a colourful light that is shining out of every window! Do they sell
here water in red, green, yellow colour?
B. No! That's all for decoration. It's a pharmacist's shop, and the large,
coloured glasses do not contain anything but normal water. But isn't the
effect of it good in the evening, especially from the distance? Let us go
across the street and look at the transparent paper windows! Here you have
all shades and colours in the different frames, illuminated by extensive
light! On the printed paper fields, framed in silk, you can read:
antiscorbutic drops, aperient pills, medications that make you sweat, the
famous restorative which wipes away all sins of youth, Velno's vegetabilic
syrup, the famous appetite powder, the brilliant universal medicine by
Doctor F., and so on. Just look how the inexperienced farmer, the shy
betrayed woman, the modest craftsman, the extremely witty medication
104 Chapter Four
skeptic and the excessive man of pleasure enter the shop and buy, trapped
by that kind of quacksalverish boasting. For below the medicine's title,
there are letters of people who have allegedly been cured by those means.23
Although Hüttner lets his characters be fascinated by the illumination of

shop windows, they do not lose their critical thinking: quacksalverism24
remains what it is, even if it is wonderfully illuminated.
Winckler in Paris never loses his political sharpness and provides some
stylistically remarkable pieces of critical writing like the following one
concerning the public meeting of the Free Society of Arts and Sciences in
the Louvre:
After the account of the so-called proceedings of the society, several

additional more or less boring, superfluous, obvious or erratic essays were
presented. One of the most superfluous essays was that about the question:
Will the French Revolution have positive or negative effects on literature?
- I want to see which compliments would be granted to that person who
had the guts of arguing for the latter in a Société Libre des Sciences,
Lettres et Arts without running the risk of being sent to a location of little
charm on the next possible occasion. I therefore regard a question as
superfluous to the utmost extent whose answer can be predicted as being
without any alternative to those who want to talk about the matter.25
In his reports, Winckler not only reveals the political implications of

everyday life: He is also doing the opposite - revealing the banal and
apolitical motivations of large crowds of people who were seen as
evidence for their patriotism by the French Directoire who had arranged a
series of celebrations remembering the French Revolution. Observing the
official celebration of July 14th on the Champ de Mars, Winckler
deconstructs the pathos involved and belittles the patriotic significance of
the occasion, arguing that many of the spectators did not have political
intentions but wanted to see attractions and be entertained:
The political journals will have informed you that a huge crowd of people
had assembled on the Champ de Mars, or rather around it. That is indeed
true; alas, a neutral man has to smile when he learns such positive news
that is attributed to the French bourgeois people. Other reasons and
circumstances account for that fact. Everyone who knows only a little the
character of the Parisians and their curiosity, will easily understand how a
considerable number of people can assemble for any of those celebrations,
given the fact that work is forbidden on such a day anyway. Many of the
inhabitants and especially people from outside Paris want to see the
“Directeurs” and ministers in their costumes they had so much heard of
and seen in the windows of print shops. … Rumours had been spread
several days before (and I am not saying that it happened on purpose) that
some elephants that had arrived only lately would decorate this celebration,
and that they would be brought from the Jardin des Plantes via the new
Boulevard, or Boulevard du Midi, to the Champ de Mars. ... A
circumstance that let many people believe that the elephants would indeed
parade at that celebration, was the fact that the middle part of that
Boulevard from the Jardin des Plantes to the Champ de Mars had been
covered with sand. But instead of those Indian beasts, only the
“Directeurs” were to be seen how they slowly approached the location of
the celebration in their carts with their guards around them.
The aerostatic balloon, that was officially announced, probably had

attracted most of the people there. For that reason, many people arrived
only late, after the celebration had started, for they had come only to see
the balloon. Others were curious about the military exercises that should
take place after the celebration. [...] The decoration that had been prepared
for the present celebration and probably for other national celebrations to
follow this year, was certainly nice and in good style. And indeed I
couldn't hear anything negative from the persons present but on the
contrary, more than one “Ah! je n'avais jamais vû quelque-chose de si
beau!” - with the exception of the criticism (which is directed against the
workers rather than against the architect on whom everything depends),
that the work has not been finished quite properly and was therefore
incomplete. There is always something missing.26
Winckler goes on to say that the presentation of the balloon failed: it

had been filled with “inflammable air” which caused a breath-taking smell
over the whole Champ de Mars, and was to be burnt in mid-air,
representing symbols of the monarchy, while a small boat with a
mannequin figure was supposed to land smoothly. The balloon, however,
caught fire too early and the boat came down in an irregular way. A canon
salute was fired to indicate the ending of the celebration and a final shot
opened the Champ de Mars for the masses. Winckler compares his
observation with the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 when the
Parisians went to the Ecole Militaire in order to get hold of the weapons
they could find there:
What a difference between a Parisian on July 14, 1789, and a Parisian on

July 14, 1798! There he takes to arms and believes to have destroyed not
only the Bastille but all oppression and tyranny in general. Here he stands
on the same Champs de Mars, void of weapons for three years, and now
comes again to forget his boredom by some salutes and a burnt balloon! -
To me it seemed as if the military exercises had been a satire of the earlier
armament of the people.27
106 Chapter Four
Winckler's reports from Paris lack the aimless searching movement of the
casual stroller. His flâneur is a political analyst: it is his political vigour
that renders him always engaged, observing the society around him
sharply, sometimes cynically, and always with a political mind.
While Hüttner often frequents the caricature shops of Hannah
Humphrey at 27 St James Street, who sold prints by James Gillray, and
S.W. Fores who sold those by Isaac Cruikshank, among others, Winckler
is trying to find French caricatures in Paris, often with less success, due to
police raids and the less developed originality of the French prints. On one
occasion, he realizes how much the French caricatures owe the English
artists, thus giving evidence of a fascinating example of the cultural
transfer of images:
For quite some time, there has been a gallery in the former monastery near
the Place Vendôme, where a large collection of copper plates and English
caricatures is on offer in three large arches. [...] Whenever I went there, not
more than six or eight persons were there. I think this may be due to the
hidden entry that has to be searched and is not shown by any signs. How
differently do the Londoners decorate their caricature-shops in St James
Street and the Strand!
When I had a look at the English caricatures, I learned that most of the
prints that appeared under the title L'Aristocrate Suisse, Le Democrate du
pays de Vaud etc., of which I had prepared an account in the first issue of
“London und Paris,” were indeed of English origin. I saw the same
caricatures here, which our caricaturist just copied and to which he added
another subtitle; for those English originals referred to the French
Revolution. - So the limited amount of French caricatures is even more
diminished. - Suum cuique.28
Winckler realizes that English caricatures were copied by French artists

and borrowed by being set in another political context.
Shop signs were always fascinating for Hüttner, who provides one
especially bizarre example: he mentions a dentist who had prepared a sign
for his practice by assembling many hundred teeth of all sizes and forms,
nicely fixed in a frame for everyone to see. In addition, the dentist had
provided a delightful picture of the whole operation of dragging out teeth
on another plate.29
One article has the headline: “Contemplation of a long street (for
example Baker Street) near Portman Square. Almost six o'clock in the
evening.”
Listen! How the carriages are rolling everywhere in distant alleys! These
are all wealthy people! The horses, the slim and beautiful horses are flying
over the cobbles, sparking! At the end of this street where both lines of
houses become very narrow (I was amazed to see that in a peep box when I
was young), a majestic place is opening up, a square, illuminated by many
hundred lamps. That is so great, so sublime! Although I have seen that
many different times, it always attracts my attention again! It seems as if
all this wealth was m i n e .30
Beginning with the third year of its existence, innovative forms of writing
that can be linked to the history of the flâneur, characterized by its
subjectivity and expressivity as well as the distance of the observer, cease
to occur. Although we may say that in later years, the text of London und
Paris seems to be traditionally rooted in the late Enlightenment, focusing
on contents rather than on the individual observer, we can argue that the
journal goes on to be ahead of its time, at least until the beginning of the
French occupation after the battle of Jena in 1806. What is so special about
that journal is its combination of text and image which turns it into a
“mixed genre.” Text and image together form a third part that cannot be
easily reduced to only one element. After the first few years, the editors
gave up the concept of “tableau” and tried to adapt another concept as the
principle of their journal: the panorama. Not only are several panoramas
described in both London and Paris, “panorama” also becomes part of the
subtitle for each volume of the journal, comprising four issues.31 The
perspective on society now seems to be more from above; it no longer
focuses at the lower classes as it did in the beginning. The journal wants to
appeal to the middle class as well as to the nobility. The concept of the
tableau mouvant, which includes the lower classes, is no longer needed.
The history of the journal London und Paris seems to be inextricably
bound to the rise and fall of Bonaparte: Winckler commented on
Bonaparte's rise in an admiring way and the earliest French caricature on
Bonaparte is copied in London und Paris (Fig. 4-4). Under the French
occupation beginning in 1806, the journal slowly declines to a streamlined
organ of Bonaparte's expansion policy. And when news spread in 1814
that Bonaparte had fled from Elba, the editor's son, Carl Bertuch, then
participating in the Congress of Vienna, decided to close down the journal
as censorship in Vienna had become too strong and he could find no
qualified journalists there who were willing to write for that journal in
times of unrest.
In its first two years, we can identify innovative ways of writing
reports from both London and Paris. Winckler in Paris and Hüttner in
London have become important figures in the early professionalization of
the foreign correspondent. Their early forms of flânerie are characterized,
in Winckler's case, by a strong capacity for politically oriented observation
108 Chapter Four
Fig. 4-4. [Carl Starcke (?) after an anonymous French artist] Les derniers
monumens … de la République, hand-coloured etching, London und Paris, vol. 4,
issue 7, 1799, no. XX. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, classmark Opp 8° 708/1 (4)
and analysis, and, in Hüttner's, by his tendency to avoid openly political

statements and include aesthetic observations of London. Thus, the journal
London und Paris could contribute to the process of gaining consciousness
by the German middle class as well as the nobility that the journal had
aimed at. Both aspects, the political as well as the aesthetic, played an
important part in these early forms of flânerie which constitute moments
of modernity around 1800.
Notes
1
Cf. Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann, Brennpunkt der Welt. C'est l'abrégé de
l'univers. Großstadterfahrung und Wissensdiskurs in der pragmatischen Paris-
Literatur 1780-1830 (Bielefeld, 1991), 121.
2
On the tableau tradition, cf. also Karlheinz Stierle, “Baudelaires ‘Tableaux
parisiens’ und die Tradition des ‘Tableau de Paris’,” in Poetica 6 (1974), 285-322;
Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann, “An den Grenzen der Sprache. Zur
Wirkungsgeschichte von Merciers Tableau de Paris in Deutschland,’’ in arcadia
27 (1992), 141-61.
3
Louis-Sébastien Mercier: Parallèle de Paris et de Londres, ed. Claude Bruneteau
and Bernard Cottret (Paris, 1982).
4
Cf. [Friedrich Justin Bertuch and Carl August Böttiger:] “Plan und
Ankündigung,” in London und Paris, vol. 1, no. 1, 5.
5
“London ist ein so aus allem Geschicke gewachsenes Ungeheuer, daß man, von
welcher Seite auch die Einfahrt geschieht, nie recht sagen kann: Nun bin ich da!
Nicht lange, so ist man mitten drin. Wie groß, welch ein Gewühl von Fußgängern!
Da sind ja meine Landsleute, die Frankfurter Juden auch! - Das ist wirklich ein
schöner Laden - am Ende der Straße ist ein schrecklicher Tumult, alles läuft zu,
gewiß Jemand ermordet. Nein! Es war ein Bänkelsänger” (Johann Christian
Hüttner: “London,” in London und Paris, vol. 1, no. 1, 1798, 18). I would like to
thank the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation for a seven-months-grant, the Herzog-Ernst-
Stipendium for the research on the historical book collection of the University and
research library Erfurt-Gotha in 2005. That grant allowed me to read the journal
London und Paris in full and identify examples of experimental writing which are
presented in this article.
6
“Vor ein paar Tagen, da ich einen öffentlichen Erhohlungsort besucht hatte, und
es schon spät war, wollte ich mein Abendbrodt so kurz als möglich abfertigen, ehe
ich in mein Quartier gieng, und sah mich deswegen nach irgend einem Hause um,
wo etwas Eßbares zu haben seyn möchte. Indem traf ein dumpfes Getön, wie
Tanzmusik, mein Ohr. ... Wie ich mich um die Straßenecke wandte, sah ich vor
einem Hause mehrere Leute stehen, und merkte, daß dieß mein Ort sey. Kaum war
ich ihm nahe gekommen, als ein Mädchen, die ich gleich für eine der Gutwilligen
erkannte, mir sehr artig den Arm bot und versicherte: ich würde es dort oben weit
wärmer und behaglicher finden, als hier auf der kalten Straße. Dies Geschlecht
versteht die Künste des Kosens und Plapperns sowohl, daß ich mich in einem
110 Chapter Four
ziemlich erleuchteten Zimmer befand, ehe ich überlegen konnte, wie es

zugegangen. Hier war alles in mehr als lustiger Bewegung und ich sah bald, wes
Geistes Kinder sich hier versammelten. ... - Ich war heilfroh, für ein lumpiges
Pfund eine goldene Kette und ein paar Kleinodien so viel Erfahrung gemacht und
gesehen zu haben was man einen Hop nennt. // N.S. Etwa vierzehn Tage, nach dem
mir dieß vorfiel, wurde eines Abends die Wirthin mit einer Menge ihrer Gäste
beydes Geschlechts gefänglich eingezogen, und die jetzt recht gute Polizey hat
sowohl diesen als andre ähnliche Oerter zerstört” (Johann Christian Hüttner, 5.
“Englisches Freudenhaus. Mädchen. Musik. Gauner,” London und Paris, vol. 1,
no. 1, 1798, 29-32).
7
“In der That hatten auch diese ihre öffentliche Schamlosigkeit auf einen sehr
hohen Grad getrieben. Des Abends konnte man durch wenige Straßen gehn, ohne
daß Dirnen sich einem anboten, und nicht nur anboten, sondern sich gleichsam
aufdrängten, ohne weiters an der Vorübergehenden Arm anhängten, um sie zu sich
in ihre Höle zu locken. An keinem Orte trieben sie es aber ärger, als auf dem place
des Italiens an der Ecke der rue St. Marc. Sie stunden hier zu Dutzenden (ich
übertreibe nicht): und Abends hier vorbeygehn, hies In der That durch Syrenen
hinrudern; denn bald bot sich eine links, bald eine rechts an, und etlichemal (da ich
alle Abende hier vorbey gehen mußte) hatte mich ihr festes Anklammern für meine
Rockärmel fürchten machen... … Seit dem hat die Polizey noch mehrere solche
Fänge gethan, und es scheint wirklich, daß es ihr Ernst ist, wenigstens die
öffentliche Decenz mehr beobachten zu machen” (Friedrich Theophil Winckler: 7.
‘Oeffentliche Mädchen. Polizeyminister Sottin und Dondeau,’ London und Paris,
vol. 1, no. 1, 1798, 65-68, here 67f).
8
“Das, was sie öffentlich ausrufen (ohngeachtet dies verboten ist, thun sie es doch)
ist gewöhnlich so eingerichtet, daß man etwas sehr Pikantes vermuten sollte, und
daher eilends kauft; - hat man es, so sieht man gewöhnlich, daß es entweder eine
Abgeschmacktheit oder gerade das Gegentheil von dem, was die Aufschrift sagt,
oder nur einen aus den Journalen mit einer etwas seltsamen Aufschrift, besonders
abgedruckten Artikel enthält. ... Als Bonaparte seine feyerliche Audienz beym
Directorium hatte, wurde den ganzen Morgen hindurch die Anzeige der Straßen in
ganz Paris ausgeschrieen, durch welche Bonaparte von seiner Wohnung an bis an's
Directorium ziehen würde, nebst Benennung der Personen, aus denen seine
Begleitung bestehen werde, Beschreibung ihres Kostums usw. wie man dies bey
der ersten Audienz des ottomannischen Gesandten auch gethan. Jedermann kaufte
das Blat, und das Volk versammelte sich in großer Zahl in den Straßen, durch
welche, dieser Ankündigung zufolge, der Zug gehen sollte. Am Ende zeigte sich's
daß an allem kein wahres Wort gewesen war” (Friedrich Theophil Winckler: 9.
‘Journal- und Neuigkeitsschreyer,’ London und Paris, vol. 1, no. 1 (1798), 77-9).
9
“Es ist neun Uhr. Die mjuk schreyenden Milchweiber kommen meistens nun erst
zum Vorscheine und Fanny oder Betty läßt sich um einen Farthing Milch zum
Frühstück ausmessen, wofür die Milchfrau einen Kreidenstrich an die Thür, oder
auf ein Holz macht, um etwa in 14 Tagen die Summe zu ziehen. Sodann zieht man
sich gemach an und der Vater geht mit den Kindern spatzieren, während
Mütterchen das köstliche Mahl bereitet, oder es zum Becker trägt. Aber geht man
nicht in die Kirche? Ja! in den inländischen Städten und auf dem Lande
regelmäßig. Aber zu London, Im Durchschnitte, geht auch der Handwerker nicht
viel in die Kirche. Und doch wird derselbe Mann morgen Abends die Debatten-
Gesellschaft besuchen, wo man die Methodisten herunterhetzen will” (Johann
Christian Hüttner: I. ‘London,’ London und Paris, vol. 1, no. 2, 1798, 130-1).
10
“Bey allem dem ist aber doch noch viel guter, frommer Sinn im Mittelstande.
Wendeborn ist zu streng, Küttner zu nachsichtig und entschuldigend gegen die
herrschende Kirche” (footnote by Friedrich Justin Bertuch or Carl August Böttiger,
London und Paris, vol. 1, no. 2, 1798, 131).
11
Cf. Johann Christian Hüttner: 1. ‘London,’ London und Paris, vol. 1, no. 2, 118
and 142.
12
“Seit sechs Wochen sind wenigstens zwanzig verschiedene Lesezimmer eröffnet
worden, wo man für ein bis zwey Pence alle Tageblätter und etliche Schauspiele
lesen kann. Die Begierde nach Neuigkeiten, welche jetzt England, es sey geradezu
oder veranlaßungsweise, allemal interessiren, und die Theuerung der Zeitungen hat
diese Französische Sitte eingeführt” (ibid., 147).
13
“Der Französischen Speisehäuser giebt's jetzt viele in London. Sie stehen in
eben dem Verhältnisse zu den Englischen wie die auffallendsten Theile des
beyderseitigen Nationalcharacters. In den Französischen ist es laut, man unterhält
sich ungezwungen, und hört die Neuigkeiten des Tages umsonst, mit
erzaristocratischen Bemerkungen verbrämt. In Englischen Eßhäusern ist's still,
man bedient euch gut und ihr hört an einer langen Tafel fast gar nicht sprechen,
und vor dem Anreden darf man sich gar nicht fürchten. In den Englischen ist man
reinlich; aber in den Französischen muß man oft ein Auge darüber zudrücken”
(ibid., 146).
14
Geneviève Espagne, Bénédicte Savoy (eds), Aubin-Louis Millin et l'Allemagne.
Le Magasin encyclopédique - Les lettres à Karl August Böttiger (Georg Olms
Verlag: Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: 2005) (Europaea Memoria; Studien und
Texte zur Geschichte der europäischen Ideen, Reihe I: Studien, vol. 41).
15
Gottlieb Friedrich Winckler, Le Répertoire du Vaudeville, 2 Cahiers
(Frommann: Jena, 1800-1801). As an Alsacien, Winckler was bilingual and so
both forms of his first names occur, the German Gottlieb Friedrich and the French
Frédéric-Théophile. Winckler himself signed with Friedrich Theophil, which is
therefore preferred in the present article.
16
Authors given as De Leger, Chazet et Buhan; cf. Friedrich Theophil Winckler:
II. ‘Paris,’ London und Paris, vol. 3, no. 1, 1799, 25).
17
Ibid., 40.
18
“Bin ich verstimmt oder erschöpft und zu Ideenfolgen untüchtig; - wenn ich
durch die Straßen gehe, so fallen mir hundert Kleinigkeiten auf, die mich
unterhalten. So sind die versprechenden und oft possierlichen Aufschriften an den
Läden mitunter des Lesens werth. Nichts ist mehr ein blosser Laden, sondern ein
‘Magazin, ein Waarenhaus;’ so hat man Schuh- Hut- Handschuh-Magazine,
Stiefel- Oberrock- Wäsche- Waarenhäuser. Ich begehre nicht zu läugnen, daß
wirklich viele solche Läden diese Benennungen verdienen; sondern ich meyne die
kleinern Gewölbe, welche höchstens ein paar Dutzend Stück ausgespreitzt sind,
112 Chapter Four
während das ‘Magazin’ an einem prunkenden hervorragenden Brete: ‘das

wohlfeilste Hutwaarenhaus in der Welt,’ obendrüber hängt ein monströser
erschrecklicher Tressenhut und darüber eine Laterne. Alle Sonnabende ist dieser
Laden, ich weiß nicht, mit wie vielen Lichtern erleuchtet, daß der Schein weit über
den Fußweg auf die Wagenbahn hinüber strahlt, und oben wirft eine mächtige
Kerze in der Lampe eine Glorie auf den großen Hut. Dieser Mann kennt die
Londner: sie wollen geblendet seyn. Auch ist sein Laden an diesen Abenden
gedrängt voll Leute, die von der Arbeit zurückkehren. - Der bekannte Lackington,
welcher sich aus einem Schuster zum Buchhändler emporgearbeitet und sein
Leben selbst beschrieben hat, nennt seinen Laden, welcher wie eine Rotunde
geschmackvoll erbaut und mit vielen tausend Büchern ausstaffiert ist ‘den Tempel
der Musen’” (Johann Christian Hüttner: I. “London,” London und Paris, vol. 1, no.
3, 1798, 226).
19
“Ich vermuthe sehr, daß ein Theil Crieurs de Iourneaux und Bänkelsänger
Spionen der Polizey sind. Ehmals waren sie es. In der That können auch diese Art
Leute nach Belieben vor einem Hause stehen bleiben, ohne Verdacht zu erregen,
und die Aus- und Eingehenden beobachten. Dieser Gedanke wurde in mir rege, als
ich neulich einen solchen Bänkelsänger jene complainte, interrogatoire et
confession etc. in einem kleinen und schmalen Gäßchen wenigstens eine Stunde
lang singen hörte, ob er schon fast nichts verkaufte; diese ganze Stunde über stund
er fast immer etwa vor denselben Häusern, und eh er fortgieng, fieng schon an dem
andern Ende der Straße ein anderer Bänkelsänger zu singen an, der alsdenn auch
wieder sehr lange dablieb, gerade als wenn er jenen ersten abgelößt hätte”
(Friedrich Theophil Winckler, III “Paris,” ibid., 247).
20
“Da fast jede volkreiche Stadt ihre eigenen Gassenausrufer mit besondern
Costums und Melodien hat: so ist es schon längst eine Speculation für
Bilderverkäufer geworden, diese abzubilden, und ganze Suiten davon zu
verkaufen. Man hat von Wien, Petersburg, London, Leipzig eigene Sammlungen
solcher zur Carricatur sehr passenden Figuren. Aber die Idee, ihre heulenden
Ankündigungen in Noten zu setzen, war vielleicht nirgends anwendbarer, als bey
den Pariser Ausrufern, welchen schon Mercier in seinem ältern Tableau de Paris
ch. 379. T. V. p. 67. ein eigenes Kapitel gewidmet hat ... Es wird also gewiß
manchem Leser ein Vergnügen machen, diese Dissonanzen auf beyfolgender Tafel
notirt zu finden” (d.H. [Taf. B., p. 130], Friedrich Justin Bertuch or Carl August
Böttiger, footnote in II, “Paris,” London und Paris, vol. 3, no. 2, 1799, 129-30).
21
Cf. London und Paris, vol. 5, no. 1, 1800, pl. 2. Cf. also Rolf Reichardt and
Wolfgang Cilleßen, “Nachgestochene Karikaturen. Ein Journal und sein
bildgeschichtlicher Hintergrund,” in Rolf Reichardt, Wolfgang Cilleßen, Christian
Deuling (eds), Napoleons neue Kleider. Pariser und Londoner Karikaturen im
klassischen Weimar (Berlin: G+H publishers, 2006), 7-35, here 19-20.
22
“Es ist doch ein herrlicher Anblick, sagte mein Freund, wenn man eine Londner
Hauptstraße herabsieht; die großen crystallenen Lampen machen alles fast so hell,
wie am Tage - noch mehr thun das die Läden, unterbrach ich ihn. Sehen Sie nur
wie Gewölbe an Gewölbe stößt, und wie eines immer schöner und reichlicher, wie
das andre, erleuchtet ist! ... Man dünkt sich bey manchen Läden wahrlich in ein
Lichtmeer zu sehen, vornehmlich wenn weisse Zeuge darinn die Strahlen so

allgemein zurückwerfen" (Johann Christian Hüttner, 8, “Abendspatziergang durch
London, London 31. Aug. 1798,” London und Paris, vol. 2, no. 5, 1798, 41-2).
23
“A. Was für ein vielfarbiger Schein aus jenem Fenster strahlt! Verkauft man hier
seine Wasser von rother, grüner, gelber Farbe? B. Nein! alles das ist zum
Aufputze. Es ist ein Apothekerladen, und die großen, farbigen Gläser enthalten
nichts, als gemeines Wasser. Aber ist die Wirkung des Abends nicht gut -
besonders von fern? Lassen Sie uns nun dort geradeüber an die transparenten
Papierfenster gehen! Hier haben Sie alle Farben und Schattierungen in den
verschiedenen Scheiben, durch ein üppiges Licht erhellt! Auf den bedruckten und
mit Seide gefaßten Papierfeldern lesen Sie: antiscorbutic drops, aperient pills,
schweißtreibende Mittel, das berühmte Restorativ, welches alle Jugendsünden rein
wegwischt, Velno's vegetabilischen Syrup, das bewährte Appetitpulver, die famöse
Universalmedizin des Doctor F-, unfehlbare Wanzenwasser, usw. Bemerken Sie
nur, wie der unerfahrne Landmann, die schamhafte Betrogene, der dürftige
Handwerker, der superkluge Arzneyverächter, und der unmäßige Genießer, von
diesen quacksalberischen Aufschneidereyen berückt, hineingehen und kaufen.
Denn unter dem Titel der Medizin stehen Briefe der angeblich dadurch geheilten”
(ibid.).
24
This neologism is an equivalent to German original, meaning the preposterous
and incapable behaviour of a dubious doctor.
25
“Nach dem Verzeichniß der sogenannten Arbeiten der Gesellschaft wurden nun
noch einige andere mehr oder weniger ennuyante, mehr oder weniger überflüssige,
gereimte und ungereimte Aufsätze vorgelesen. Zu den im höchsten Grad
überflüssigen Aufsätzen rechne ich besonders den über die Frage: wird die
Französische Revolution für die Litteratur nützliche oder schädliche Folgen haben?
- Ich möchte sehen, was man dem für Complimente machen würde, der sich's
einfallen ließe, das letztere heut zu Tage in einer Société libre des Sciences, lettres
et Arts behaupten zu wollen, ohne sich der Gefahr auszusetzen, bey erster
Gelegenheit eine gewisse Spazierfarth zu machen. Ich halte daher eine solche
Frage, wo jedermann die Meinung, die der, welcher darüber spricht, wenigstens
öffentlich zu haben gezwungen ist, voraussehen kann, im höchsten Grad für
überflüssig” (Friedrich Theophil Winckler, II, “Paris, 6 Sitzung der freien
Gesellschaft der Künste und Wissenschaften im Louvre. Séance publique le 14
Thermidor An VI. cinq heures de l'après-midi,” London und Paris, vol. 2, no. 5,
73-7, here 75-7).
26
“Die politischen Zeitungen werden Ihnen gesagt haben, daß eine
außerordentliche Menschenmenge am 14. Julius auf dem Champ de Mars, oder
vielmehr um dasselbe her, versammelt war. Dieß ist allerdings wahr; allein ein
unpartheyischer Mann muß wahrlich lächeln, wenn er diesen Zulauf auf Rechnung
des Bürgertums und anderer schönklingenden Phrasen schreiben hört. Es kommen
hier mehrere in ganz andern Umständen liegende Ursachen zusammen. Jeder, der
nur ein wenig den Charakter der Pariser und ihre Neu- und Gaffgierde, mit welcher
der bey weitem größere Theil derselben mehr oder weniger behaftet ist, kennt,
wird sich leicht erklären können, wie sich bey jedem dieser Feste, wo es ohnehin
114 Chapter Four
zu arbeiten verboten ist, eine beträchtliche Menge Menschen versammeln könne.

Viele der hiesigen Einwohner, und besonders Fremde (d.h. Nichtpariser), möchten
doch auch einmal gern die Directoren und Minister in ihrem Costüme, von dem sie
so viel reden hören, und welches man an den Fenstern aller Kupferstichhändler
sieht, in naturalibus sehen. ... Man hatte - ich möchte nicht geradezu behaupten, es
sey nicht absichtlich geschehen - etliche Tage vorher ausgestreut, die unlängst
angekommenen Elephanten würden dieses Fest zieren, und sie würden aus dem
Jardin des plantes über den neuen Boulevard, oder Boulevard du midi, nach dem
Champ de Mars gebracht werden. ... Ein Umstand, der viele Personen in der
Meynung bestärkte, die Elephanten würden wirklich bey dem Feste paradiren, war,
daß der mittlere Theil jenes Boulevard vom Jardin des plantes bis an das Champ du
Mars hin mit Sand bestreut war. Allein statt dieser Indischen Bestien sah man nur
die Direktoren in zweyspännigen Wagen, auf allen Seiten mit ihrer Garde
umgeben, langsam zum Lokal des Festes hinfahren. / / Der aerostatische Ballon,
den das Programm ankündigte, hatte vielleicht am meisten angelockt. Daher
kamen eine Menge Personen erst sehr spät, nachdem das Fest schon lange
angefangen, weil sie nur wegen des Luftballon's gekommen waren. Andere waren
auf die militärischen Uebungen neugierig, welche nach dem Feste sollten
vorgenommen werden. [...] Die Dekoration, die man für dieses Fest (und
wahrscheinlich für die folgenden dießjährigen Nationalfeste) auf dem Marsfelde
errichtet hatte, war gewiß schön und geschmackvoll. Auch hörte ich in der That
nicht von einem einzigen Anwesenden einen Tadel, sondern im Gegentheil mehr
als ein: ah! je n'avons [sic] jamais vû quelque-chose de si beau! - es sey denn der
Tadel (welcher aber mehr auf die Arbeiter fällt, als auf den Architekten und was
von ihm abhängt), daß die Arbeit nicht ganz vollendet und daher lückenhaft ist.
Dieß ist überhaupt bey fast allen öffentlichen Festen seit vielen Jahren der Fall.
Immer fehlt etwas” (Friedrich Theophil Winckler, II, “Paris”, 2. “Fest des 14ten
Julius. Woher die Menge von Zuschauern? Geschmackvollere Einrichtung des
Amphitheaters auf dem Marsfelde. Die Herrn lassen waren. Personal des Aufzugs.
Luftballon. Grobheit der Soldaten. Tanz,” London und Paris, vol. 2, no. 6, 139-
43).
27
“Welcher Unterschied zwischen dem Pariser am 14. Jul. 1789 und dem Pariser
am 14. Jul. 1798! Dort greift er zu den Waffen, und glaubt mit der Bastille auch
jede Art von Bedrückung und Tyranney zerstört zu haben; - hier steht er auf
demselben Marsfelde, ist schon seit 3 Jahren entwaffnet, und kommt jezt, um sich
die Langeweile durch Flinten- und Kanonenschüsse und - einen verbrannten
Luftballon vertreiben zu laßen! - Mir schien es, an dem Tage, wo sich die hiesigen
Bewohner in einem Anfalle von patriotischem Enthusiasmus bewaffneten, eben
diesen nun entwaffneten Bewohnern das kriegerische Schauspiel der Waffen-
übungen zu geben, sey im Grunde eine bittere Satire auf jene Bewaffnung selbst”
(Friedrich Theophil Winckler, ibid., 148-9).
28
“Seit einiger Zeit ist in dem ehemaligen Kloster der Kapuzinerinnen bey dem
Place Vendôme eine Gallerie eröffnet, wo in drey langen Gängen Kupferstiche und
eine außerordentlich große Sammlung von Englischen Carricaturen feil geboten
wird. ... So oft ich noch hinkam, traf ich höchstens sechs bis acht Personen da.
Dieß scheint mir zum Theil eine Folge des zu versteckten Eingangs, den man erst
erfragen und suchen muß, statt daß er in die Augen fallen und durch Aufschriften
der Weg dahin bezeichnet seyn sollte. Wie ganz anders wissen die Londner ihre
Carricature-shops in St Jamesstreet und auf dem Strand aufzuputzen! / / Die
Ansicht dieser Englischen Carricaturen belehrte mich übrigens, daß die meisten
Zwergfiguren, die vor einigen Monaten unter dem Titel l'Aristocrate Suisse, le
Democrate du pays de Vaud u.s.w., von denen ich ihnen zu seiner Zeit ein
Verzeichniß gegeben habe (welches in der ersten Nummer von London und Paris
gedruckt worden ist), eigentlich Englischen Ursprungs sind. Ich sahe hier gerade
dieselben Carricaturen, die der hiesige Carricaturennachstecher bloß copirte und
eine andere Unterschrift dazu setzte; denn jene Englische Originale bezogen sich
auf die Französische Revolution. - So wäre denn die ohnehin geringe Anzahl
Französischer Carricaturen dadurch noch um ein Beträchtliches verringert. - Suum
cuique” (Friedrich Theophil Winckler, III, “Pariser Carricaturen. 1. Nachricht von
einer neuerrichteten Gallerie von Kupferstichen und Carricaturen,” London und
Paris, vol. 2, no. 8, 1798, 387-90).
29
Cf. London und Paris, vol. 4, no. 7, 1799, 201.
30
“Horch! wie die Wagen überall in den ferneren Gassen rollen! Das sind alles
reiche Leute! Die Pferde, die schlanken schönen Pferde fliegen über das Pflaster
und schlagen Funken! Am Ende dieser Straße, wo die beiden Häuserreihen so eng
zusammenlaufen, wie ich sie in meiner Jugend blos in den Guckekasten erstaunt
ansah, öffnet sich ein majestätischer Platz, ein Sqare [sic.] von vielen hundert
Lampen erleuchtet. Das alles ist so groß, so hebend! Unzähligemal habe ich das
schon gesehen, aber immer fällt es mir wieder mächtig ins Auge! Es ist mir, als ob
aller dieser Reichthum m e i n wäre” (Johann Christian Hüttner, I, “London. 4.
Betrachtung einer langen Straße (etwa Bakerstreet) in der Gegend von
Portmansquare. Im November. Ein wenig vor sechs Uhr Abends,” London und
Paris, vol. 6, no. 6, 1800, 123).
31
The journal had started off as London und Paris, comprising eight issues per
year. The publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch transferred the journal to the city of
Halle, which belonged to Prussia that granted more freedom of the press to the
entrepreneur than the tiny dukedom of Saxe-Weimar that already felt tight
diplomatic pressure from napoleonic France. From 1811 on, the editor-in-chief
Carl Bertuch (1777-1815), the publisher's son, extends the focus of the journal to
the Austrian capital Vienna, a consequence of missing reports from London due to
Bonaparte's blockade of the continent. The title was altered to Paris, Wien und
London. Ein fortgehendes Panorama dieser drei Hauptstädte [Paris, Vienna and
London. A continuing panorama of these three capitals] (vols 25-26, or vol. 1-2 of
the new sequence) (Rudolstadt, in der Hof- Buch- und Kunsthandlung, 1811). In
1812, the London part had to be left out completely; Paris und Wien. Ein
fortgehendes Panorama dieser beiden Hauptstädte (vols. 27-29, or vols 3-5 of the
new sequence) (Rudolstadt, in der Hof- Buch- und Kunsthandlung, 1812). The
numbers 5 to 8 of 1813 and the complete year 1814 had been left out due to
political unrest and the diplomatic activities in Vienna. In the final issue of 1815,
all three capitals are assembled again in the title, starting with London, Paris und
116 Chapter Four
Wien, vol. 30 no. 1 (vol. 6, no. 1) (Rudolstadt, in der Hof- Buch und
Kunsthandlung, 1815).
CHAPTER FIVE
FLÂNEURS, COMMODITIES,
AND THE WORKING BODY IN LOUIS HUART’S
PHYSIOLOGIE DU FLÂNEUR
AND ALBERT SMITH’S
NATURAL HISTORY OF THE IDLER UPON TOWN
JO BRIGGS
The flâneur emerges from intertextual environments, most famously when

the French critic and poet Charles Baudelaire cites Edgar Allan Poe’s short
story of 1840, “The Man of the Crowd” in his essay “The Painter of
Modern Life,” published in 1863.1 In Louis Huart’s book-length
Physiologie du flâneur, published in Paris in 1841, perhaps the most
sustained and significant account of the flâneur to appear in the first half
of the nineteenth century, an invocation of even more diverse literary texts
is the setting for a humorous investigation of this archetypal figure. In the
first few pages the author references the eighteenth-century playwright,
Beaumarchais, the seventeenth-century poet, La Fontaine, and several
ancient Greek philosophers.2 Furthermore, examining the literary genre to
which Huart’s study of the flâneur belongs, Martina Lauster traces the
textual and conceptual reference points of the Physiologies to an even
more diverse set of sources: encyclopedias, medical treatises, and the
writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century moralists.3 This mesh of
references immediately suggests the problem of fixing the flâneur too
exclusively in one time or place.
In addition, Huart identifies three classes of society “where one finds
the heart and the legs truly worthy of belonging to a flâneur”: poets,
artists, and solicitors’ clerks.4 The flâneur therefore cannot be reduced to a
single figure, class or viewing position. In fact, somewhat paradoxically,
Huart’s text mostly treats what he identifies as multiple false versions of
flânerie.5 Chapters are devoted to several aspiring flâneurs: the “batteur de
118 Chapter Five
pavé” (“pavement beater,” who is essentially criminal), the “flâneur

militaire” (the “military flâneur”), the “musard” (the “muser” or “idler”),
the “gamin de Paris” (“Parisian street urchin”), and the “badaud étranger”
(the gawping tourist).6 Thus, the modes of strolling described in the
Physiologie du flâneur are multiple, and the definition of the true flâneur
obfuscatory.7
A text clearly inspired by Huart’s Physiologie du flâneur is Albert
Smith’s The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, published in London
by David Bogue in 1848, but based on articles that had appeared in Punch
in early 1842 under the title “Physiology of the London Idler.”8 The vogue
for Physiologies in Paris peaked in 1841-2 when around 120 were
published, all with a similar format.9 These volumes were cheap (retailing
for 1 franc against a more common price for books of 3 francs 50) and
hugely popular (with an average print run of 3,500, when 2,000 was more
typical), and they were readily available in London, being sold through
shops such as Delaporte’s in the Burlington Arcade.10 Bogue’s series of
“Social Zoologies,” to which The Natural History of the Idler upon Town
belongs, was clearly modelled on this publishing phenomenon. Volumes
such as The Natural History of the Ballet Girl (1847), The Natural History
of the Gent (1847), and The Natural History of Flirt (1848) all followed
the physical format of the French Physiologies, with a similar number of
pages and multiple illustrations of various sizes integrated with the text.
The “Social Zoologies” enjoyed the same startling success as their French
predecessors.
It is perhaps surprising that in the extensive scholarship on the flâneur,
the Physiologie du flâneur and more especially the The Natural History of
the Idler upon Town have not garnered more attention, particularly given
the opportunity they present for working comparatively across national
boundaries. Huart’s text has been cited by critics, but often as a prelude to
a discussion of Baudelaire or simply to note Walter Benjamin’s neglect of
this book and the genre to which it belongs. The 2007 republication of
Huart’s and Smith’s texts in facsimile with detailed textual commentary
and a critical introduction by Margaret A. Rose should draw further
attention to these works and the flâneur prior to Baudelaire’s (and
subsequently Benjamin’s) more famous treatment of the figure, as well as
flânerie beyond Paris. This short investigation cannot do justice to the rich
possibilities for close comparative readings offered by these volumes, but
by focusing Huart’s musard and Smith’s Mooner, two closely related
figures, I hope to demonstrate the potential of juxtaposing these works.
This investigation begins with a comparison of musard and Mooner,
followed by a close reading of Smith’s text and its illustrations in relation
Flâneurs, Commodities, and the Working Body 119
to middle-class male viewing practices in the 1840s and in the run up to

the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in
London in 1851.
“Le musard” and “Of the Mooner”

Though the text of The Natural History of the Idler upon Town is in places
very close to the Physiologie du flâneur, Smith’s book is not a translation
of Huart’s; rather it is a transposition of Huart’s mode of categorizing
Parisian strollers to the crowds of London, recalibrated to reflect that city’s
contemporary popular culture, leisure activities and social mores. As Rose
has noted: “As in Huart’s physiologies, irony, parody and satire prevail in
Smith’s works,” and parallels also exist between the wood engravings that
accompany both volumes (Figs 5-1 and 5-2).11 Following Huart’s text,
several different types of stroller are identified by Smith. Chapter headings
refer to “the West-end Lounger,” the “Exhibition Loungers,” “the Park
Idler,” “the Visitor to London” and “the Street Boy,” and mirror the
divisions in Huart’s volume.12 Chapter six, “Of the Mooner,” is clearly
informed by chapter five of the Physiologie du flâneur, “Le Musard.” In
French musard means a “muser” or “idler,” and the word has connotations
of absent-mindedness, even stupidity. Smith means to indicate a similar
concept with the term Mooner. However, a close reading of Huart’s and
Smith’s texts and their accompanying wood engravings affords a deeper
understanding of the differences between these figures, primarily relating
to the Mooner’s viewing of commodities and the working bodies that
manufacture them. In addition Smith made changes to his 1842 Punch
articles for their republication in 1848, changes that highlight anxieties
associated with the working-class female body as a site that encompasses
the work of production while it is itself a thing to be consumed by the
male gaze.
To gain a clearer idea of what Smith brings to the musard when
transplanted to London as the Mooner it is necessary first to examine
Huart’s description of this figure. For Huart the musard falls into the
category of those who “at first glance, have the air of strolling [“de
flaner”; unaccented in original], but are nevertheless lacking of one or
more of the required qualities.”13 He continues: “The first of these false
flâneurs [“faux flaneurs”] is the musard. There is as great a difference
between the musard and the flâneur as between a glutton and a
gourmet.”14 Instead of “stopping in front of the most ornate shops with the
prettiest goods and above all the prettiest shop-girls, he [the musard] will
remain for thirty-five minutes in front of Père-la-Gallette; - and watch the
120 Chapter Five
cutting of pieces of pâte ferme [a type of hard dough], while holding his
eyes and mouth wide open.”15 The musard happens across two dogs
fighting over a bone: “If the combat lasts half-an-hour, he remains there
for half-an-hour, not because he takes a lively interest or because it amuses
him very much; but, just because the musard has found himself there, he
stays.”16 He spends the whole afternoon watching people try to get an
escaped canary back into its cage; Huart remarks that “an intelligent
stroller would only accord the escaped canary a quarter-of-an-hour, and
still devote at least fourteen minutes of that time to ogling all the pretty
women attracted to their windows by this important event.”17 According to
Huart, the musard “occasionally stays in one place even longer than he
wants, this is when, strolling carelessly or concentrating his attention too
deeply towards a chimney-fire or an escaped canary, he gets stuck up to
his ankles in a pavement newly decorated with asphalt.”18 Huart’s musard
is therefore a “false flâneur” because he misses opportunities for enjoying
the glimpse of feminine beauty that the city affords, wasting his time
instead on pointless and dull events rather than being a discriminating
“gastronome” of urban spectacles.19 The musard moves too slowly for a
stroller, which results in him becoming completely stationary, almost
petrified, when he sinks into the wet asphalt. The musard is thus absorbed
into the fabric of the city, instead of skimming over its surfaces with the
required discrimination of the true flâneur.
Smith begins the first of his three chapters on the Mooner with a very
similar definition to that found in the opening of Huart’s chapter on the
musard. Smith explains that a Mooner is “an individual who moons about
without any object, half absent, half contemplative.”20 He continues: “He
lounges … and strays about, taking four times the period usually allotted
to walk any distance, fiddle-faddling the space of time away in a
lamentably unprofitable manner, and finding intense amusement in objects
which the Regent Street Idler, or even the Gent, would pass by in
contempt.”21 In an almost direct quotation from Huart’s description of the
musard the Mooner is described as just as meandering in his speech as he
is in his strolling.22 Smith’s description of the Mooner’s walk from
Piccadilly to Lincoln’s Inn via St Martin’s Lane and Covent Garden is
lengthened across two chapters partly by the insertion of descriptions of
the various street characters that the Mooner meets in Leicester Square.
Smith’s own narrative therefore appears at times to be as distracted as the
Mooner’s. However, what is perhaps most notable in Smith’s description
of this figure is the manner in which he is distracted, not by canaries or
dog fights, but by commodities, both on display and being made.
Mooner, which Smith capitalizes as if it was a proper noun (as he does

with all his designations, such as “Street Boy” or “Park Idler”), is a more
complicated term than musard, although it is an effective translation of
Huart’s term for which there is no ready equivalent in English. Indeed,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Smith coined the term
Mooner, giving it the colloquial meaning it carried throughout the rest of
the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth.23 Perhaps Smith’s most
immediate source for his neologism was Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his
reference to “moonery” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834;
Coleridge uses the term in a very similar way to Smith.24 However, a more
ancient meaning also exists dating back to at least the late sixteenth
century. At that date a mooner is understood as a dog that barks
continually at the moon, or even simply at the reflection of the moon in
water. This usage seems related to the moon’s traditional connection with
madness.25 The connotation of madness or misplaced agitation seems to be
intended by Smith, since in the most general terms Smith’s Mooner, like
Huart’s musard, is someone who becomes fixated to the point of
distraction by what he is seeing before him with no apparent good reason.
This is certainly the sense that seems to be conveyed in the wood
engraving drawn by the caricaturist John Leech that appears next to the
initial letter “A” at the opening of Smith’s article “Of the Mooner” in
Punch (Fig. 5-3). The figure’s face is round like the moon; wide-eyed and
open-mouthed, the lack of a defined neck allows us to read this figure as
leaning towards the viewer, which would also go some way to explaining
the disturbing size of the head in relation to his body. The moon-like
roundness of his face suggests a head transformed into a single eyeball. At
the same time, due to the figure’s lack of a neck, it appears as if his head
has retracted, tortoise-like into his body, as if recoiling in fear. At the
Mooner’s feet is a sunken area that appears to have blocks already in place
to each side. This vignette illustrates the passage in Smith’s text that
describes the Mooner as detained for half-an-hour in contemplation of “the
laying-down of wooden blocks, to form a new pavement.”26 Leech’s
illustration recalls the description of the musard’s expression while
watching dough being cut, but in this case the Mooner is watching hard
physical labour, as depicted in a second illustration across the page (see
below Fig. 5-7).
Commodities and the Mooner

To a far greater degree than Huart’s musard, Smith’s Mooner is distracted
by commodities, and specifically mass-produced manufactured items. One
122 Chapter Five
of Archibald Henning’s illustrations shows the Mooner viewing teapots

“revolving on a bottle-jack” in the window of a cheap ironmonger’s (Fig.
5-4).27 He stands for so long outside a bonnet shop in Cranbourne Street
that the women who work there “commence thinking that he is about to
become a purchaser on a large scale … and directly rush up and overwhelm
him.”28 Here it is the female workers, threatening to “overwhelm” the
stroller, who perform the function of the newly-laid asphalt described by
Huart. The Mooner seeks refuge among a cacophony of commodities
“plunging into that paradise of fourteen-shilling Wellington boots; small
tooth-combs; pastry-cooks; French prints, more or less questionable;
outfitting warehouses … ; umbrellas; Berlin wool; and travelling trunks.”
and “having brought him thus far, we will leave him, lost in wonder at a
railway carpet-bag or an expanding portmanteau.”29 This list of things has
no precedent in Huart’s book.
Huart does dwell briefly on the “rich shops” with “mirrors, marbles,
and bronzes reserved in other times for palaces alone” that are found in the
rue de la Paix and the arcades of the rue Castiglione, and gives a few much
quoted paragraphs to the arcades, without which “the flâneur would be
unhappy, but without whom the arcades would not exist,” but the number
and variety of goods encountered by Smith’s strollers far exceeds those
mentioned by Huart.30 Interestingly, given Walter Benjamin’s emphasis on
the arcades in Paris, a great many more pages (three whole chapters in
fact) are devoted to the arcades of London in Smith’s book. A chapter a
piece is allotted to the aristocratic Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly, the
nearby Pantheon bazaar with its conservatory filled with flowers, birds and
goldfish, and the petit-bourgeois Lowther Arcade off the Strand, as well as
descriptions of the different items for sale found in each.31
The goods on display are so densely packed and numerous that they
are even a danger to the stroller. For example, in the chapter describing the
Lowther Arcade, an illustration shows a figure completely surrounded by
goods for sale, tripping over a bucking rocking-horse while musical
instruments, toys and cases topple over all around him (Fig. 5-5). The
falling figure is completely inverted with his legs in the air, his top-hat and
cane tumbled on the ground. Smith’s text describes the items for sale here
as forming a “labyrinth” where “the greatest caution is necessary in
threading your way”; he continues: “every article forms the key-stone to
an elaborate arrangement of its companions, and you cannot move it
without bringing all the rest down at the same time.”32 Smith also
complains that objects lay on the ground with “the most fragile generally
being placed where they can be readily kicked over and broken.”33 He
goes on: “Like the entanglement of a fly in the cobweb, which causes the
spider to dart from his abode, this accident generally produces the owner
of the property, who lies in wait in some secret corner, and upon hearing
the fracture pounces out … upon the thoughtless victim.”34 As with the
bonnet shop in Cranbourne Street, the vignette at the opening of the
chapter devoted to the Lowther Arcade implies that it is a woman who lies
in wait for the stroller inside the shop (Fig. 5-6). In contrast to the women
in Paris, who seem to offer themselves up more unproblematically to the
flâneur’s gaze, in London women are a crucial component of the
commercialism that surrounds the flâneur. This contrast becomes clear in a
comparison of the title-pages to each volume. The title-page of the
Physiologie du flâneur shows a man with a top hat and cane contemplating
two fashionably dressed ladies from behind, in contrast the title page of
The Natural History of the Idler upon Town shows a similarly dressed man
looking at a number of items for sale on a counter, while the female shop
assistant looks at him.35
However, a crucial passage on the commodity does appear in the final
chapter of Huart’s book, which details the train of thoughts and fantasies
that occur to the flâneur on viewing a piece of cloth hanging in a shop
window. First the flâneur considers the aesthetics of the cloth’s design, the
effect of its colours, and whether is it innovative or nostalgic, then
transcending the window-display, he reviews the production process, and
traces the chain of supply to Leipzig, London and St Petersburg. Finally,
the cloth is the occasion of an imaginative flight “into the world of the
imagination, a brilliant world, the best and above all the most beautiful of
possible worlds.”36 This passage finds its counterpart in the Mooner’s
extended interaction with commodities, but with a less rapturous outcome.
For Smith’s Mooner a similar imagined placement of commodities within
the context of the manufacturing process leads back to working bodies.
The Mooner watches a cork-cutter at work, and a man twisting wire
toasting forks and pipe-stoppers, and a steam-driven coffee-mill.37 Sweated
labour often underpins and haunts the landscape of seemingly abundant
commodities encountered in London, since Smith observes that the
Mooner is “exceedingly fond of the shops – more especially those where
some mechanical performance is going on in the windows.”38 This kind of
observation of bodies at work is reminiscent of reports into the working
conditions in sweatshops, factories and mines taking place in this period.
The Mooner’s preoccupations can be linked to debates among the middle
classes at this time over labour reform, class, consumption and design
reform that crystallized in 1851 at the Great Exhibition.39 Though Smith’s
approach is light-hearted, a close reading of the text and illustrations of
The Natural History of the Idler upon Town suggests both guilty and
124 Chapter Five
heroic associations stemming from the Mooner’s contemplation of the

working body.
Guilty and Redemptive Looking at the Working Body

As Rose has shown, much of the text for The Natural History of the Idler
upon Town was simply lifted from the essays published in Punch six years
earlier, but she also notes that some changes were made before the text
appeared in book form: primarily references to popular culture were
updated.40 Another change thematizes the issue of middle-class spectatorship
in relation to working bodies, particularly female bodies: a reference to a
poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is prompted by the Mooner’s visit to
Leicester Square. This is an intriguing passage for its risqué reference to
female nudity, deep irony, and hints at the darker consequences of
unchecked male gazing at the female body. The passage begins with the
Mooner stopping at the Walhalla, a theatrical venue in Leicester Square
occupied by a troupe of actors and actresses who execute poses plastiques
dressed in flesh-coloured, tight-fitting bodysuits.41 The actors and actresses
adopted poses from famous works of art by Flaxman, Canova and others.
42
In such productions the female body was both at work, and the
consumable, aestheticized product of work.
Smith writes that at the entrance to the Walhalla the Mooner is “riveted
by the woodcut of Madame Warton as Godiva, after Mr Landseer’s
forthcoming picture.” 43 Warton (or Wharton), whose real name was Eliza
Crowe, was the leader of the company, and press advertisements show that
in the winter of 1847 she was indeed acting out the role of Godiva. It was
reputed that she had modelled for Landseer, although the finished painting
was not shown at the Royal Academy until 1866.44 The Mooner, Smith
continues, “wicked old fellow – … almost wishes he had been Peeping
Tom, when the real wife of the grim Leofric [that is, Godiva] performed
her daring act of horsemanship” (according to legend, to ride naked
through Coventry in order to have a prohibitive tax lifted that was imposed
on its citizens by her husband).45 Smith, or rather the Mooner, then quotes
nine lines of Tennyson’s well-known poem dating from 1842, “Godiva.”
The extract begins: “Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity….”
After this digression the Mooner “makes up his mind to get an order
somewhere, and go and see her.”46
This is deeply ironic as Tennyson’s moralizing poem would seem to
warn against just such a course of action. Tennyson’s final verse is omitted
from Smith’s quotation, but at the end of the poem Peeping Tom’s eyes
are “shrivel’d into darkness in his head, And dropt before him” for the
crime of taking a covert look at Godiva as she rides past. This is the
character that the Mooner “almost wishes he had been.”47 Thus, a horrific
punishment for looking, of shrivelled eyeballs and blindness, haunts the
Mooner’s distracted contemplation of working bodies. Indeed, the working
classes are referenced in the opening of Tennyson’s poem where he
situates himself in the present-day and with the repeated phrase “not only
we,” makes the explicit connection between middle-class philanthropic
concern for working people and the self-sacrifice of Godiva “a thousand
summers back.” The poem opens:
I waited for the train at Coventry;

I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this:-
Not only we, the latest seed of Time,

New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past, not only we, that prate
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well,
And loathed to see them overtax’d.48
Making this connection still sharper, the paragraph that follows the
Mooner’s quotation of most of the fifth verse of the poem opens with an
account of him watching a “man twisting wire toasting forks and pipe-
stoppers” for so long that he becomes “almost competent to undertake the
manufacture himself.”49 The allusion to the legend of Godiva raises the
possibility that looking can be a punishable crime. If “Godiva,” where
stolen glances lead to shrivelled eyeballs, can be read as a manifestation of
guilt on the part of the middle-class observer for his complicity in the
exploitation of the working classes, an alternative reading is also available
that suggests a potentially redemptive heroism in looking.
One of Leech’s original illustrations for Smith’s series of essays in
Punch, “Physiology of the London Idler,” highlights the author’s assertion
that the various kinds of labour associated with metropolitan improvements
tend to attract the Mooner’s attention (Fig. 5-7). Smith writes: “The
opening of a water-main, or a course of gas-pipes, is another riveting
spectacle.”50 Leech emphasizes the act of the Mooner’s spectatorship by
placing an oversized pair of spectacles in the shop window in the
background. In Leech’s illustration the middle-class and working-class
body are contrasted. The Mooner is buttoned up in his top-hat and tailcoat,
whereas the pickaxe-wielding worker has placed his jacket and less shiny,
less structured hat on the bollard at the side of the road. His shirt-sleeves
are rolled up and, as he swings his axe, his gaze is wholly focused on the
126 Chapter Five
work in hand performed for the municipal good: laying on either gas or
water. It is difficult to read this man’s expression due to his head being
bent in his work, but it appears grimly determined. In contrast the Mooner
presents a portly profile and chubby face; stationary, he gazes with an
impassive expression. His dangling watch-fob suggests a certain
fastidiousness, as does the rolled umbrella.51 The paralleling of the
Mooner with the behatted bollard, staring spectacles in the shop window
and the lamp-post, the form of which suggests a hat above a face, gives the
impression that the Mooner is simply another piece of street furniture;
certainly the navvy pays the Mooner as much attention as these inanimate,
yet anthropomorphic, objects.
There is a striking similarity between Leech’s illustration and Ford
Madox Brown’s monumental canvas Work, completed between 1852 and
1865. Although there is a far more complex arrangement of diverse figures
in Brown’s painting, two men at the right-hand edge contemplate several
navvies at the centre of the composition digging up the road to lay a water-
main. The Mooner in Leech’s wood engraving, in both his role as observer
and his placement to the right of the scene, foreshadows that of the
Christian Socialist F.D. Maurice and the historian and sage Thomas
Carlyle in Brown’s later painting. The parallel between the Mooner and
the observing “brain workers” is closer in Brown’s sketch for Work, dating
from 1852 and retouched in 1864 (Fig. 5-8).52 Occupying the position that
in the finished painting is taken by Maurice and Carlyle is a figure who
perhaps smokes or simply has one hand to his mouth in a thoughtful
gesture. His other hand holds a walking stick on top of which is balanced a
top-hat. This man leans against a railing at the side of the road; the
direction of his gaze is unclear, but he appears to be musing on the activity
before him. In a diary entry for 1 January 1855, Brown seems to describe
him as an artist.53 However, it is interesting that this figure, and several
others in the watercolour sketch, relate to the types defined in Bogue’s
“Social Zoologies.” With reference to other volumes by Smith from the
series it would be tempting to read the figures as follows: from left to
right, the Gent in a patterned waistcoat and checked trousers, the flirt in
pink, “‘stuck-up’ people” on horseback, and finally the Idler, or more
specifically the Mooner.54 Smith’s types certainly had a long currency, as
has been demonstrated by Mary Cowling in her discussion of crowd
scenes painted by William Powell Frith, Ramsgate Sands (Life at the
Seaside) (1852-4), Derby Day (1856-8) and The Railway Station (1862),
which date from the same years in which Brown was creating Work.55
Perhaps for Brown the Mooner is the closest of Smith’s figures to the
artist: the wandering and wondering observer of modern urban life and the
labour which underpins it.
Brown had originally planned to include in his tableau the historian
and novelist Charles Kingsley as the moralizing observer, but his patron,
Thomas Plint, requested changes.56 Kingsley was at this time chiefly
known for his hard-hitting pamphlet on sweated labour Cheap Clothes and
Nasty (1850), and a novel on the same theme, Alton Locke (1850). The
writer was therefore, even more than Carlyle, associated with the exposure
of the inequalities of industrial society, specifically the human cost of
cheaply made goods, and the need for the consuming classes to take a
moral stance and protect workers from gross exploitation. Shoddy goods
were a major preoccupation of commentary generated by the Great
Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851, as Joseph
Bizup and Lara Kriegel have shown.57 Stamped, pressed and moulded
products allowed craftsmanship to be simulated cheaply, and some feared
that the demand for novelty led to an emphasis on quantity over quality as
manufacturers sought to appeal to popular taste, which was characterized
as irrational and “savage” in its tendencies.58
Smith’s Mooner can be seen as reflecting the kind of viewing that was
encouraged by Kingsley and anticipating that which was emphasized at the
Great Exhibition. Indeed, the depiction of several male figures viewing the
exhibits in Dickinson’s Comprehensive Lithographs of the Great
Exhibition of 1851 recall Leech’s earlier image of the Mooner in Punch.
For example, in a view of the French section a portly gentleman in a top-
hat and tails, wearing spectacles and carrying an umbrella, intently views
the exhibits with the aid of a printed guide (Fig. 5-9), in another lithograph
a man contemplates a display of dishes (Fig. 5-10), in a scene that recalls
the illustration on page forty-nine of the Natural History of the Idler upon
Town (Fig. 5-4).
With the Mooner, Smith successfully transposed Huart’s musard for
English readers. The fact that the figure is both still recognizably Huart’s
and was meaningful in 1840s London is testimony to the international
currency of this figure. However, the fact that Smith’s Mooner ultimately
takes up a different viewing position to the musard, shaped by the
commodity-saturated streetscape he inhabits and the labouring bodies he
encounters, suggests that changes were also necessitated in the course of
the musard’s move to London. That the Mooner’s concerns were coloured
by those of middle-class reformers in the years leading up to the Great
Exhibition, an event often seen as defining spectatorship in mid
nineteenth-century Britain, demonstrates how this category of strolling
was enmeshed within broader cultural concerns. Not just an obscure
128 Chapter Five
subspecies of urban idler, Smith’s Mooner can be seen as a prescient

harbinger of the industrial spectatorship of 1851.
Moreover, rather than simply reinstating the flâneur as a central figure
of modernity in London, as well as Paris, a comparison of Smith’s and
Huart’s texts reveals the importance of paying close attention to historical
context when studying this figure. The idea that the modern city defines
the flâneur and the flâneur defines the modern city points back to Huart’s
observation that the flâneur would be unhappy without the arcades but that
without the flâneur the arcades would not exist.59 But such a neat and
harmonious symbiotic relationship does not characterize strolling in either
Huart’s or Smith’s texts. Class and gender are two points of conflict that
are as significant as the built environment of the arcades in defining male
flânerie in both Paris and London in 1840s.
Illustrations
Fig. 5-1. Anonymous wood engraver, after a drawing by Marie-Alexandre Alophe,
Honoré Daumier or Théodore Maurisset, half-page illustration from the
Physiologie du flâneur (Paris, 1841), 106.
page illustration from The Natural History of the Idler upon Town (London, 1848),
25.
130 Chapter Five
Fig. 5-3. Anonymous wood engraver, after drawing by John Leech, initial letter
from chapter 8 of the “Physiology of the London Idler,” “Of the Mooner,” Punch,
vol. 3 (January 1842), 82. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
49.
132 Chapter Five
Fig. 5-5 Anonymous wood engraver, after a drawing by Archibald Henning, half-
73.
Fig. 5-6. Anonymous wood engraver, after a drawing by Archibald Henning,

vignette initial letter from the opening of chapter 9, The Natural History of the
Idler upon Town (London, 1848), 71.
134 Chapter Five
Fig. 5-7. Ebeneezer Landells, wood engraving after a drawing by John Leech,
quarter-page illustration from chapter 8 of the “Physiology of the London Idler,”
“Of the Mooner,” Punch, or the London Charivari , vol. 3 (January 1842), 82.
Fig. 5-8. Ford Madox Brown, sketch for Work (1852, retouched 1864),
watercolour over pencil, 7 ¾ x 11 ins (19.7 x 28 cm.). Manchester City Art
Galleries.
136 Chapter Five


138 Chapter Five
Notes
1
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life
and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne
(Greenwich, CT: Phaidon, 1964), 7 (1-40). In this essay Baudelaire also refers to
Stendhal, William Makepeace Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson, Byron, and others.
2
Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, par M. Louis Huart, vignettes de MM.
Alophe, Daumier et Maurisset (Paris: Aubert et Cie, and Lavigne: 1841), 5-10.
3
Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and
its Physiologies, 1830-50 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York, NY: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007) see especially chapters 4, 5 and 7.
4
Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 55. All translations are my own.
5
See especially chapters 2 and 3, “Est-il donné à tout le monde de pouvoir flaner
[unaccented in original]?” (“Is its possible that everyone is able to stroll?”), and
“Des gens qui s’intitulent très-faussement flaneur” (“People who very falsely call
themselves ‘flâneur’”), Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 10-23.
6
These are Huart’s the headings for chapters 7, 9, 5, 10 and 6.
7
For references to and partial definitions of the “vrai flaneur” (“true flâneur”) see
63 on the infantryman, chapter 8, “Le parfait flaneur” (“The Perfect Flâneur”), 53-
9, and the final chapter, chapter 15, “Conseils à l’usage des flaneurs novices”
(“Guidance for novice Flâneurs”), 113-26.
8
Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, illustrated by A.
Henning (London: D. Bogue, 1848). For more on the relationship between Smith’s
articles for Punch and The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, see Margaret
A. Rose, “Flâneurs and Idlers: a ‘Panoramic’ Overview,” introduction to Rose
(ed.) Flâneurs and Idlers (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2007), 27-45.
9
This is striking as around ten different publishers were behind these books. As
Lauster observes: “albeit as competitors, they were collaborating on an undeclared
project - ‘Les Physiologies’” (Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, 290).
10
Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, 289.
11
Rose, “Flâneurs and Idlers,” 40. Compare also Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 30
and Smith, The Natural History of the Idler, 18. This pairing, showing the stroller
looking at prints in a shop window is reproduced in Rose, “Flâneurs and Idlers,”
44.
12
The Natural History of the Idler, titles for chapters 2, 5, 10, 12 and 14. Several
of these headings correspond to the earlier chapters in Smith’s “Physiology of the
London Idler,” Punch, vol. 3, 1842 (see Rose, “Appendix 3,” in Flâneurs and
Idlers, 328-36). Chapter headings which reflect Huart’s are chapter 6, “Of the
Mooner” (chapter 5, “Le musard”), chapter 12, “Of the Visitor to London”
(chapter 6, “Le badaud étranger”), and chapter 14, “The Street Boy” (chapter 10,
“Le gamin de Paris”). Other subject are lifted by Smith from Huart’s text, but not
reflected at the level of chapter headings.
13
Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 32.
14
15
16
17
18
19
Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 32. The musard is further contrasted with the true
flâneur when he makes a final brief appearance in the concluding chapter of
Huart’s book, see 123.
20
Smith, The Natural History of the Idler, 46.
21
Smith, The Natural History of the Idler, 47. The Gent, another male stroller and
voyeur, was profiled in Smith’s The Natural History of the Gent (London: D.
Bogue, 1847).
22
Compare Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 37 and Smith, The Natural History of
the Idler, 51.
23
“mooner, n.”. OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/121911 (accessed November 01, 2012).
24
“† moonery, n.”. OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/121912 (accessed November 01, 2012).
25
“mooner, n.”. OED Online.
26
Smith, “Physiology of the London Idler,” Punch (January 1842), vol. 3, 82-3.
This passage is reproduced without illustration in The Natural History of the Idler,
47.
27
28
29
30
Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 102 and 97.
31
For the chapter on the Burlington Arcade see chapter 3, for the Pantheon bazaar
see chapter 4, and for the Lowther Arcade see chapter 9.
32
Smith, The Natural History of the Idler, 72 and 73.
33
34
35
Notably, when Smith’s book was reissued in 1858, the title page showed a man
seated on a pier viewing two women with parasols (who seem to be a mother and
daughter) again from behind. This wood engraving appeared in the 1848 edition,
62.
36
Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 124-5.
37
Smith, The Natural History of the Idler, 48, 52 and 49.
38
39
On this subject see “The ‘Discovery’ of Sweated Labour, 1843-1850,” chapter 1
in Sheila Blackburn, A Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work?: Sweated Labour
and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain (Aldershot, Hampshire
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), and Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture:
Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville, VA and London:
University of Virginia Press, 2003). See also Lara Kriegel, “Commodification and
Its Discontents: Labor, Print Culture, and Industrial Art at the Great Exhibition of
1851,” chapter 3 in Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian
Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 86-125. The
140 Chapter Five
Mooner is middle-class as according to Smith he is “most probably an old

bachelor, with a hundred and fifty pounds a-year” (Smith, The Natural History of
the Idler, 47).
40
See Rose, Flâneurs and Idlers, especially 31 and 35.
41
See Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press,
1978), 346.
42
See Altick, The Shows of London, 346-7.
43
44
See Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996), 109.
45
46
47
48
The Collected Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware, Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 155-7.
49
Smith, The Natural History of the Idler, 52. A few pages previously the Mooner
is described as fascinated by the “arcana” of the gold-beaters and paper-stainers
who have displayed the tools of their trade in their shop windows (Smith, The
Natural History of the Idler, 50).
50
Smith, “The Physiology of the Idler,” 82, and Smith, The Natural History of the
Idler, 48.
51
The umbrella is also signifier of class, because carrying an umbrella signifies
that a person is not rich enough for a carriage but cares enough about clothes and
appearance to wish to stay clean and dry.
52
Kenneth Bendiner, quoting from Brown’s pamphlet on Work, in The Art of Ford
Madox Brown (University Park Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylavia State University
Press, 1998), 93.
53
See Tim Barringer, quotation from Brown’s diary, in Men at Work: Art and
Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2005), 76.
54
This would correspond to the following volumes by Smith: The Natural History
of the Gent, The Natural History of the Flirt (London: D. Bogue, 1848), The
Natural History of “Stuck-Up” People (London: D. Bogue, 1847), and The
Natural History of the Idler.
55
See Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: the Representation of Type
and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
especially chapter 6.
56
See Barringer, Men at Work, 65.
57
See Bizup, Manufacturing Culture, 169-71. Kriegel argues convincingly for the
reinsertion of the human presence of the labouring body in readings of the Great
Exhibition (Grand Designs, 90). This argument runs counter to the suggestion that,
at the exhibition, the fetishization of the commodities on display led to labour and
the labouring body being effaced. For a key proponent of this argument, see
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and
Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
58
For Bizup’s comment on the Art Journal’s equation of “shoddy goods” with the
tastes of “savage people,” see Manufacturing Culture, 123.
59
CHAPTER SIX
A PATCHWORK OF EFFECTS:
NOTIONS OF WALKING, SOCIABILITY,
AND THE FLÂNEUR IN LATE NINETEENTH-
CENTURY MADRID
VANESA RODRIGUEZ-GALINDO
The title of this essay, “A Patchwork of Effects,” is inspired by Jonathan

Crary’s seminal work Suspensions of Perception. In the book’s epilogue,
entitled “Spellbound in Rome,” Crary examines a letter written by Freud
in 1907. The letter offered an evocative description of an evening stroll
through Rome’s Piazza Colonna: a place filled with couples strolling and
groups lounging around while trams traversed the piazza and magic
lantern slides were projected onto the square column. Here, individual and
collective subjectivity took shape in a “multiplicity of images, sounds,
crowds, vectors, pathways, and information.”1 The square was presented
as a hybrid and pluralistic space, a “patchwork of fluctuating effects” that
moved simultaneously between interiority and communication, between
belonging and disorientation.2 A context, in Crary’s words, far from the
“Baudelaire/Simmel tradition of shock-ridden inner life” or the preferred
arena of the anonymous and aloof “post-Haussmann flâneur.” 3
While the main theme of Crary’s book is the nature of modern
attentiveness, the rationale for focusing on these brief passages of his work
is the centrality given to sociability in conjunction with observation.
Spectacular society and its modes of perception are explored here within
an arena of collective street life, a context in which social aggregation and
conviviality do not impede but rather were intertwined with elements of
accelerated progress. Crary thus opens up the possibility of dismantling
the identity of the flâneur, or at least breaking the ubiquitous link, that is
so pervasive in accounts of modernity, between the experience of the city
A Patchwork of Effects 143
and the solitary observation associated with the urban archetype of the
flâneur.4
Thus I use Crary’s discerning lead as a point of departure for the study
of flânerie in a different Southern European capital. Like its Italian
counterpart, Madrid has been overlooked in urban and visual studies alike
and has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. In recent
decades, groundbreaking works have proposed new approaches to the
study of nineteenth-century Madrid; however, the urban archetype of the
flâneur has been somewhat neglected.5 Similarly, representations of
conviviality and street life have not been sufficiently addressed, and are
generally examined within the broader process of state formation, national
identity and casticismo.6 Yet, analysis of popular imagery and the
practices of everyday life reveals that although the subject of conviviality
and collective street life in Southern Europe may seem a banal matter, its
effects on and links with the modernizing process have not yet been fully
formulated.
In what follows, I will focus on accounts and representations of urban
strolling and lived experience in arenas associated with conviviality and
the quotidian. Rather than dwelling on the meanings and implications of
flânerie when transposed to a foreign setting, I concentrate on two main
areas. First, I aim to retrieve what Mary Gluck calls “the 19th century’s
own understanding of the figure [of the flâneur]”7 by exploring how
flânerie was perceived in contrast to other forms of walking. Second, I
examine how the everyday spatial practices of the urban dweller were
recorded in popular imagery and the implications of the quotidian in
conceptualisations of strolling, specifically in Madrid’s main square, the
Puerta del Sol.
This paper focuses, in particular, on Madrid’s press and illustrated
magazines, but will also draw on other forms of visual and cultural
production that circulated within the city. Image-making not only recorded
spaces and events but disclosed the ways in which conceptualisations of
public space were articulated and were instrumental in shaping broader
concerns regarding modernity and urbanisation.8 In line with recent
scholarship, the underlying purpose of this paper is to move away from the
strict binary divisions that are normally employed in relation to the
experience of modernity in cities, and Madrid in particular: the old and the
new, the modern and the primitive, high and low culture.9 In doing so, I
reveal the way that perceptions of flânerie exposed the fluctuating limits
between notions of pre-existing urban practices on the one hand and those
that were triggered by modernisation and foreign influence on the other,
144 Chapter Six
thus suggesting that such boundaries were considerably more complex and
porous than has been recognised.10
Flanear, callejar or pasear? Definitions and Debates

Concerning the French Flâneur in the Spanish Context
Three salient and interrelated issues serve as a common thread throughout
this paper, and are fundamental in conducting an accurate assessment of
flânerie in the Spanish context: the persistence of the gestures and tropes
of costumbrismo,11 the debate regarding modernisation and its association
with European influence, and a preoccupation with self-representation
coupled with an acute sense of self-awareness.12 As we will see, an almost
“obsessive” preoccupation with the Spanish capital’s modern status and
the need to achieve adequate levels of modernisation in accordance with
other European models surfaced continuously in almost all forms of
cultural production throughout the nineteenth century, including those
related to the figure of the flâneur. As a result, scholars have continued to
explore the implications of concerns regarding the country’s modernising
project.13
Specific references to strolling and flânerie first appeared in the Spanish
press towards the mid-nineteenth century, becoming more persistent in the
1870s and 1880s. Particularly significant is an article entitled “El
transeúnte” (The Passer-by), published in 1848 in the popular weekly
Semanario Pintoresco Español. Although this text preceded later debates
surrounding the figure of the flâneur, it is certainly worth mentioning
because it reveals an early preoccupation with the act of strolling and the
various types of urban dwellers who inhabited Madrid.14 Beginning with a
straightforward question - “What is the passer-by?” - the text is structured
around this initial line of enquiry. The transeúnte described here
demonstrates the influence of the flâneur from mid-century French
panoramic essays and writings. The characteristics of the flâneurs described
by Auguste de Lacroix in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1841) and
Louis Huart in Physiologie du flâneur (1841) surfaced in “El transeúnte,”
which focused in particular on the passer-by’s superior sense of
awareness, sensibility and urbanity.
More importantly, “El transeúnte” anticipated two main features that
would become predominant in later accounts of walking in Madrid. First,
as implied in the aforementioned opening question, there was an ongoing
concern with the qualities and requirements to be fulfilled by the adequate
passer-by within the changing social, political and cultural landscapes of
Madrid.15 This concern persisted until the turn of the century and was
formulated in relation to the capital’s status within Europe. Determining

how and when Madrid fitted European models was at the core of this
continuing debate, which accentuated a sense of self-consciousness in
relation to foreign practices. The second aspect is the presence of the
other, the fellow idler or stroller, and the importance of the individual
passer-by within a broader context, in part characterised by the presence
and interaction with fellow city-dwellers, in other words, through the
gestures and forms of expression of costumbrismo.16 As we will see in
later accounts of strolling, chance encounters came to embody one of the
defining elements in the construction of space and a sense of urban
identity.17 The stroller was commonly depicted as an attentive city-dweller
who willingly and often deliberately engaged in social interaction, an aspect
which undoubtedly comes into conflict with a Baudelairean conception of
the flâneur as an anonymous and vigilant spectator immersed in the
crowd.18 However, companionship and social relations did not hinder the
experience of conscious, urban observation, a distinctive characteristic of
the flâneur.
The use of the French word flâneur, or rather the lack of an equivalent
term in Spanish, sparked debates in the press in the final decades of the
nineteenth century. Journalists pointed to - and sometimes irreverently and
mockingly questioned - the difference between flânerie and the already
existing word for strolling in Spanish (pasear) or walking aimlessly about
the streets (callejear). This discussion signaled an underlying concern with
questions of identity and the implications of adopting, not only a foreign
term, but also a foreign mode of behaviour and approach to public spaces
and walking.
Understanding how terms like flâneur, pasear and callejear were used
is fundamental in grasping how the act of walking was perceived in the
nineteenth century. The verb callejear derives from calle, meaning street.
Calle not only indicates a physical location or thoroughfare but has several
connotations. It is a word loaded with emotive meaning that can refer to
social interaction, a sense of place, and an expansive idea of public space.
Idioms and expressions including the word calle, such as en toda la calle
(the whole world) or hacer calle (make way on a crowded street) were in
use as early as 1729 and included in the first official dictionary of the
Spanish language issued by the Real Academia Española, an institution
that, to this day, continues to dictate the correct usage of the Spanish
language.19 In the earliest edition of the dictionary, the definition of the
verb callejear was: “To walk continuously from one street to another,
without any other aim than curiosity or vice.”20 This definition was used in
subsequent editions with what seemed like minor, but were really very
146 Chapter Six
significant changes. Curiosity and vice were substituted for ocio (leisure or
idleness).21
Explicit references to flânerie or Frenchified modes of strolling became
more persistent through the 1870s and 1880s. The word flâneur, however,
was never assimilated into common Spanish usage, a fact that was noted
by Spanish writers and commentators. In 1883, Madrid’s long-running
newspaper La Época printed the article “Flaneo” by the Spanish journalist
Antonio Hoffmeyer, which began with the somewhat candid sentence:
“And why not? So the word does not exist in Spanish. Then we will
introduce it.”22
This brief article reveals an argument that appeared in the press during
these years, which stated that the differences between the idle stroller
(paseante or ocioso) and the observant flâneur justified the use of the
Gallicism. In order to further illustrate the difference between the two
terms, Hoffmeyer paraphrased and manipulated the published Spanish
translation of Honoré de Balzac’s Physiologie du Mariage.23 In previous
Spanish editions of Balzac’s work, the French terms flâneur and flâner had
been translated as ocioso (idler, leisurely man) and vaguear (to roam)
respectively. The journalist, however, manipulated the translation to
further prove his point and strengthen his argument: “[T]o stroll is to
vegetate … flanear is to live, to enjoy life, to observe the varied scenes of
the kaleidoscope that is the urban thoroughfare ... El flaneo is gastronomy
for the eyes.”24
In line with the French archetype described in the physiologies, these
commentators stressed sensibility and openness to observation as the key
characteristics of the flâneur as opposed to the common stroller; they
opted for corrupting the French word and adapting it to Spanish phonetics
and grammatical rules: “And, readers, please forgive my inventing this
verb, but an exact translation of the French flâner does not exist in our rich
and harmonious language.”25 Therefore, flâneur became flaner, and the
verb flanear was conjugated in accordance to Spanish grammar, as in the
above-mentioned article, “Flaneo.”
In spite of this usage and commentators’ insistence on the differences
between strolling and flanear, it is important to bear in mind that these
journalists belonged to a small circle of writers. The flâneur never did
enter the pages of the official dictionary. Instead the word was relegated to
the Diccionario manual ilustrado de regionalismos y habla local, a
thesaurus that included local and foreign words recently incorporated into
Spanish. In spite of its title, one could say the volume was relatively
coercive, rather than an explanatory and illustrated thesaurus. Besides, the
word in question was the recommended and “proper Spanish” expression.26
The French word flâneur was included in the first edition of the
Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la lengua española published in 1927,
and beside it appeared the accepted and adequate term to be used in its
place: vagar or callejear.27 While some journalists used the French word
and/or its deformations, others, like Balzac’s Spanish translators or the
urban planner and theorist Angel Fernández de los Ríos employed the
accepted term callejear,28 or even coined new expressions altogether like
the “recorredor de calles” (street traverser).29 The debate surrounding the
word flâneur implies that neither the term nor the action it defined caught
on, in part because of pre-existing conceptions of strolling and debates
surrounding European influence.
The Flâneur Interrupted:

Sociable Flânerie as a Narrative Device
I would now like to elucidate the points of continuity between the origins
of the flâneur and notions of walking that developed from the mid-century
onwards. As noted by Gluck in regards to the Parisian flâneur, there were
two interconnected narratives of flânerie. There was, first of all, the “popular
flâneur” who emerged in the commercial press and the physiologies of the
1840s, and then there was the “avant-garde flâneur” formulated by
Baudelaire in subsequent decades. In contrast to this elusive flâneur, the
popular flâneur was sociable and key in humanising a changing urban
landscape.30
The Spanish equivalent of the “popular flâneur,” to use Gluck’s
expression, can be traced back to the romantic and costumbrista work of
early and mid-nineteenth-century illustrators and writers such as Mariano
José de Larra, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos and Leonardo Alenza.31
While physiologies and panoramic essays lost appeal in France by 1848,32
the gestures and tropes of costumbrismo persisted in the Spanish arts until
the turn of the century and morphed into costumbrista approaches to
contemporary subjects and vice versa. The motifs and topoi of
costumbrismo (the street, the type, and the crowd)33 therefore merged with
those of Realism and even Impressionism.34 There is no doubt that the
keen eye of the flâneur surfaced in the early writings of the nineteenth
century – mainly the 1830s and 1840s – proving to be a more than suitable
medium through which to address the capital’s changing society and
customs. However, towards the last quarter of the century attention shifted
to the urban dweller’s specific trajectories and visual practices. The main
focus became the journeys marked by the protagonists and the act of
148 Chapter Six
reflective observation itself within the context of a changing yet sociable

urban landscape.
The act of consciously observing the city that is generally associated
with flânerie was used as a narrative and descriptive device in short
serialised novels (known as novela por entregas or novela de folletín) and
late costumbrista articles. These texts continued to be the preferred form
of expression in the illustrated press at the turn of the century.35
Somewhere between a voyeur and flâneur, the narrator functioned as an
indiscreet, invisible presence walking the streets of the capital or following
the steps of the protagonist. He described the stimuli and urban reforms
galvanised by technological advances. Moreover, with the same attentive
eye of the flâneur, he recounted the social encounters that occurred during
his stroll, scrutinising his fellow city-dwellers, their conversations and
wanderings, and, more importantly, their reactions to modernisation and
the trajectories and practices developed in relation to these
transformations.36 In the brief 1886 article “La de los líos,” the journalist
and poet Eduardo Bustillo focused on the visual experience and pleasure
of a seamstress as she strolled through city, an experience that was
heightened as she reached the Puerta del Sol and its surroundings. While
the implications of the inclusion of a female protagonist are extremely
significant, here I would like to point out how the central theme of this
form of journalistic writing was the urban experience itself. The
protagonist was an attentive navigator, hungry for the pleasures of the city
and, most importantly, employed to mark the trajectories that allowed for
the description of urban experience:
An insatiable and blind pleasure guides her swift pace that, although
forbidden, is sometimes worth the price she must pay. She goes from one
place to another, guided by the instinct of her appetite, walking round and
round the streets without hesitation.37
A second narrative technique entailed introducing short fragments

recounting the emotions or the objects surveyed by the main protagonist’s
gaze while he or she moved through the city, which were integrated within
the wider framework of a story. Narrated in the third person, the absent
storyteller described the choice of routes marked by the main character
and the visual stimuli he encountered throughout the walk. The serialised
novel “Los ceros del Juan Araña” published in the popular magazine La
Ilustración Española y Americana in 1880, for instance, recounted the
adventures of an intelligent yet impertinent student, Juan Araña, who
considered that there was nothing worthwhile he could learn in the
classroom from his bigoted university lecturers (although this did not
prevent him from having a romantic affair with his professor’s daughter).
Tired of what he deemed inconsequential teachings, Juan Araña defiantly
walked out of the examination room and chose to walk the streets instead.
The narrator explored in detail Araña’s journeys throughout the city
streets, from the university to the Puerta del Sol. The route is delineated
through Juan Araña’s gaze and the objects he analysed on his way.
Material commodities were gradually incorporated into the urban
landscape as the character approached the commercial streets surrounding
the Puerta del Sol – a frequent destination in descriptions of Madrid:
Juan Araña’s attention gradually strayed from the windows and balconies
he had devoted himself to from the start of his stroll … to what offered
more material for entertainment, he began to undertake an inventory with
his eyes, the space, the wide array of tempting or unremitting objects
displayed in the shop widows along his way … were subject to his
inspection, which at times was indifferent and disdainful, or attentive and
reflective, or galvanised by the electric vibrations of desire.38
The protagonists of this genre of popular journalism were thus deployed as

attentive, reflective navigators within the city streets; however, they were
not alone on their walks.39 While they were described as being immersed
in the stimuli of the city, their strolls were also interrupted by a series of
elements: noise from the tramway, the cries of street vendors, flirtatious
comments, chance or planned encounters, in short, interruptions that
interfered with the anonymous status generally attributed to the figure of
the flâneur. Even in 1841, Huart’s Physiologie du flâneur critiqued the city
walker who called himself a flâneur but then stopped at every corner of the
Marais to engage in banter with the street vendors selling melons,
discrediting these wanderings as “flâneries melonières.”40 Conversely,
many accounts and depictions of streetwalking in Madrid conveyed these
interruptions as an inherent part of the city. Rather than reproaching the
aspiring flâneur for falling prey to petty distractions, a latent presence of
conviviality and the quotidian is presented as an inescapable quality of city
life, building on the way that notions of the city were recast in memory
and then linked to specific places and practices. Moreover, if, for any
reason, the stroller should wish to maintain his anonymity or refrain from
partaking in this social setting, a conscious effort needed to be made in
order to “[flee] from encountering friends”41 or “the disproportionate
shouts” of a peach vendor.42
At this point, I would like to reconsider Walter Benjamin’s reflections
on the possibility of the existence of a Roman flâneur. Benjamin briefly
pondered the conditions that enabled the existence of the flâneur in Rome
150 Chapter Six
and affirmed that this figure could not emerge in a city with Rome’s
characteristics, for here the passer-by became involved in the mnemonic
characteristics of his surroundings. The “Roman character” as well as the
city’s “historical frissons” – its squares, churches, and national shrines -
did not permit the urban landscape to enter the passer-by’s dreams.43
Recent scholarship has contested the view of the flâneur as an aloof,
anonymous figure devouring the streets of the city. According to such
views, in the midst of technological advance, the flâneur also took comfort
in public spaces that offered the privileges of domesticity and associations
with memory and place, thus suggesting that the limits between public and
private practices were in fact more porous than has been acknowledged.44
While Benjamin pinpoints the problematic issue of locating the aloof and
reflective flâneur within a Southern European landscape, the theories on
spatiality and temporality that have flourished in past decades allow us to
go beyond the mere questioning of the flâneur’s existence in a capital
other than Paris in order to identify the mechanisms and motivations that
made urban observation possible in the first place.45
In this sense, Lefebvre’s analysis (or rhythmanalysis) of Mediterranean
cities provides a framework that facilitates interpretations of Southern
European cities and helps bridge the gap between contemplative observation
and the presence of what Benjamin termed reminiscences or frissons.
Lefebvre suggests that in Mediterranean cities, past historical circumstances
and rituals merged with the rhythms of everyday life, but rather than
merely exercising an imposition, these disruptive elements or “persistences”
could be incorporated into a process that reshaped socio-spaces.46 In this
way, one could argue that the past also gave way to a sense of autonomy in
using space that derived from a historical yet regular relationship with
space based on the quotidian.47
A Stroll through Madrid’s Promenades

and Puerta del Sol: Mocking the Flâneur,
Socio-spatial Formations, and the Image of the City
The Madrilenian illustrated press of the late nineteenth century presented
interconnected narratives of the old and the new city, of the historical
remembrances that permeated daily life and the modern stimuli that
actively changed the fabric of the city. Social interaction was the common
thread connecting the past and present, crossing the boundaries of literary
and artistic styles. As noted by Deborah Parsons in relation to Benito
Pérez Galdós’s Realist novels of the 1870s and 1880s, Madrid was
envisaged as a socio-spatial formation that was “the product of the
interaction of built form, social rhythms and human practices and

emotions.”48 Building on Parsons’ assertion that Madrilenian modernism
was characterised by the incorporation of the trivial, the quotidian and the
popular,49 one could argue that conceptions of strolling were embedded in
past customs and the tropes through which these were articulated. As a
result, previous conceptions of sociability shaped perceptions and
constructions of the Madrilenian flâneur and his relationship to urban
identity. It has been noted that, unlike his European counterparts, the
Spanish flâneur of early costumbrista literature and journalism often
walked the streets with a friend or acquaintance,50 a formula that, as we
have seen, persisted throughout the century in different forms of
expression. As mentioned above, in these brief costumbrista articles of the
late century, attention shifted from the people and customs described by
the stroller/narrator to the act of observation itself.
A telling example of sociable flânerie is found in a brief article by
Jacinto Benavente published in 1898 under the title of “Confidencias.” In
this text, two friends aimlessly walk the city together arm in arm, their
manner of speaking mirroring the slow stream of consciousness associated
with reflective observation: “They walk arm in arm along streets and
streets, with no particular destination … They speak slowly, with an
aloofness of thought.”51 And if the weather allows it, the main character
continues: “I flaneo on my own or with the first friend I come across.”52
The act of flânerie is, to a certain extent, trivialised, as the two characters
are ordinary men by the name of Pepe and Manuel. “Confidencias”
exemplifies a common approach to urban walking: flânerie ceased to be an
end in itself to become a means of enjoyment. Through the tropes of
costumbrismo, the observation and reflectiveness of the flâneur merged
with the pleasure derived from social interaction. However, one did not
cancel out the other.
This approach to flânerie and social encounters extended to popular
imagery. Madrid Cómico, a satirical illustrated weekly devoted to Madrid
street life, conveyed the capital’s changing urban and social landscape
through the humorous characterisation of city-dwellers. Satirical and
humorous cartoons became increasingly popular and a number of comical
magazines, or revistas festivas, as they were known in Spanish, depicting
the vicissitudes of everyday city life, were launched in the final decades of
the century. In the 1886 “En la Puerta del Sol,” just one of many examples
of the type of panoramic studies and cartoons featured in this gazette,
various urban types were portrayed strolling in the square: bourgeois men,
the popular chulo, a preoccupied intellectual, and members of the lower
classes (Fig. 6-1). They were depicted observing the square from different
152 Chapter Six
viewpoints while commenting on a range of subjects, from the infamous

clock in the square to an attractive female passer-by boarding the tram, or
the recent reduction of prices at a local café. What these vignettes have in
common is, again, the emphasis placed on conviviality combined with
attentiveness to the social and spatial transformations that were in the
process of altering perceptions of the square. The central theme of the
illustrations is, of course, the square, yet it must be emphasised that the
site is constructed through a dialectical relationship between the city-
dweller and changing spatial and social relations, formulated through the
accessible and well-known topoi of costumbrismo.
Fig. 6-1. Ramón Cilla, “En la Puerta del Sol,” Madrid Cómico, no. 192 (23
October 1886): 4, 5. Biblioteca Residencia de estudiantes, Madrid.
Issues related to national identity surface in this style of representation.

However, it is important to note that chroniclers of the city were well
aware of the capital’s representation as a convivial and lively city and the
stereotypes yielded by this reputation. Reformers were especially
concerned with equalling the standards of what were considered to be
more advanced, modern capitals of Europe, namely Paris and London. The
Puerta del Sol was at the centre of debates regarding modernisation as it
embodied the city’s identity whilst encapsulating all that needed to be
improved.53 Referred to as a mentidero (a meeting or gossiping point), the

square was also the capital’s financial and political hub; as such, it
underwent major renovation in the mid-century in order to accommodate
the modern infrastructure required by this sort of city focal point. In spite
of this regeneration project, the square continued to be referred to as a
mentidero frequented by a range of social classes.
Fig. 6-2. José Jiménez y Aranda, “El Mentidero,” La Ilustracion Española y

Americana, supplement to no. 47 (22 December, 1878): 384. Biblioteca Virtual
Miguel de Cervantes.
Two prints of Seville’s main square and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol,
reproduced in 1878 and 1876 respectively, signal concerns with sociability
and its implication within a context of modernisation (Figs 6-2 and 6-3).
The reproduction of a painting by José Jiménez Aranda is a historical
recreation of eighteenth-century Seville and its mentidero, while the
second is a contemporary portrayal of the Puerta del Sol at dusk, the
busiest time of the day when madrileños used to go for a stroll. Regarding
the painting of Seville, the main urban centre of rural Andalusia, the
magazine’s editor compared its mentidero to that of Madrid, thus
establishing elements of continuity not only between regions (as could be
154 Chapter Six
suggested from the vantage point of a project of national identity), but,

more importantly to the subject of this essay, between past and present
spatial practices. The Andalusian mentidero portrayed an everyday scene
from over a century earlier, whereas its accompanying text focused on the
archetypes, their trajectories and how they mediated public space in
relation to nineteenth-century practices.
Fig. 6-3. José Luis Pellicer, “Una acera de la Puerta del Sola al anochecer,” La
Ilustración Española y Americana, no. 17 (8 May 1876): 304/305. Biblioteca
Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
Nineteenth-century urban theorists, chroniclers and authorities

reflected on Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and its reputation as a mentidero,
which was regarded as an obstacle to the city’s modernisation project and
a sign of backwardness.54 Accounts of the square varied between the
denunciation of the square’s overcrowding to the celebration of its
conviviality understood as part of Madrid’s distinctive yet modern
identity, which is the tone adopted in the drawing of the Puerta de Sol
(Fig. 6-3), and further emphasized in the accompanying text.55 It was
therefore regarded as a source of pride based on its ties to past customs
and practices; a reminder of certain aspects that could be improved; and,
more often than not, it was conveyed as a hybrid of these distinct features.
These characteristics were not only ascribed to the Puerta del Sol, but
were also extended to other urban spaces like Madrid’s paseos (promenades).
Although the differences between Madrid and other European capitals
were emphasised and enhanced, so were the capital’s new infrastructure
and thoroughfares modelled on European capitals. The article “Paseos de
Madrid” (Madrid’s Promenades), for example, was explicit in its depiction
of Madrid’s “uniqueness” whilst highlighting the similarities it shared with
other modern European cities. The article affirmed that Madrid, like other
European capitals including Berlin, St Petersburg, Paris and London,
boasted pleasant paseos (promenades) for one to stroll and invigorate the
imagination. However, Madrid’s distinctiveness lay in its conviviality, a
quality commonly associated with smaller, provincial towns:
What happens in Spain’s main city does not occur in any other promenades
[in Berlin, Constantinople, London, and Paris]. The person who goes to the
Tuileries, only goes to stroll, to listen to the music played every afternoon
by the military bands; if they run into an acquaintance, they are surprised.
In Spain’s promenades, one of the most attractive features - if not the main
attraction - is the fact that one will find friends or acquaintances. If this
only occurred in the provinces, it would not be remarkable, but it also
happens in Madrid.56
In costumbrista style the author then recreated several dialogues (or

“stereotyped dialogues”, as he termed them) in order to enact the chance
encounters that took place among the urban archetypes populating the city.
This was a common narrative technique used in journalism that stressed
the interdependency of individual and collective subjectivity and of
notions of Madrilenian and European identity. As a result, Madrid was
equated with, but at the same time differentiated from, other European
capitals.
Illustrations like “High life de Madrid” (1876) and “En la Puerta del
Sol. High Liffe [sic]” (1888) (Figs 6-4 and 6-5) signal various issues
linked to urban identity and social-spatial practices that belied the
increasingly popular satirical drawings of street life in the late-nineteenth
century. Here we see how questions of class, European aspirations, and the
pretensions of the figure of the Frenchified flâneur are all intertwined. The
156 Chapter Six
conversations between the protagonists of the illustrations and the

accompanying captions provide the framework for the characters congregated
Fig. 6-4. “High Life”, El Solfeo, no. 183 (2 March 1876): “And how is Mrs X’s
salon this year?” “Admirable (etonant) [sic], the most select people of Madrid’s
society gather there.” “Then I cannot miss it this evening.” Hemeroteca Municipal
de Madrid.
Fig. 6-5. José Luis Pellicer, “En la Puerta del Sol. High-Liffe [sic]”, Madrid
Cómico, no. 270 (21 April 1888): 4. Biblioteca Residencia de estudiantes, Madrid.
158 Chapter Six
at the Puerta del Sol and the Paseo del Prado. The pomposity of flânerie
and European fashions were, on the one hand, coupled with sardonic
comments on the ostentatious afrancesado (Frenchified) and, on the other,
associated with the vulgarity of the middle classes who attempted to
emulate aristocratic manners, as exemplified in “High life de Madrid”
(Fig. 6-4). A brief reading of the text below the drawing reveals two men,
casually speaking on the street, as stereotypes of the middle class, as can
also be inferred by their attire and stance. Their dignified demeanor and
polite manner contrast with the poorly dressed, slouching men leaning into
conversation at the Puerta del Sol (Fig. 6-5). However, in both
illustrations, chance encounters are used as a vehicle for self-irony within
the context of the new socio-spaces galvanised by modernisation.
Contemptuous terms and expressions were coined for the new urban
classes. The term cursi was used for an incipient middle-class who attempted
to emulate the French fashions introduced in Spain by the aristocracy.57 At
the same time, the negative features associated with the aristocracy -
expenditure, excess and frivolity - were a way of life that the respectable
bourgeoisie tried to refrain from, a lifestyle that was sardonically referred
to as “la high life.” The illustration depicting common idlers at the Puerta
del Sol (Fig. 6-5) evidently mocked the pretentious lifestyle of the
aristocracy and aspiring middle classes through the caustic use of the
phrase “high life,” but it also emphasised the capital’s flaws through a
deliberately audacious depiction of the popular urban archetypes that came
to embody Madrilenian identity. A common technique in the press
consisted of coupling images of the “high life,” or simply the term itself,
with elements associated with Castilian street life, such as “paleto”
(bumpkin), “caló” (gypsy), or the working-class neighbourhood of
Lavapiés.58 Thus feelings of selfdeprecation, inferiority and weariness of
the European also enabled an acute awareness of the practices and
demands that had made their way into the spaces of everyday life.59
Although common idlers and aspiring flâneurs were ridiculed and
recriminated, it is important to stress that the act of strolling itself was
trivialised. Meanwhile, conviviality – a pre-existing trope made familiar
by costumbrismo - was a common thread through these changing spaces of
sociability. It was not only the pretentious flâneur who was mocked, but
attention was drawn to the act of flânerie itself within the spaces of
sociability which were associated with earlier modes of experience and
walking. The fact that the construction of Madrid’s Ensanche, its first
residential suburb intended to accommodate the growing middle classes,
was not concluded until the final decades of the century contributed further
to the overcrowding of commercial streets and the social congregation that
occurred in certain areas. As a result, the transformations that enabled the

common idler to become, sometimes unknowingly, a European flâneur
were highlighted, namely social climbing and access to material culture
and recently renovated or urbanised sites. The comical use of the term
“high life” or flaneo conveyed these changing conceptions of class, urban
identity and public space in Madrid. This was the case for an immigrant
from a rural region of Spain (one of many immigrants from the
countryside who, ultimately, made up the fabric of the capital):
There are no Madrilenians [in Madrid]: there are people from Andalusia,
Galicia, Valencia, etc. etc. … [A]nd civilization softens primitive senses in
such a way that, after one month of flanear, a bear from Pajares will enter
any barbershop to have his hair done.60
Does the figure of a sociable yet attentive stroller defy the definition of the
archetypal flâneur as we know it? Was it possible, then, for this flâneur to
exist in Madrid? Possibly not, but going back to the opening paragraphs of
this essay, attentive urban experience and modern modes of perception can
coexist with and be informed by social behaviours. I hope to have
demonstrated that the flâneur is a socially and culturally specific
archetype, and should be thought about in relation to the particularities and
circumstances of each urban centre. In doing so, one is obliged to rethink
notions of flânerie, modernity, and sociability, which may give way to a
more fluid understanding of urban experience. While the validity of the
flâneur was questioned in Madrid, the issues of representation, vocabulary,
and the contemporary debates examined here reveal an acute awareness of
the new demands of modern life. The presence of European influence and
the types of behaviour it promoted, such as flânerie, brought forth the need
to reflect on looking, walking and socialising, with the goal of
accommodating novel notions and practices within the city’s identity and
memory. Through this case study, I hope to encourage others to rethink
established notions of the flâneur and strip this well-known archetype of
its contingent characteristics that, perhaps, conceal what was at the core of
the matter: the reasons that triggered and motivated nineteenth-century
thinkers and artists to reflect on and explain how they walked, looked and
talked about public space.
160 Chapter Six
Notes
* Unless otherwise indicated all translations are mine.

1
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 365.
2
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 370.
3
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 365.
4
On the archetype of the flâneur, its uses and meanings in the humanities, see
Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Chris
Jenks, “Watching your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur,” in Chris
Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 142-60.
Recent studies on the subject have provided new readings of the archetype and its
relation to modernity. See, for example, Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough
(eds), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in
nineteenth-century Paris (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2006).
5
Dorde Cuvardic’s study on Ramón de Mesonero Romanos and flânerie is one of
the few examples. See Dorde Cuvardic García, “El flâneur y la flâneire en el
costumbrismo español,” Filología y Lingüistíca, XXXV (1) 2009: 23-38. Also see
Edward Baker, Materiales para escribir Madrid: Literatura y espacio urbano de
Moratín a Galdós (Madrid: Siglo 21 de España Editores, 1991), 26-32; and
Vicente Pla Vivas, La ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX (Valencia: Universitat de
Valencia, 2010), 123-42; and Catherine Sundt, “Reciprocal Development of the
Lived City and the Popular Press (1833-1868),” Decimonónica, vol 11.1, winter
2014. While the present paper was in preparation for publication Cuvardic’s book
on the flâneur and costumbrismo was published. This is the first book to look at
flânerie in Spain and Latin America: Cuvardic, El flâneur en las prácticas
culturales, el costumbrismo y el modernismo (Paris: Editions Publibook
Universitaires, 2012). Unfortunately, it could not be consulted in time for this
publication.
6
On this subject, see for example, Imman E. Fox, “Spain as Castile: Nationalism
and National Identity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture,
ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21-36.
Through the analysis of posters, Parsons notes castizo aspects were incorporated to
the narratives of modernity: “Fiesta Culture in Madrid Posters, 1934-1955,”
Constructing Identity in 20th-century Spain, ed. Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), esp. 183. See n. 9 for works that incorporate local and
castizo features to discourses of modernity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Madrid.
7
Mary Gluck, “The Flâneur and the Aesthetic Appropriation of Urban Culture in
Mid-19th-Century Paris,” Theory Culture Society, 2003, vol. 20 (53): 54.
8
This obviously implies a conception of the city as a mobile entity, shaped by a
dialectical relationship between mental and physical spaces, infused by historical
yet daily habits that produce a stratification of past and present remembrances and
practices. For an overview of recent studies that have applied a Lefebvrian
approach to Madrid, see Benjamin Fraser, Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban
Experience: Reading from the Mobile City (Lewisburg, PA.: Bucknell University
Press, 2011), esp. “Introduction,” 1-38. On the construction of the city as a
stratification of past memories and histories that informs present subjectivity, see
Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes. Paris et son discours (Paris: Éditions de
la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2001).
9
In this sense, I follow a line of recent scholarship that advocates integrating,
rather than opposing, Madrid’s modernity within western modernization whilst
exploring the implications of its local features as an integral part of the Spanish
capital’s modernizing process. See, for example, Noël Valis, The Culture of
Cursilería. Bad Taste, Kitsch and Middle Class in Modern Spain (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002); Deborah Parsons, A Cultural History of Madrid.
Modernism and the Urban Spectacle (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003);
Parsons, “Fiesta Culture in Madrid Posters, 1934-1955,” Susan Larson,
Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid 1900-1936 ( Madrid: La Casa de la
Riqueza, 2011); Susan Larson and Eva Woods (eds), Visualizing Spanish
Modernity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), Edward Baker, Madrid
Cosmopolita: La Gran Vía, 1910-1936 (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2009);
Rebecca Haidt, “Visibly Modern Madrid: Mesonero, Visual Culture and the
Apparatus of Urban Reform,” in Visualizing Spanish Modernity, 24-45.
10
A similar approach is taken by Mary Gluck in relation to popular and avant-
garde narratives of the flâneur in French literature.
11
Costumbrismo, the dominant genre in prose, journalism and the visual arts from
the Romantic period to the emergence of Realism in the 1870s, described urban
archetypes and scenes of everyday street life. These sketches reflected a shift
towards the empirical study of contemporary life and proved to be an adequate
vehicle in conveying the ephemeral moments of a rapidly changing society moving
towards a bourgeois liberal order. Costumbrismo most often took the form of brief
articles serialized in the press that were later compiled in a collection, but was also
the predominant style in engraving and painting. See Michael Iarocci, “Romantic
prose, journalism, and costumbrismo,” in David T. Gies, The Cambridge History of
Spanish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 381-91.
12
In relation to the Spanish middle class, Jesús Cruz has recently noted that it is
precisely an awareness of class and the adoption of certain life styles that
characterized perceptions of being modern in nineteenth-century Spain. See Cruz,
The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-century Spain (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 16.
13
Edward Baker, “Introduction,” Special Section: Madrid Writing/Reading
Madrid. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, n. 3 (1999): 74.
14
Manuel Carreras y González, “El transeúnte,” Semanario Pintoresco Español
(1848), 61, 62. The text is partially reproduced in Vicente Pla Vivas, 143-4.
15
For a reading pertaining to the political significance of this text, see Pla Vives,
La ilustración gráfica, 143-4.
16
In this sense, like the passer-by described by Louis-Sébastian Mercier in his
Tableau de Paris, “the flâneur is observed while observing.” As noted by
162 Chapter Six
Parkhurst, there is a co-dependent relationship between the attentive flâneur and

the idler; see Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson on Mercier in “The flâneur on and off
the streets of Paris,” in Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994),
27.
17
In relation to costumbrista journalism of the early and mid-nineteenth century,
Cuvardic has noted that the Spanish stroller often walked and conversed with a
companion, a typical trope of this genre of literature (Cuvardic, 29, 32).
18
See Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in The Painter of
Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon
Press, 1964); Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A lyric poet in the era of high
capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Verso, 1997). On the urban archetype
and its historiographical uses, see note 4.
19
Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana, en que se explica
el verdadero sentido de las voces, su naturaleza y calidad, con las phrases o
modos de hablar, los proverbios o refranes, y otras cosas convenientes al uso de la
lengua (Madrid: Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1729), vol. 2, 72-4
20
“Andar continuamente por la calle de una en otra, sin tener que hacer, ni otro fin,
que la curiosidad o el vicio” (Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 1729, 74).
21
See entries for callejear and callejero in Diccionario de la lengua castellana por
la Real Academia Española, 12th edn (Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio
Hernando, 1884), 193.
22
“¿Y por qué no? ¿Qué no existe esa palabra en castellano? Pues se introduce”
(Antonio Hoffmeyer, “Flaneo,” La Época, supplement to n. 10. 961 [14 January
1883]).
23
Honoré de Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage was published in 1829 and first
translated into the Spanish in 1841. Subsequent editions in Spanish appeared in
1867 and 1879. For the Spanish translation of this paragraph, see Fisiología del
matrimonio o meditaciones de filosofía ecléctica sobre la felicidad y la desgracia
conyugal, trans. Alberto Robert (Madrid: Librería de Alfonso Duran, 1867), 43.
24
“[P]asear es vegetar … flanear es vivir, gozar de la vida, observar las variadas
escenas de ese kaleidóscopo que se llama vía pública … El flaneo es gastronomía
de los ojos” (Antonio Hoffmeyer, “Flaneo”).
25
“Y perdónenme los lectores la invención de este verbo en gracia de que no existe
en nuestra rica y armoniosa lengua ningún otro que traduzca exacatmente el flaner
francés” (Asmodeo [pseodynoum of Ramón de Navarrete y Fernández Landa],
“Cartas de Asmodeo,” La Época, n. 7621, [17 August 1873]).
26
Real Academia Española, “Prologue,” in Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la
lengua española. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1927), vii-viii.
27
Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la lengua española (1927), 944.
28
Fernández de los Ríos, “La quincena parisiense,” La Ilustración Española y
Americana (3 May 1879).
29
“Recorredores de Calles,” La Discusión, n. 1557 (2 October, 1873).
30
Gluck, 69. Margot Versteeg also applies Gluck’s lead on flânerie in relation to
the genre of the urban chronicle that was made popular in the comical magazine
Madrid Cómico. Margot Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma: La (re)definición del
papel del escritor-periodista en la revista Madrid Cómico (Madrid:

Iberoamericana, 2011), esp. 151-3.
31
See Cuvardic, “El flâneur y la flâneire en el costumbrismo español”; and
Valeriano Bozal, La ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX en España (Madrid: Alberto
Corazón, 1979).
32
Gluck, 72.
33
Rebecca Haidt has identified these as the key topoi of costumbrismo: Haidt,
“Visibly Modern Madrid,” 26.
34
On the transition from costumbrista to realist painting, see for example, Carlos
Reyero, Pintura y Escultura en España, 1800-1916 (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995),
179ff. The work of the artist Jose Jiménez Aranda (see Fig. 6-2) exemplifies the
merging of costumbrista motifs and impressionist techniques.
35
Iganacio Ferreras, La novela por entregas, 1840-1900, cited by Michael Iarrocci,
“Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo,” in The Cambridge History of
Spanish Literature, ed. David Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 384.
36
Within this genre of literature, see for example, Carlos Frontaura, “Tipos
madrileños,” La Ilustración Española y Americana supplement to no. 5 (February
8, 1888), 99, 102; Manuel Fernández y González, “Las dos Victorias,” La
Ilustración Española y Americana 22 (June 15, 1883), 370-2.
37
“Guía su ligera planta la sed insaciable y ciega de un goce [pasear] que, por
vedado, vale a veces lo que cuesta. Va a donde va por instinto que el apetito
despierta, sin vacilar de las calles en las vueltas y revueltas” (Eduardo Bustillo,
“La de los líos,” Madrid Cómico, no. 153, 23 January 1886).
38
“Juan Araña fue descuidando por grados la inspección de ventanas y balcones a
que venía dedicándose desde el principio de su paseo … por otro que le ofrecía
más abundante materia de entretenimiento, comenzó a inventariar con los ojos, a
todo su espacio, los objetos más o menos tentadores expuestos en los escaparates
de toda especie que encontraba al paso … cayeron baja la inspección, unas veces
indiferente y desdeñosa, otras atenta y reflexiva, otras galvanizada por las
eléctricas vibraciones del deseo” (Peregrín García Cadena, “Los ceros de Juan
Araña,” La Ilustración Española y Americana, n. 30 [15 August, 1880], 90). There
are two underlying criticisms in these texts that appeared frequently in these
decades: women’s frivolity was condemned but so was male indiscretion;
secondly, there was a denouncement of materialism commonly identified with
luxury goods and European material culture.
39
On walking with a companion, see note 17.
40
Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (Paris: Aubert and Lavigne, 1841), 20-1.
41
“[huir] del encuentro de sus amigos” (Ricardo Molina, “Dos Matrimonios”, El
Museo Universal, no. 9 [2 March 1862]: 71-2).
42
“los gritos descompensados” (Emilio Huelín, “Las ferias de Madrid”, La
Ilustración Española y Americana, supplement to no. 28 [5 October 1871]).
43
This observation first appeared in “The Return of the Flâneur” published in 1929
(see “The Return of the Flâneur” in Selected Writings. Volume 2, part 1 (1927-
1930), ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA:
164 Chapter Six
Harvard University Press, 1999), 263). A briefer reference to Rome is also made in
Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project; see The Arcades Project, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999), 417, 880.
44
Deborah Parsons, “Flâneur or flâneuse? Mythologies of modernity,” New
Formations 38 (1999): 96; Parsons, A Cultural History of Madrid, 41.
45
For an overview of the spatial theories that have informed cultural readings of
cities, see for example, Andrew Thacker, “Theorizing Space,” in Moving through
Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003), 13-45.
46
Henri Lefebvre, “Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities,” in Writings on
Cities, trans. and ed. by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (London:
Blackwell, 1996), 228-39.
47
This link between Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of Mediterranean cities and Madrid
follows Deborah Parsons’ suggestion in A Cultural History of Madrid, 9.
48
Deborah Parsons, A Cultural History of Madrid, 37.
49
Parsons, “Paris is not Rome, or Madrid: locating the city of modernity,” Critical
Quarterly, vol. 44, Issue 2 (July 2002): 25. Also see, Parsons, “Fiesta Culture in
Madrid Posters, 1934-1955,” esp. 183.
50
Cuvardic, 32.
51
“Pasean del brazo por calles y calles, sin dirección fija ... Hablan con lentitud,
con dejadez del pensamiento” (Jacinto Benavente, “Confidencias,” Madrid Cómico
[5 November 1898]: 765).
52
“flaneo, solo o con el primer amigo encuentro” (Jacinto Benavente,
“Confidencias,” Madrid Cómico, 765).
53
See for example, Eugenio de Ochoa, Madrid, París y Londres (Paris: Baudry,
1861); Eusebio Blasco (ed.), Madrid por dentro y por fuera, Guía de forasteros
incautos.- Misterios de la Córte, enredos y mentiras (Madrid: J. Peña, 1873), 10;
Ángel Fernández de los Ríos, El futuro Madrid (Barcelona: José Batlló, 1975
[1868]), 20.
54
See note 52.
55
Eusebio Martínez de Velasco, “Madrid - Una acera de la Puerta del Sol al
anochecer,” La Ilustración Española y Americana (8 May 1878): 299.
56
“En ninguno de estos paseos [de Berlín, Constantinopla, Londres y París]
sucede, sin embargo, lo que pasa en las principales poblaciones de España. El que
va a las Tullerías, va solo a pasear, a oír la música, que ejecutan por las tardes las
bandas de la guarnición; si encuentran algún conocido, experimentan una sorpresa.
En los paseos de España, los atractivos, el principal casi es el de hallar amigos o
conocidos. Si esto pasase en las provincias, no sería extraño, pero también sucede
en Madrid” (Juan de Madrid (pseudonym of Julio Nombela), “Paseos de Madrid.
Los jardines de Recoletos,” La Ilustración Española y Americana (25 December
1869).
57
On the meanings of cursilería and the development of the Spanish middle class,
see Noël Valis, The Culture of Cursilería. Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern
Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), esp. “Introduction,” 1-30. Also
see Jesús Cruz, The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain.
58
Federico Garcia Caballero, “Verdades inconclusas. Las cosas pequeñas,” La
Ilustración Española y Americana (30 June 1877). Also see La Iberia (17 May
1879): 3; Revista contemporánea, no. 16 (July 1878): 123.
59
See note 12 on the links between class and perceptions of being modern.
60
“Allí [en Madrid] no hay madrileños: hay andaluces, gallegos, valencianos, etc.,
etc. ... [Y] la civilidad dulcifica los sentimientos primitivos de tal modo que un oso
de Pajares, al mes de flanear por la Puerta del Sol, se entra en cualquier peluquería
para que le ricen el pelo” (Fernanflor, “Madrid – Barcelona,” La Ilustración
Ibérica, n. 300 [29 September 1888]: 610).

CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PHANTASMAGORIA OF THE CITY:

GOGOL’S AND SADOVNIKOV’S NEVSKY
PROSPECT, ST PETERSBURG
TATIANA SENKEVITCH
In March of 1830, ɋɟɜɟɪɧɚɹ ɩɱɟɥɚ [The Northern Bee], a leading political

and literary St Petersburg newspaper, published an advertisement
announcing that M. André Prévost, a well-known publisher and art dealer,
had commissioned the talented young painter and graphic artist Vasilii
Sadovnikov to produce a panoramic view of Nevsky Prospect in the
format of a lithographed mini-panorama1 (Figs 7-1 and 7-2). Sadovnikov
had gained recognition for his luminous watercolours of the capital’s
emerging urban ensembles. His masterwork for Prévost began as a
watercolour sketch some sixteen meters long, encompassing accurately
scaled elevations of both sides of Nevsky Prospect from Admiralty Square
to the Fontanka River. It was then reproduced as a remarkably precise
suite of thirty lithographed sheets that were divided into two scrolls. The
project was completed in 1835, and the Art Gallery of the Society for the
Support of Artists offered to its subscribers the sets of The Panorama
packed in two elegant pocket-sized marbled paper cases (Fig. 7-3).
In 1836, Nikolai Gogol, a young Ukrainian-born writer who became
famous in the literary circles of the Russian capital, purchased a copy of
The Panorama; he sent it to Ukraine as a present to his mother, who had
never visited St Petersburg. An aspiring intellectual in search of a
professional vocation, Gogol had arrived in St Petersburg in 1828 full of
vague but stirring ambitions. He dabbled in a range of occupations that
included acting, writing, journalism, lecturing at the university, drawing,
and private tutoring. Yet none of these professions seemed to resonate
completely with Gogol’s aspirations for his future. In the end, it was
writing that prevailed. In 1835, Gogol published a miscellany of critical
essays on art, architecture, geography, pedagogy, and history that also

The Phantasmagoria of the City 167
included three urban novellas and some unfinished novel fragments. The
title of the collection—Arabesques—referred to a linear ornament of
Islamic origins, a decorative, meditative element of decoration that
expressed the freedom of fantasy from prescribed rules. In classical
architecture, arabesque ornaments enlivened the monotony of plain
surfaces; however, in the Romantic period, the arabesque becomes a
significant structural principle for poetry and visual arts.2 Influenced by
the German Romantics, and Friedrich Schlegel in particular, Gogol
experimented with literary genres that challenged the axial structure of
literary narrative. The theories of genre that Gogol discovered through
reading German criticism informed his Ukrainian tales and urban novellas.
The latter appeared in Arabesques, a collection whose title reflects
Gogol’s particular interest in the visual arts, architecture, and German
literary theories.3 The formal independence of the architectural arabesque,
in Gogol’s views, stood in opposition to the uniform order and blandness
of classicism, a style that defined the architectural identity of Russia’s
capital.4
“Nevsky Prospect” became one of Gogol’s most significant
contributions to the genre of urban novella in Russian literature. The
structure of the novella grew out of a culture of promenades along Nevsky
Prospect, the city’s main thoroughfare, its “finest” part, the “making of the
city,” in Gogol’s words.5 Promenading along Nevsky Prospect, the young
capital’s public façade and a symbol of its dynamic response to modernity,
became synonymous with experiencing urban life in St Petersburg. A
provincial youth eager to adapt to the mores of the capital, Gogol took to
heart the emerging custom of promenading in the city. His knowledge of
St Petersburg thus allowed him to portray vividly the images of the city,
which his characters perceived in a “promenading” regime, as they
literally walk through and about the plots of his novellas. Gogol’s
characters both dwelled in and consumed the metropolis; their story lines
were charted by architectural paradigms and historical imperatives of St
Petersburg’s cultural landscape. Gogol’s manifestly urban characters
perform in a manner that corresponds to nineteenth-century flâneurism,
which was associated with Haussmannian Paris.
This essay examines Nikolai Gogol’s novella “Nevsky Prospect” along
with Vasilii Sadovnikov’s Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, a form of visual
memorabilia of St Petersburg, as two contemporaneous responses to the
emerging custom of the leisure promenade within or along a specific urban
site, such as exemplified by Nevsky Prospect in St Petersburg.6 It will
consider the formation of the modern, perambulating observer--one who
encounters the city in motion, and whose visual skills, predilections, and

168 Chapter Seven
ideologies were influenced and harnessed by the clash between two visual
regimes, that of order and stability represented by the classical tradition
and that of dynamic spectacle and illusion represented by capitalist
modernity.7 In placing a novella and a popular visual object side by side, I
am conscious of juxtaposing two distinct kinds of cultural and aesthetic
artifacts; however, both are predicated on the mobile observer and the
ways in which the urban perambulation informed aesthetic concerns of the
writer and the artist. Both Gogol and Sadovnikov transform this mobile
observer into an active agent of the city’s spatio-visual apparatus and the
phantasmagorical effects that it produced. 8 Taking into account the
relationship between Gogol, the author of “Nevsky Prospect,” and Gogol,
the purchaser of Sadovnikov’s Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, the essay
will consider the coextensive relationship among Gogol’s characters, the
staffage pedestrians in Sadovnikov’s Panorama, as well as Gogol’s
readers who themselves would have visited Nevsky Prospect at some point,
to argue for a proto-flâneurism grounded in the particularities of Petersburgian
urbanism.
How a Perspective Becomes a Panorama

Nevsky Prospect, or Nevskaia pershpektiva (the Latin word “perspective”
as it was transliterated in the eighteenth-century Russian) is the main
thoroughfare in St Petersburg, the city founded in 1703 by Peter the Great
as the projected capital of his new Russian empire. Peter personally
directed the initial planning of the city, for which he evidently produced
several sketches.9 The tsar-reformer envisioned the new city being laid out
in accordance with a regular planning scheme to contrast the irregular,
medieval layout of Moscow, the ancient capital of Russia. He conceived
his new capital as a modern city with linear streets, regulated urban
typology, and an infrastructure conducive to enacting the affairs of state as
well as to organizing commercial and cultural activities. Peter desired the
city to represent a new geopolitical power that Russia acquired in the
Baltics after the war with Sweden and to project the image of a powerful
empire, one distinctly different from the semi-medieval backwater state that
he had inherited. To implement his vision Peter determined to adopt
Western architectural and planning concepts, technologies, and specialists.10
Placing the Admiralty in the focal and symbolic centre of the new city
expressed Peter’s resolute determination to transform Russia into a
seafaring nation open to the West through the Baltics. The three avenues
radiating out from the Admiralty Tower in a goosefoot pattern became the
city’s main streets, with Nevskaya perspectiva destined to serve as a

gateway to the future ensembles of central squares that were yet to

embellish the capital (Fig. 7-4). By 1713, Nevskaya perspectiva already
linked the initial wooden Admiralty with the Monastery of St Alexander
Nevsky, a prince-warrior who defended Russia’s western border against
the fourteenth-century invasion of the Teutonic Knights. The 1717 map of
St Petersburg, drawn by Nicolas de Fer, identified the future Nevsky
Prospect as Bolshaya perspectivnaya doroga [or, Great Perspectival
Thoroughfare] and framed it with a double-row of trees (Fig. 7-5). This
road, then still beyond the limits of Petrine Petersburg, became the formal
entrance to the city; it was intended to impress visitors with its orderly
appearance and night lanterns, which were introduced in 1721.11 In the one
hundred and thirty years that separated the founding of the city from
Gogol’s and Sadovnikov’s time, St Petersburg grew into a full-fledged
metropolis with grand architectural character and poise. The growing city
converted vast amounts of space into a series of spectacular ensembles.12
Along with the rapid development of its urban structure, St Petersburg also
developed its own mythology, crystallized for Gogol’s generation in the
heartless, maddening, and terrifying image of the Bronze Horseman who
had been conjured in the eponymous poem by Pushkin.13
St Petersburg’s original layout, in addition to its strategic planning,
reflected the function of the state, the city’s leading patron. From the
moment of its inception, St Petersburg’s urbanism functioned politically
and ideologically by seeking to create a stable, modern, and harmonized
image of the nation’s identity. In the process, the city acquired its own
identity as well, though often in opposition to that of the capital’s official
stance. The ensemble of main city squares that took shape at the beginning
of the nineteenth century contributed to a hegemonic spatial order that
highlighted the function of the state; the city’s subjects were conditioned
by this order to perceive the statecraft scenography and participate in its
effects. Nevsky Prospect allowed visitors to move into the fulcrum of the
city’s perspectival system, located in the Admiralty, or to reverse this
order by moving away from the Admiralty’s central tower pavilion to the
periphery of the grand urban tableau (Fig. 7-6). Both directions--inside and
outside the fulcrum--activated the kinesthetic command of the observer by
imposing on him/her a certain hegemony of visual order enforced by the
rhetoric of architectural spaces (Fig. 7-7).
The formative role of perspective, somewhat new in Russian urbanism,
had been essential for Western city planning since the Roman times.
Analyzing the political function of spatial order in trecento Florence,
Marvin Trachtenberg emphasises that:

170 Chapter Seven
Perspective is the one level of planning that explicitly—by design—

incorporates the viewer into its paradigm. As in essentially all perspectivally
constructed images, whether purely pictorial or architectural, trecentesque
or Albertian, the viewer is made the fulcrum of the entire spatial
composition of the piazza (albeit here not by any geometry of orthogonals
but by real spatial construction of the square and its street-entry).14
The dominating position of the Admiralty not only operated as a civic

symbol of St Petersburg, but also as an invisible eye of the founder of the
city. Moreover, it reinforced the city’s imperial mandate, which was
projected through the three perspectival rays radiating away from the
city’s core out towards Russia’s vast mainland territories. The trident lay-
out of the land that Peter I, one of the most travelled and culturally curious
monarchs of eighteenth-century Europe, surveyed in person during his trip
to Versailles in 1717 might have influenced the tsar’s vision for his capital.
The trivium plan, which was borrowed from Roman urbanism and thus
suggested a symbolic link between Peter’s expanding empire and his
earlier vision of his capital as a new Rome, had probably struck the tsar
much earlier.15 Committed to correcting Russia’s historic separation from
Latin culture Peter sought to promote allegorical allusions to Rome in the
mind of his subjects long before his visits to France.16
Peter I succeeded in implementing the perspectival ordering of space
as a means of organizing spatial discourses for the future development of
the capital’s political and cultural architectural image. Hubert Damisch
notes that, “[a]ll views of the city current in our time are tributaries, in one
way or another, of the perspective configuration—perspective being
essentially constructive, if not urban.”17 The constructive role of perspective
in the initial urban structure of St Petersburg determined the city’s
consequent expansion into a coherent chain of architectural ensembles that
remained sustainable even through stages of industrialization and
commercialization of the city. The perspectival planning order played a
particularly significant role in St Petersburg due to the relative
concordance in time between the foundation of the city and the formation
of its major architectural ensembles, which distilled and implemented the
neoclassical language of measure, proportion, legibility, and uniformity.18
The natural flatness of the marshy lands, the reflective surfaces offered by
the river and canals, and the gently scattered accents in the form of spires
and the traditional onion-domed churches contributed to converting the
planned perspectival system into the spatial mechanisms of order. Yet,
how stable was that order?
By the time the new Russian capital was not quite one century old, the
effects of the Industrial Revolution had already touched many of the

European capitals that St Petersburg was supposed to rival. The emerging

entertainment technologies that served to enhance the leisure time of city
dwellers generated novel visual commodities, often converting cities into
sites of display. In 1787, the Scotsman Robert Baker patented his invention
of a three-hundred-and-sixty degree, circular painting of the city and castle
of Edinburgh. Unlike previous optical devices, which relied on a fixed
frame of vision, this invention, described by the author as la nature à coup
d'œil (or nature at a glance), allowed the experience of mobility within a
field of vision that would later take the form of what Jonathan Crary terms
the observer’s “ambulatory ubiquity.” 19 Barker’s invention placed the
viewer on a platform inside a cylinder-shaped structure whose walls
served as a support for a circular tableau. 20 The effect of a “window”
illusionism associated with a static spectator since the Renaissance was
dissolved; the eye of the moving observer could survey the image in an
uninterrupted sequence and at his/her own pace. When Barker moved his
invention to London in 1793, he placed it in a new architectural structure,
now fully corresponding to its function. The term “rotunda” given to the
structure of Leicester Square became generic for temporary pavilions that
housed panoramas across European cities.21 The word “panorama” became
synonymous with the experience of a continuous viewing and of any
comprehensive survey of ideas, objects, and events in general.22
In the first two decades of the nineteenth century viewing panoramas
became a vogue that spread throughout a number of European cities. The
themes of the painted panoramas varied, but representations of cities,
magnificent natural sites (particularly those in exotic lands), and dramatic
battles were greatly preferred as these subjects yielded the most effective
pairing of wide-angle illusionist effects with the precise rendition of
details. The presumed truthfulness of these views was a prerequisite for
attracting the public. The industrialization of rural landscapes raised the
value of observing the sublime power of untouched nature, while the
panoramas of cities attuned the observer’s skills to comprehending the
layered visuality of urban spaces. Walter Benjamin discerned a similarity
between the experience of viewing a panoramic painting and a perception
of cities, particularly for the flâneur, who represented for him a distilled
agent of nineteenth-century urbanism. He wrote:
Announcing an upheaval in the relation of art to technology, panoramas are

at the same time an expression of a new attitude towards life. The city
dweller, whose political supremacy over the provinces is demonstrated
many times in the course of the century, attempts to bring the countryside
into town. In panoramas, the city opens out, becoming a landscape—as it
will do later, in subtler fashion, for the flâneurs.23

172 Chapter Seven
The “political supremacy” of city life, according to Benjamin, turned

panorama viewing into a training ground for city subjects. The peak of the
panorama’s popularity, as Benjamin observed, corresponded to the
inception and growth of shopping arcades, particularly in Paris. 24 The
technologically innovative use of iron in architecture brought the
relationship between art and technology to a new level. Shopping arcades
organized a commercial display of commodities into a visual spectacle and
engaged urban mobile observers in the experience of processing these
images.25 The proximity of visual experiences afforded by viewing painted
panoramas of cities or navigating through real shopping arcades became
essential for distilling and comprehending images in motion. The newly
coined term “panorama” acquired its currency in both its technical and
metaphorical senses, and established itself in literature and popular
discourses almost simultaneously with the growing popularity of actual
panoramas.26 According to Benjamin, “[c]ontemporary with the panoramas
is a panoramic literature.”27
Along with the grand stationary panoramas, smaller, portable versions
of the three-hundred-and-sixty degree views of different sights began
appearing in the mass entertainment market. Rolled on a spool, collapsible
panoramas were often demonstrated through portable optical devices, or
unfurled in home theatres as backstage decorations for amateur
performances. These portable objects displayed in private interiors
reversed the kinetic freedom of beholders in the stationary panoramas, as
they required a somatically static observer that moved along the image
only in her/his imagination. Portable panoramas often abandoned the all-
around image principle of the generic panoramas and relied on the
beholder’s bifocal vision, which simulated the fullness of the illusionistic
immersion in the scene.28 A promenade along the street, such as in The
Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, or a river trip, such as in Costa Scena: A
Cruise Across the Southern Coast of Kent by Robert Havell, Jr, - rare
surviving examples of nineteenth-century portable panoramas - called for
an imaginary transversal of the interior’s boundaries while allowing the
observer to remain within the comfortable confines of their private salon
or cabinet.29
Cultural historian Grigory Kaganov notes that, by the end of the
eighteenth century, the Russian viewing public had already formulated two
different ways of perceiving a city: from the inside out, which represented
a Cartesian seclusion of the “self” within one’s dwelling space, and from
the outside, which is akin to seeing it as a landscape. 30 The genre of
cityscape that began burgeoning in the eighteenth century became
particularly associated with the views of the two largest Russian cities of

the period, Moscow and St Petersburg. The northern capital, unlike other
Russian cities, had no shortage of architectural views to offer, as the city
remained almost perpetually in a process of construction. The painted and
printed views of St Petersburg explored the juxtaposition between the
chthonic nature of the city and the rational, measured rhythm of its stone
architecture, both uncharacteristic of traditional cityscapes. 31 During the
reign of Catherine II, who was a staunch proponent of classicism in
architecture, the cityscape of St Petersburg acquired its idealized stance of
the city with erect classical façades and massive stone structures, which
proudly-- even narcissistically--gazed at their own reflection in the water
of the Neva River. John Augustus Atkinson’s Panoramic View of St
Petersburg, exhibited in Mr Wigley’s Great Room in London in 1807,
captured the exceptionally poised, magnificent and spatially ordered
sensibility of the Russian capital—a sensibility that had amazed its
European neighbours 32 (Fig. 7-8). Having arrived in 1795, Louise-
Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun offered a description of St Petersburg that
corresponded to Atkinson’s lofty, mythical representation of the city. An
exile from revolutionary Paris and a faithful admirer of Catherine II,
Vigée-Le Brun could hardly be considered a dispassionate observer:
As magnificent as I had imagined the city to myself, I was ravished by the

appearance of its buildings, its beautiful houses and its big streets, one of
which is called Perspective and is one league in length. The beautiful Neva
River—so clear and limpid—runs through the city and is filled with boats
and barges that come and go incessantly and enliven this city in a charming
manner. The Neva’s embankments are in granite as are some of the canals
that Catherine [II] ordered to be dug in the interior of the city. There is
nothing more beautiful in the moonlight, they say, than the masses of its
stately buildings that resemble ancient temples. Along one side of the river,
there are excellent buildings such as the Academy of Fine Arts and The
Academy of Sciences and others that are reflected in the surface of the
river. All in all, St Petersburg transports me to the times of Agamemnon as
much by the magnificence of its monuments as by the costumes of its
people that recall those of the ancient times.33
This solemn, imposing manner of representing the city spread out in

the numerous lithographed views of St Petersburg became particularly
familiar for its own public and visitors. 34 Though generally devoid of
immediate human presence or commercial activities, these images defined
certain positions from which the city had to be viewed; they made vistas
longer, perspectives more dramatic, and assisted in cultivating slow
promenades with a measured rhythm of looking at the city’s monuments.
In the 1830s, however, a new image of St Petersburg was in demand--that

174 Chapter Seven
of the city on the move, enlivened by various commercial activities and

populated by more impatient, dynamic city subjects. Vasilii Sadovnikov,
an artist with a penchant for rendering urban views in a more animated,
vibrant manner, was a felicitous choice for introducing the change.
André Prévost, an astute art dealer, capitalized on the popularity of the
word and the idea of “panorama,” when he advertised his project in the
newspaper. The Panorama of Nevsky Prospect consisted of thirty separate
watercolour sheets executed by Vasilii Sadovnikov and later glued into a
linen band. Two different printmakers with identical last names transferred
Sadovnikov’s originals into lithographs. I.A. Ivanov lithographed the right
(shaded) side of Nevsky in 1830. In the next few years, Sadovnikov
produced the master views of the left (sunny) side of the street, which
were almost immediately lithographed by P. S. Ivanov. A complete
version of The Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, often referred to as
Sadovnikov’s Panorama, consisted of two lithographed scrolls mounted
on linen of approximately seven and nine metres in length, respectively,
and fifteen centimetres in height. Prévost’s subscribers received the hand-
coloured copies of the Panorama, although a certain number of the non-
illuminated copies were printed as well.35 Prévost’s shop, adjacent to the
Art Gallery of the Society for the Support of Artists, was located on
Nevsky Prospect and identified in the lithographed rendition of the street.
Those who purchased The Panorama in Prévost’s shop could point out to
their friends the exact location of the shop on the copy they already owned
(Fig. 7-9).
Sadovnikov skillfully transferred the linearity of the street into the
bands of scaled elevations, which retained the impeccable illusionism and
verisimilitude characteristic of the full-scale panorama. Yet, the printed
panorama delivered a more playful, miniaturized rendition of the street
that made it easier to grasp it visually. Although still referred to by city
folks as “perspectiva,” the actual Nevsky Prospect was long but not
monotonously linear. Punctuated by different waterways—smaller rivers
and canals—it contained a number of radiating side perspectives that the
Panorama strategically emphasised (Fig. 7-10). The pockets of side-street
activities included in the Panorama corresponded to virtual impressions of
a promenading pedestrian who could never completely absorb the
commanding linearity of the street. The intriguing peripheral views almost
inevitably demanded that the observer adopt a wider-angle of view or
rotate her or his head to take in a fuller scene. The development of St
Petersburg converted Nevsky Prospect, conceived as a thoroughfare, into a
progressively unfolding visual sequence that did not aspire to achieve the
compositional unity of political spaces, such as the Senate or the Winter

Squares. The visual uniformity of perspective on the street level became

even harder to maintain when one commenced a commercial exploration
of the street and the pershpektiva devolved into forms of religious,
commercial, gastronomic, and sartorial display of the city’s various
commodities where the main priority was be fashionable, elegant, and
festive (Fig. 7-11). It was a place to encounter other, equally fashionable,
elegant, and festive inhabitants of the city. “Nevsky is the universal
communication of Petersburg,” wrote Gogol, pointing to the street’s social
function. “Here the inhabitant of the Petersburg or Vyborg side who has
not visited his friend on Peski or the Moscow Gate [the districts of
Petersburg] for several years can be absolutely certain of meeting him. No
directory or inquiry office will provide such reliable information as
Nevsky Prospect.”36
Sadovnikov succeeded in breaking the established convention of
representing the city in a static mode. In the Panorama, Nevsky Prospect
vibrates with the virtual energy of hundreds of miniature figures, all of
them in transit and each inhabiting a different axis of movement (Fig. 7-
12). The Panorama urged its observer to immerse him- or herself in
different and intermittently changing rhythms of walking and/or spectating,
as all the characters - pedestrians, riders, and those in carriages - move at
various speeds. This “krasavets [beauty]” - this is how the Panorama was
referred to in one popular advertisement by rendering the noun “beauty” in
its masculine version - was no longer a static frame but a fragmented,
interrupted, decentered entity in a shifting frame of vision. The division of
the miniaturized Prospect into two paper scrolls recalled the playful spirals
of arabesques in their unfurled state. Furthermore, this division subverted
classical notion of perspective that imposed a dominant, unified point of
view. Effectively, the two scrolls could have been unrolled in any order, or
even cut into pieces to yield very specific views. No one in particular but a
collective, abstract entity of Nevsky’s promeneurs seemed to share the
power of the street’s agitation and to consume the street’s beauty, which
appeared “transient, fleeting, contingent,” to recall Baudelaire’s attributes
of modernity37 (Fig. 7-13).
A distinct feature of Sadovnikov’s Panorama was its emphasis on the
commercial topography of Nevsky Prospect. If the variety of vendor types
that animated the Panorama’s street’s activities echoed the historical
tradition of les cris prints, the foregrounding of new and fashionable
commercial pursuits suggested a novel approach for a visual guide to a
street. The Panorama allowed the observer to read shop signs during a
virtual promenade along Nevsky, facilitating to some degree that same
observer’s ensuing visit to those very commercial facilities on the actual

176 Chapter Seven
street. Although not a structural sibling to the iron-girded Galerie Vivienne

that opened for visitors in 1826, the Nevsky of the 1830s resembled some
famous Parisian passages as an idealized and titillating entry point to a
shopping street, which projected a “wish image” of the city’s inchoate
modern collective. 38 For example, churches of different Christian
denominations erected along Nevsky Prospect, which are all identified by
inscriptions in the Panorama, are reminders of the city’s collective
identity as well as a demonstration of St Petersburg’s ethnic diversity39
(Fig. 7-14).
Perusing The Panorama trained observers in what Benjamin called a
“technique of inhabiting” the city space. 40 By representing various
pedestrian figures moving in and out of stores, churches, conversing with
each other, or just leisurely gazing around, Sadovnikov emphasized the
ludic aspect of the panoramic display while at the same time captured the
texture of daily life of Nevsky Prospect. Yet, his pictorial promeneurs
were also a source of edification for real-time observers who would
necessarily enact and cultivate the deft urban skills of noticing, collecting,
and processing multiple visual data--the street’s shop signs, people’s
appearances, dress codes and manners, interaction among consumers and
vendors, among other things (Fig. 7-15). An owner of Sadovnikov’s
Panorama, for example, might have been more attuned to catching
glimpses of celebrities passing through Nevsky Prospect after identifying
Alexander Pushkin, the famous poet, as a scurrying gentleman wrapped in
a fashionable long frock and top hat in front of the Holland House (Fig. 7-
16). 41 Because The Panorama could be pushed simultaneously through
two special boxes with glass windows – the viewer was situated between
them - it also gives an impression of simulating an imaginary carriage ride
through the city, a mode of promenading that was preferred by some of St
Petersburg’s wealthier classes. A cabinet-sized visual device with no
special instructions as to how it should be used, Sadovnikov’s Panorama
was a flexible visual tool for exploring the city in private. Along with
other private and public mechanisms operating in the city, it directed urban
subjects towards developing certain habits that overlapped with those of
the future flâneur.42 Going out for a walk in a city without actually leaving
one’s own room, as Benjamin noted, was indeed one such habit.43
In many ways, Sadovnikov’s Panorama extended and perpetuated the
rituals of everyday urban life. The publisher Prévost’s rhetorical gesture,
which brought together the words “panorama” and “perspective,” along
with Sadovnikov’s remediation of architectural elevations into a miniaturized
panoramic image of Nevsky Prospect, converted a linear street into a
moving band of images and enriched it by installing multiple, fragmented

centres of action. As we shall see, Gogol’s novella similarly challenged

the deceptive linearity and uniformity of St Petersburg’s main street, but
even pushed it further by pursuing the radial trajectories of its characters
outside Nevsky Prospect into the peripheries of the city.
The Phantasms of Nevsky Prospect

Gogol wrote his novella “Nevsky Prospect” at the moment when “progulki
po Nevskomy prospectu [promenades on Nevsky Prospect],” a new genre
of literature, was becoming popular among St Petersburg’s reading
public.44 This genre celebrated a social mode of exploring the streets of the
city in addition to more traditional promenades in the city’s numerous
gardens and parks. 45 St Petersburg’s merciless climate posed a serious
challenge to this new trend. Nevertheless, this urban practice became even
more culturally engrained during the reign of Alexander I, who himself
preferred promenading on the English Embankment.46 An encounter with
the city on foot stimulated an interest in its layout, architecture, and social
topography, thus setting the stage for the formation of the “traveling eye”
of modern city subjects and a particular mode of seeing the city in
transit.47
The Panorama of St Petersburg by Alexander Bashchutskii, published
in 1834 in three volumes, was the first version of the encyclopedia devoted
to the city, which covered a variety of historical, ethnological, economic,
and climatic aspects of its life. The title of this publication as well as its
description of the city’s structural cycles perhaps had a crucial influence
on Gogol’s choice of the opening passage of his novella “Nevsky
Prospect.” In a veritable proto-cinematic gesture, Gogol opens his novella
by turning the narrator’s imaginary “camera-eye” on Nevsky Prospect at
dawn. The narrator’s gaze follows the changes that the street undergoes
throughout the day: the point of view moves up and down, rotates, and
courts close-ups. It itemizes oddities, points out excesses characteristic of
its visitors, criticizes their sartorial concoctions, smiles, and whiskers and
it presents many other eye-catching curiosities. All that belongs to Nevsky
Prospect, in Gogol’s description, moves, migrates, appears and disappears,
changes colour and shape. The street comes into view as a collection of
fragmented details dispersed in space, constituting an ever-changing
totality (Fig. 7-17). Different from the illusionism of painted panoramas or
the facticity of journalistic panorama-surveys, Gogol’s inventory of
Nevsky Prospect carries an unmistakable tinge of irony:

178 Chapter Seven
All-powerful Nevsky Prospect! The only entertainment for a poor man at

the Petersburg feast! How clean-swept are its sidewalks, and, God, how
many feet have left their traces on it! The clumsy, dirty boot of the retired
soldier, under the weight of which the very granite seems to crack, and the
miniature shoe, light as smoke, of a young lady, who turns her head to the
glittering shop windows as a sunflower turns toward the sun, and the
clunking sword of a hope-filled sub-lieutenant that leaves a sharp scratch
on it—everything wreaks upon it with the power of strength and the power
of weakness. What a quick phantasmagoria is performed on it in the course
of a single day! How many changes it undergoes in the course of a single
day and night!”
In daylight or illuminated by a night lantern, Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect

emerges not as a high-definition, eye-lubricating trompe-l’œil painting, but
as a set of supernatural, spectre-like images that emerge, overlap, mutate,
and disappear in one’s imagination. A trace on the pavement of Nevsky,
for instance, is one of the many lingering phantasms that overlap with real
images. Gogol’s use of the term “phantasmagoria” to construct his vision
of Nevsky Prospect borrows from the specter-show of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century that gave way to a popular spectacle of
ghostly apparitions performed in St Petersburg as well as across Europe.48
He extends the notion of the phantasmagorical apparition produced by an
optical contraption, such as a magic lantern, to the metaphor for the
irrational, appearing as the imagery generated by the mind. The
phantasmagoria became one of the dominating tropes of European
Romantic literature, one that Gogol masterfully deployed in his earlier
collection of Ukrainian Tales, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which
was published in two installments in 1831 and 1832 and brought him
instant recognition in Russian literary circles.49
The importance of the Romantic context, and particularly of German
philosophy and literature in Gogol’s formation, is well established. His
fascination with the Gothic Cathedral as the expression of spatial harmony
and the architectural sublime articulated in the essay “On Architecture of
the Present Day” came from his perceptive reading of Schlegel and Goethe.
Victor Hugo’s influence, however, should not be overlooked either,
particularly in light of the anonymous translation of the author’s chapter
“This will destroy that” from Notre-Dame de Paris, which was published
in The Russian Literary Journal in 1834. Yet, Gogol’s indebtedness to the
arabesque as a literary form—one that juxtaposed chaos and order, totality
and fragmentation, singularity and multiplicity–derived closely if not
idiosyncratically, from Schlegel’s literary theory. 50 It is significant that
Gogol extended the notion of phantasmagoria to his city novellas, which
unfold in St Petersburg, a city that had not much in the way of historical

traces in general, less so of Gothic architecture or any historical

architecture at all. The genre of urban novella allowed him to fuse the
arabesque as a literary form with the arabesque as a non-narrative visual
element and to enrich this combination with the phantasmatic imagery that
appeared as a temporary, fleeting figurations. It was Nevsky Prospect, an
urban structure of modernity, one governed by classical architectural order
and rational urban structure that generated the effect of apparitions and
phantasms. In this respect, Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect anticipated the
phantasmagoria that Benjamin located in the Paris of the Second Empire.
For Benjamin, as Margaret Cohen notes, phantasmagoria occupies a
key methodological position in the Arcades Project and provides a crucial
link between “the dream image” and “the dialectical image” in the context
of nineteenth-century commodity culture.51 In the 1939 exposé to “Paris,
Capital of the Nineteenth Century” that the critic envisioned as an
overview of the Arcades Project in general, Benjamin explains the levels
of phantasmagoria:
Our investigation proposes to show how, as a consequence to this reifying

representation of civilization, the new forms of behavior and the new
economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the
nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. These creations
undergo this “illumination” not only in a theoretical manner, by an
ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of their perceptible
presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias. Thus appear the
arcades—first entry in the field of iron construction; thus appear the world
exhibitions, whose link to the entertainment industry is significant. Also
included in this order of phenomena is the experience of the flâneur, who
abandons himself to the marketplace. Corresponding to these
phantasmagorias of the market, where people appear only as types, are the
phantasmagoria of the interior, which constituted by man’s imperious need
to leave an imprint of his private individual existence in the room he
inhabits. As for the phantasmagoria of civilization itself, it found its
champion in Haussmann and its manifest expression in his transformation
of Paris.52
On the scale of Benjamin’s levels of phantasmagoria, Gogol’s treatment of

it belongs to the most immediate, experiential level of the street-gallery. It
is important, however, that Gogol perceived the phantasmagorical in the
transitional moment from a classical visual regime to a modern one. Even
the emerging culture of commodification was powerful enough to produce
intoxicating image-desires that circulated in the imagination of Gogol’s
urban characters.

180 Chapter Seven
So how does the phantasmagoria unfold itself in Gogol’s Nevsky

Prospect? In the early morning, bakers, ragged servant ladies, and other
workmen responsible for delivering the daily supplies to the city’s main
artery occupy the street. At this hour, shopkeepers are just gradually
turning to their duties, ordering their “ganymedes” to clean the street in
front of their shops. By noon, the street has become filled with a different
type of crowd comprised of those who, in Gogol’s words, “have their
occupations, their anxieties, and their annoyances, and are not thinking
about the street at all.” 53 Also at noon, tutors of all nationalities and
genders take their charges for a walk on the street, thus transforming it into
a “pedagogical Nevsky Prospect.”54 By two in the afternoon, the prospect
undergoes another change of scenery. The respectable aristocratic fathers,
who finished their service in ministries, their families, prosperous
bourgeoisie, officers and young ladies, and all “those who finished their
rather important domestic business” converge on the site. 55 It is worth
remembering that it is the midday activities that Sadovnikov’s Panorama
portrays. At this hour Nevsky Prospect turns into a veritable exposition of
commodities, which are exhaustively catalogued by the writer (Gogol’s
preference for the word “vystavka [exhibition]” in relation to this hour on
Nevsky Prospect should be noted here). Moustaches, hats, the cuts of
female dresses, pipes, even smiles along with other accouterment
belonging to the street have an air of the best things in the world, properly
crafted for the occasion:
At this blessed time, from two to three in the afternoon, when Nevsky
Prospect may be called a capital in motion, there takes place a major
exhibition of the best products of humanity. One displays a foppish frock
coat with the best beavers, another a wonderful Greek nose, the third is the
bearer of superb side-whiskers, the fourth a pair of pretty eyes and an
astonishing little hat, the fifth of a signet ring with a talisman on his smart
pinkie, the sixth of a little foot in a charming bootie, the seventh of an
astonishment-arousing necktie, the eighth an amazement-inspiring
mustache….56
Around four o’clock in the afternoon, after a brief period of “spring

blossoming” produced by the green uniforms of government clerks
scurrying home from their departments, Nevsky becomes deserted, only to
come back to life at dusk, at “the mysterious time when lamps endow
everything with some enticing, wondrous light.”57 As dusk descends upon
Nevsky and the night comes to life, Gogol’s main characters— Lieutenant
Pirogov, in his imperial army uniform, and the artist Piskarev, in a dress
coat and cloak — embark upon their fateful promenade along Nevsky

Prospect. As soon as the two friends enter the street, two female figures
capture their attention: a dark-haired lady, “a pure Bianca by Perugino,” as
Gogol defined her otherworldly likeness, catches the artist’s attention,
while the lieutenant becomes smitten by another woman, a blonde beauty
crossing the street. Both decide to follow their evanescent desires and
launch into their respective flights along Nevsky Prospect. Piskarev, the
artist, chases his Peruginian beauty far beyond the limits of Nevsky
Prospect to the less prosperous area of Liteinii Prospect until the beauty
disappears behind the doors of a brothel. The pursuit of the blonde lady,
who takes a side street at the Bernini-inspired Our Lady of Kazan
Cathedral, incites the lieutenant to deviate from the conventional
promenade on Nevsky Prospect as well (Fig. 7-13). Pirogov finds himself
on Meshchanskaya (Merchant) street, “a street of tobacco and grocery
shops, of German artisans and Finnish nymphs.”58 Thus, two pursuits that
began on Nevsky Prospect took both characters outside the bounds of the
prescribed order of the Prospect, forced them to step into the liminal parts
of the city with different urban and visual regimes.
The itineraries of the two young men following their ladies, in Gogol’s
novella, can be inscribed onto the surface of the city as etched arabesques.
The characters’ hurried walks reveal a network of routes connecting St
Petersburg’s centre and its peripheries in a web-like socio-topography,
which the glitter of Nevsky Prospect successfully disguised under its
ostensibly linear facades. The narrator, who follows the characters through
the city, is an inseparable part of its plot: it is through his voice that the
reader experiences the changes in the city’s topography, which remains
otherwise unacknowledged by the young friends. His perception of the
city counterbalances the ardor of Piskarev’s and Pirogov’s chases and
approximates the tireless state of mind akin to what Benjamin calls an
“amnesiac intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city.”59 This
intoxication, as Benjamin further explains, feeds on the sensory data
taking shape before one’s eyes and even produces abstract knowledge of
inert facts or already lived-through experiences. Similarly, Gogol’s
characters respond to the generative power of the sensory data that
inflames desires and curiosity and spurs the pace with which one walks
about the city.
How, then, does Gogol’s mapping of the city correspond to the
mapping of his characters? The artist Piskarev is the writer’s tribute to the
waning years of Romanticism. Piskarev’s choice of artistic profession is
compared to a phantom that comes to real life: “He was an artist. A
strange phenomenon, is it not? A Petersburg artist! An artist in the land of
snows, an artist in the land of Finns, where everything is wet, smooth, flat,

182 Chapter Seven
pale, gray, misty ….”60 Piskarev’s character is meek, kind, shy and timid,
lacking any pretense, just like the garret that he occupies, or a beggar
woman whom he paints for hours. Piskarev speaks modestly about his
favourite subjects, but keeps “bearing in his soul sparks of feeling ready
on the right occasion to burst into flames.”61 The leitmotif of his character
is dreaming. His poetic imagination readily conflates a woman who he
sees on the street with a mental phantasm of the ideal beauty, which was
epitomized by the Renaissance artist Perugino for Piskarev. Bewitched by
his beauty’s inviting smile on Nevsky Prospect he neglects the
transformation of a glamorous avenue into a seedy, deserted area.
Moreover, once he has come to the end of his journey, he refuses to
recognize a brothel in a disordered room at the top of the stairs. Even
when he comes to terms with the transformation of his Peruginian ideal
into a prostitute, he continues to concoct the ways of saving her from the
putrid grip of vice and to shield his mental phantom from the sordid touch
of reality. Exhausted by his confrontation with the real, he locks himself in
his garret to continue dreaming.
Piskarev’s unceasing phantasms generated in his sleep are induced by
opium, which he obtains from a Persian shawl seller, who lives in the
basement of the same house. The Persian tradesman asks Piskarev to pay
for the opium by painting his portrait with a beautiful woman next to him.
This ingenious “dream-for-a-dream” barter exchange, concocted by Gogol,
happens in a row house typical of the nineteenth-century St Petersburg.
Gogol situates the artist and the tradesman respectively at the top and the
bottom of an apartment building as if to underscore their liminal status
with respect to the “bel étage” of the early capitalist metropolis.
Piskarev returns to the brothel again to propose his hand and heart to
his Peruginian beauty. He finds her sleepy and disheveled, recovering
from a night of revelry. “She had suddenly shown him the whole of her
life as in a panorama,” writes Gogol, seizing the expressiveness of the
word “panorama.” 62 After aimlessly wandering through the city, the
distraught Piskarev secludes himself in his garret only to be discovered
later with a slit throat and a blood-stained razor on the floor by his
housekeeper. “Thus perished the victim of a mad passion, poor Piskarev,”
laments Gogol, “quiet, timid, modest, childishly simple-hearted, who bore
in himself a spark of talent which in time might have blazed up broadly
and brightly.” 63 No one weeps for a poor artist, a victim of romantic
dreams, no one accompanies his body to the remote Okhta Cemetery but a
drunken soldier, notes Gogol, as if to underline the city’s cruel modus
vivendi. Even his friend Pigorov, who supported the artist from time and
time, can not attend Piskarev’s burial as he is too busy with his own

pursuit of a dream. Two imaginary arabesque scrolls corresponding to the

life itineraries of the two characters that started unfurling at a certain point
on Nevsky Prospect decisively ran in opposite directions.
If Piskarev’s flight implies an arabesque line with a Romantic twist,
Pirogov’s itinerary is distinctly farcical. In contrast to the dreamy and
lonely artist, Piskarev enjoyed the socially active life of an officer
stationed in a big city, a position that demanded the cultivation of various
friends, reasonably informed conversations about art and literature, the
mastering of dancing skills at numerous balls, and the easy courtship of
ladies. The officer’s pursuit of the blonde leads him to a simple but tidy
flat on Meshanskaya street, which, it turned out, is the home she occupied
with her husband Schiller, the silversmith. Pirogov carelessly enters the
flat, eager to know more about the woman he pursued. The self-assured
officer does not retreat from an awkward intrusion after realizing the
futility of his action, but instead proceeds to invent a commission for the
silversmith for a pair of silver spurs, which may allow the lieutenant to
visit the house again. During his second visit to the silversmith’s house on
a Sunday, while the silversmith was away for a church service (notably to
the Protestant Church on Nevsky Prospect), Pirogov persuaded his naïve
lady-friend to dance with him to compensate for the fact that they do not
speak a common language and can barely communicate. When Schiller
returns home from the church service with his friend Hoffmann, the
cobbler, he finds his wife waltzing with Pirogov. The enraged German
promises the officer immediate retribution, which he intends to accomplish
with the help of Hoffmann and his other German friend Kuntz, who also
lived in the same quarter.64 Unfortunately for Pirogov, he did not put on
his military uniform before embarking on this Sunday tryst; the uniform of
the officer could have protected him from humiliating bodily punishment.
As the result, “the most stalwart fellows of all the Petersburg Germans …
behaved so rudely and impolitely with him that I confess I cannot find
words to describe this sorry event,” writes Gogol.65
Upon leaving the hostile site on Meshanskaya street, the infuriated
Pirogov conceives his revenge against the German artisan, exiling Schiller
to Siberia in his mind. Similar to his friend Piskarev, Pirogov pointlessly
meanders around the city in rage but somehow he makes his way back into
the loop of familiar order. On his way home, he stops at a café, appeases
himself with a few pastries, while perusing a recent issue of The Northern
Bee, the newspaper where Sadovnikov’s Panorama was once advertised.
Not only do these simple urban indulgences cool his wrath, but they also
induce him to take a quick stroll on Nevsky. Promenading on the prospect
till evening, the officer decides to let the painful matter go. He ends his

184 Chapter Seven
evening at a party given by Director of the Tax Committee, where he met

some important government officials and officers from his regiment, and
where he distinguished himself as one of the best mazurka dancers at the
party. Unlike his unfortunate friend Piskarev, whose life comes to a brutal
end all because of a fateful stroll Nevsky Prospect, the officer finds solace
in the street’s regulating mechanisms, which allow the retracing of his
habitual arabesques of pleasures. The spirit of merriment reigning in the
street allays any of his concerns and substitutes them for the joy of
voyeuristic forgetfulness:
The moment you enter Nevsky Prospect, it already smells of nothing but
festivity. Though you may have some sort of necessary indispensible
business, once you enter it you are sure to forget all business. Here is the
only place where people do not go out of necessity, where they are not
driven by the need and mercantile interest that envelops the whole of
Petersburg.66
If one charts the urban trajectories of Gogol’s characters, it becomes clear

that Nevsky Prospect, a street eponymously linked to the notion of
perspective, constitutes the spatial and narrative axis of his novella. Two
main characters—Piskarev and Pirogov—are introduced while they are in
the middle of promenading on the Prospect; their respective itineraries
appear as haphazard traces on St Petersburg’s grid of streets with Nevsky
Prospect at its axis. The itineraries of their lives are snapshots—
incomplete and fragmented—and are akin to many figures moving along
Nevsky Prospect in Sadovnikov’s Panorama. The movements across the
city that Gogol charts for his characters elucidate his notion of the
arabesque as both a figurative motif and a literary form. Piskarev’s
arabesque perishes in the liminal zone of death, while Pirogov’s arabesque
obeys the system of symmetry and returns to its structural axis. The
literary scholar Susan Fusso remarked on the organizing role of digressive
exposition in Gogol’s Arabesques: “‘Nevsky Prospect’ is about neither the
high-Romantic gait of Piskarev nor the low-farced anecdote of Pirogov but
rather the point at which the two meet in jarring, genre-crunching
contrast.”67
The genre clash outlined by Fusso is manifested in the visual conflict
between the rational regulation of perspective in the urban order and the
fragmentation of its totality dictated by the phantasmatic spectacle of the
street. Sadovnikov’s Panorama manifests the clash of genres in the visual
arts as well by allowing the two lithographed scrolls divided into the thirty
distinct views of the street to stand nominally for a full-scale panorama.
The de-scaling of Nevsky Prospect--an architectural artery of the city and

its main thoroughfare—into a pocket- size instance of memorabilia implies

the pliability of grand-scale painted views and their consequent
commercial customization. Seen in the context of Arabesques, Gogol’s
“Nevsky Prospect” suggests a strong parallel between the conflicting co-
existence of different visual orders within a purportedly unified structure
of the capitalist city and the collision of different genres within a single
literary collection. The classical language of perspective and symmetry
that underpins the architectural image of St Petersburg loses its
commanding grip over Gogol’s characters as they move along the Prospect.
The staffage figures dispersed along Nevsky Prospect in the Sadovnikov-
Prévost Panorama seem equally oblivious to a larger perspectival order
imposed on the city by its structure; they operate more as animated
puppets of the Prospect’s mercantile drive and narcissistic self-display.
The observer on the Nevsky Prospect of the 1830s becomes a victim of
phantasms not because he/she is controlled by the invisible and powerful
string that coordinates the entirety of perspective but because of the
vulnerability of his/her sensorium that is being incessantly attacked by the
localized and decentered clusters of images that linger, overlap, demand
attention and instigate further desires. The vulnerability of the characters
promenading along Nevsky Prospect in Gogol’s novella is similar to the
helpless state of observers in a painted panorama, which counterfeits the
experience of viewing a real city. The cultural historian Bernard Comment
points to the conflict between the central, almost demiurgic position
assigned to the observer in commercial panoramas and to her/his actual
sense of displacement, disorientation, and even dissolution of the viewing
subject in a fictive pictorial world.68 The staged reality of a panorama or
an urban perspective compromised the observer’s sense of self. Even an
art critic as astute as Théophile Gautier was miffed by Nevsky’s
perspectival theatricality, when he wrote:
[t]his ensemble is organized as an admirable coup d’œil, for which the

name of perspective, which this street carries along with some other streets
in St Petersburg, appears wonderfully appropriate and meaningful. All is
organized for the [benefit]of optics and the city that was created in one
gesture by an untrammeled will and recovered from the marshes as a
complete theatre set called to life by a whistle of a stage machinist.69
For Gogol, however, the power of the urban coup d’œil that Gautier
admired in St Petersburg’s scenography is less unified. In the essay
dedicated to Karl Briullov’s monumental painting The Last Day of
Pompeii, also included in Arabesques, he emphasised the fragmented and
discontinuous effects of the present that the painting conveyed: “Its idea

186 Chapter Seven
belongs completely to the taste of the present century [my emphasis],

which while experiencing its own horrible fragmentation, strives to merge
all events into large groups and selects a powerful crisis sensed by the
masses.” 70 Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” similarly brings together the
disparate and incongruent elements of everyday street life, dissolving a
sense of the street’s putative totality. In keeping with “the taste of present
century,” Gogol renders St Petersburg’s main street as a site of disparate
brushstrokes that are fragmented in accordance with its inhabitants’
personal tastes, social differences, patterns of daily business, professions,
and religions. None of these changing and fleeting specters of Nevsky
Prospect seem to be captured in a single coup d’œil. Moreover, the street
appearances—human and otherwise-- should not be trusted as one’s true
identity cannot be revealed in the open space of the city but in its
dialectical pole, the interior. Gogol’s characters, for example, only
uncover the identities of the women they were pursuing once they breach
their private spaces.71
Who among Gogol’s characters in “Nevsky Prospect” could be
characterised as a flâneur? The meek, demure Piskarev, an artist living in
the world of his own illusions, or the cocky lieutenant Pirogov, who
soothes his humiliation at amorous defeat by eating his favourite pastry in
a café on Nevsky? The tentative flâneur in Gogol’s story is the narrator
who navigates the city with the characters and comments critically on the
signs of its conspicuous progress. His mind processes the passage of time
and characters on Nevsky Prospect and collects the oddities in their
appearances and manners. It is his perceptive gaze that prompts the reader
to view the city’s architecture in a metaphoric, often ironic light. For
example, in the collection of smiles that are given on Nevsky Prospect, the
narrator identifies one that makes the recipient “feel higher than the
Admiralty spire.”72 Finally, it is his critical eye that decries the illusion of
Nevsky Prospect’s appeal as a precursor of the “collective unconscious”
articulated by Benjamin. Gogol’s narrator admonishes those who may be
deceived by the street’s appeal; he serves as a mouthpiece for the author
who condemns what he perceives to be the rise of urban modernity:
But strangest of all are the events that take place on Nevsky Prospect. Oh,
do not believe this Nevsky prospect!
I always wrap myself tighter in my cloak and try not to look at the
objects I meet at all. Everything is deception, everything is a dream,
everything is not what it seems to be! … Peer less at the shop windows: the
knickknacks displayed in them are beautiful but they smell of a terrible
quantity of banknotes. But God forbid you should peer under the ladies’
hats! However a beauty’s cloak may flutter behind her, I should never

follow curiously after her. Further away, for God’s sake, further away from
the street lamp! Pass it by more quickly, as quickly as possible. You’ll be
lucky to get away with it pouring its stinking oil on your foppish frock coat.
But, along with the street lamp, everything breathes deceit. It lies all the
time, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves
its dense mass upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the
houses, when the whole city turns into rumbling and brilliance, myriads of
carriages tumble from the bridges, postillions shout and bounce on their
horses, and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything
not as it really looks.73
This impressionist sketch of noise and brilliance reveals a lingering

spectacle of commodities under the dangerous “illumination” of the street
lamp. For Gogol, the treacherous dappled light of the street lamp embodies
a convergence point of St Petersburg’s urban perspectives.

188 Chapter Seven
Illustrations
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (St Isaac Square, right side of the street), paper

Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Palace Square, left side of the street), paper mounted
on linen, 847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Fig. 7-3. The Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, rolled in marbled paper tubes with a
printed label of Prévost’s shop, h. 21.6 cm., d. 7.6 cm. The Getty Research Institute,
Los Angeles.

190 Chapter Seven
Fig. 7-4. Mikhail Makhaev (drawn by), Yu. Vasiliev (engraved by), Plan of St
Petersburg with the Representation of its Most Significant Prospects, engraving,
1753-61. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations.
Fig. 7-5. Nicolas de Fer, Plan de la Nouvelle Ville de Petersbourg, 1717, 48 x 38.5
cm., engraving. The National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection,
Shapell Family Digitization Project and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Department of Geography, Historic Cities Research Project.

Fig. 7-6. Nevsky Prospect, View to the Admiralty, ca. 1890-1900, photomechanical
print, photochrome, colour. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, D.C.
Fig. 7-7. Mikhail Makhaev (drawn by), Yu. Vasiliev (engraved by), View of
Nevsky Perspective Road from the Admiralty towards East, engraving, 1753-61.
Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundation.

192 Chapter Seven
Fig. 7-8. John Augustus Atkinson (made and published by), Panoramic View of St.
Petersburg dedicated by permission to His Imperial Majesty Alexander I, c. 1805-
7, aquatint, 438 x 810 mm., plate 1 of 4. Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Fig. 7- 9. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), P. S. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of

Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Police Bridge, left side), paper mounted on linen,
847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Police Bridge, right side), paper mounted on linen,
718.6 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

194 Chapter Seven

Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (New Street across from Michael Palace, left side),
paper mounted on linen, 847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Anichkov Palace, right side), paper mounted on


Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Cathedral of Our Mother of Kazan, right side), paper
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (St Catherine’s Church, left side), paper mounted on

196 Chapter Seven
Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Café Volf and Béranger, left side), paper mounted on
linen, 914 x 15 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Fig. 7-16. Vasilii Sadovnikov (after), S. Ivanov (lithographed by), Panorama of

Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Police Bridge, detail), paper mounted on linen, 914 x
15 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

198 Chapter Seven

Nevsky Prospect, 1830-1835 (Anichkov Bridge, left side), paper mounted on linen,
847 x 20.8 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
This essay is based on two talks given at two conferences: “St Petersburg:
300th Anniversary. The City as a Cradle of Modern Russia” at Hofstra
University in 2003 and “The Flâneur Abroad” at University of
Nottingham in 2012. Working with a pristine copy of the rare
Sadovnikov’s Panorama of Nevsky Prospect at the Getty Research
Institute and receiving images for this publication would not be possible
without generous support of Louis Marchesano, Ted Walbye, Sabine
Schlosser and other staff members of the Getty Research Institute in Los
Angeles. I also want to thank Anatole Senkevitch, Jr., Nadieszda Kizenko,
and Andrei L’vovich Punin for sharing their ideas about Gogol, Nevsky
Prospect, and St Petersburg’s cultural history.

Notes

1
Grigory Kaganov, Images of Space: St Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts,
trans. Sydney Monas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 81.
2
In a letter to his friend Maksimovich Gogol referred to this collection as “a
confusion, a mix of everything, a porridge” (N.V. Gogol, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, ed. N.L. Meshcheriakov et al., 14 vols (Leningrad: Nauka, 1937-1952),
vol. 10, 349).
3
See particularly, Melissa Frazier, Frames of Imagination. Gogol’s Arabesques
and the Romantic Question of Genre (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).
4
See Gogol’s essay “On the Architecture of the Present” from Arabesques. On the
nineteenth-century criticism of classical style see chapter “Romantiki protiv
klassikov [Romantics Against Classicists]” in Andrei Punin, Arkhitektura
Peterburga seredini i vtoroi poloviny XIX veka [Architecture of St Petersburg in
the Middle and Second part of Nineteenth Century], vol. 1 (St Petersburg: Kriga,
2009), 22-38.
5
Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans.
Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, London, Toronto: Everyman’s
Library, 1998), 239.
6
Vasilii Sadovnikov (1800-1879) received commissions from The Society for the
Support of Russian Artists as of 1823. He became one of the leading urban artists
of the period, who produced a variety of city views in watercolour for the growing
industry of illuminated lithography. After the success of The Panorama of Nevsky
Prospect, Sadovnikov drew The Costumes and Views of St Petersburg and its
Surroundings, 1848, The Views of Vilno (Vilnus), 1646-48, among other series of
city views and interiors. Born as a serf, Sadovnikov was freed from serfdom in
1838. A few years later he became an Associate Member of the Imperial Academy
of Fine Arts. This position allowed him to receive numerous commissions,
including those from the Imperial family. For the range of Sadovnikov’s works,
see Olga Kaparulina, Vasilii Semenovich Sadovnikov (1800-1879) (St Petersburg:
Palace Edition, 2000).
7
My preference for the term “observer” is based on Jonathan Crary’s distinction
between the beholder and the observer in the context of nineteenth-century visual
culture. Gogol’s fictional characters, including that of a narrator, see the city in the
mode of the observer, who acts “within a prescribed set of possibilities,” that are
“embedded in a system of conventions and limitation.” Jonathan Crary, Techniques
of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 1992), 5-6.
8
Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translations of The Collected Tales,
published in 1998, restored the word “phantasmagoria” that Gogol used in his
original Russian version. Considered as rough or unpalatable for an English ear,
this key term underpinning Gogol’s metaphor for the city’s visual spectacle was
substituted for “transformations” or “changes” in previous translations of “Nevsky
Prospect” into English.

200 Chapter Seven

9
For Peter I’s architectural sketches, including the trident lay-out of his private
palace “Monplasir” in Peterhof, which is structurally similar to the three-ray
system of streets radiating from the Admiralty, see I. Grabar’ et al., Russkaia
arkhitectura pervoi polovini XVIII veka [Russian Architecture of the First Part of
Eighteenth Century] (Moscow: GILAS, 1954), 108-111; A. N. Voronikhina,
Peterburg i ego okresnosti v chertezhakh i risunkakh architectorov pervoi treti
XVIII veka: katalog vystavki [Petersburg and its Suburbs in Sketches and Drawings
of the Architects from the First Third of the Eighteenth Century] (Leningrad, 1972),
cat. # 9, 19, 42, 43.
10
For the indispensible account of the early architectural history of St Petersburg
see Chapter 6, “Revolution Embodied: The Building of St Petersburg,” in James
Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988), 147-92.
11
On architectural development of Nevsky Prospect, see S.L. Luppov, Istoria
stroitel’stva Peterburga v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka [A History of The
Construction of St Petersburg in the First Quarter of Eighteenth century] (Moscow-
Leningrad, 1957), 53, 118; Yurii Egorov, The Architectural Planning of St
Petersburg, trans. Eric Dlugosch (Athens, OH: Univ. Press, 1969).
12
On the ensemble of main squares see particularly A. Senkevitch Jr., “St
Petersburg, Russia: Designing a Monumental Urban Stage Set for Imperial State
Craft,” Dimensions, 12 (1998): 22-35.
13
On the literary myths of St Petersburg see Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St
Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005), 116-57.
14
Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early
Modern Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 254.
15
Dmitry Shvidkovsky, Russian Architecture and the West (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1997), 206.
16
On Peter I’s use of “the New Rome” allegories in his political reforms of Russia
see Paul Bushkovitch, “The Roman Empire in the Era of Peter the Great,” Rude
and Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in
Honor of Robert O. Crummey, ed. Chester S.L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and
Daniel Rowland (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2008) and Richard S.
Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
17
Hubert Damisch, Skyline. The Narcissistic City (Stanford: Stanford University
Press 2001), 11.
18
On the significance of Russian classicism as a means of legitimizing Russia’s
belonging to the European stream of culture, see Maria Naschekina, Antichnoe
nasledie v russkoi architecture Nikolaevskogo vremeni [The Heritage of Antiquity
in Russian Architecture during the Reign on Nikolai I] (Moscow: Progress
Tradition, 2011).
19
Crary, 113. The difference between various technologies that incorporated the
observer into the image in the panorama, the diorama, and the phenakistiscope are
discussed in his Techniques of the Observer, 95-136.


20
On Barker’s invention, see Scott W. Wilcox, “Unlimiting the Bounds of
Painting,” in Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All-
Embracing View” (London: Trefoil Publications, 1968), 13-44; Stephen Oetterman,
The Panorama. History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New
York: Zone Books, 1997), 99-115.
21
The Leicester Square rotunda became a commercial facility with a paid entrance
fee, a controlled circulation of visitors, and a printed orientation plan.
22
Sadovnikov’s portable panorama includes the actual building of the Panorama of
Mme La Tour, a structure recognizable by a lantern on top, which was located on
Bolshaia Morskaya Street. This Panorama was among several entertainment
facilities that schooled Petersburgians in viewing panoramas, diaramas,
cosmoramas, and the “theatre of light.”
23
Walter Benjamin, “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century <Exposé of
1935>,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA, London, England: The Belknap Press, 1999), 6.
24
Ibid., 5.
25
On the centrality of the relationship between art and technology in Benjamin’s
Passagen-werk, see particularly Chapter 5, “Mythic Nature: Myth Image,” in
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989), 111-
57.
26
Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, 6-7.
27
Benjamin, “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century <Exposé of 1935>,” 5.
28
See Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All-Embracing” View,
131-68, for the examples of portable panoramas.
29
Documented evidence related to the actual use of these portable panoramas is
lacking. Jonathan Crary’s warning that a tendency to conflate all optical devices in
the nineteenth century into a single “vague collective drive to higher and higher
standards of verisimilitude” often ignores “the conceptual and historical
singularities of each device” seems correct to me. See Crary, 110.
30
Kaganov, 39.
31
On the lithographic views of Petersburg see Kaganov, 57-79.
32
Joshua Atkinson’s Panoramic View of St Petersburg was dedicated to Alexander
I, who was crowned in 1801. Printed in aquatint on four plates (38 x 304.8 cm.), it
was meant to be exhibited on a circular surface as well as to be bound in a
presentation folio.
33
“Toute magnifique que je me représentais la ville, je fus ravie par l’aspect de ses
monuments, de ses beaux hôtels et de ses larges rues, dont une, que l’on nomme la
Perspective, a une lieue de long. La belle Néva, si claire, si limpide, traverse la
ville chargée de vaisseaux et de barques, qui vont et viennent sans cesse, ce qui
anime cette belle cité d’une manière charmante. Les quais de la Néva sont en
granit, ainsi que ceux de plusieurs grands canaux que Catharine a fait creuser dans
l’intérieur de la ville. D’un côté de la rivière se trouvent de superbes monuments,
celui de l’Académie des arts, celui de l’Académie des sciences et beaucoup
d’autres encore, qui reflètent dans la Néva. On ne peut rien voir de plus belle, m’a-
t-on dit, au clair de lune, que les masses de ces majestueux edifices qui ressemblent

202 Chapter Seven

à des temples antiques. En tout, Saint-Petersbourg me transportait au temps
d’Agamemnon, tant par le grandiose de ses monuments que par le costume du
people, qui rappelle selui de l’âge antique” (Louise-Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun,
Souvenirs, 2 vols (Paris: Charpentier et Compagnie, 1869), vol. 1, 307-8).
34
Not by accident Gogol makes one of the two characters in “Nevsky Prospect” an
artist, who paints in a drab, greyish, melancholic palette of tones, that Gogol
associated with St Petersburg. Piskarev’s preference for a dark, muted combination
of colours hints at Gogol’s criticism of the commercial views of St Petersburg of
the time, presenting the city in evenly lit, transparent atmospheric effects.
35
Only a few sheets from Sadovnikov’s original watercolours for The Panorama
are preserved in the National Library of Russia, St Petersburg and the Pushkin
Memorial Museum. These fragments constitute about 1/5 of the original sixteen
meters band of watercolours. See, Panorama of Nevsky Prospekt : reproductions
of lithographs after water-colours by V. Sadovnikov, produced by I. Ivanov and P.
Ivanov and published by A. Prévost between 1830 and 1835 (Leningrad: Aurora,
1974), 8.
36
Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” 239.
37
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art
and Artists, trans. P.E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972),
403.
38
On the beginning of commercial galleries in Paris and the use of iron, see
Benjamin, “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century <Exposé of 1935>,” 3-5;
Benjamin, Convolute F [Iron Construction], The Arcades Project, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, London, England: The Belknap
Press, 1999), 150-70.
39
Protestant, German Evangelical, Armenian, Roman Catholic, and a number of
Orthodox churches that featured in the Panorama next to commercial venues,
theatres, the Imperial Library and The Imperial Cabinet bespoke a sense of a
metropolis for a modern empire that combined the multiple and diverse subjects.
At least, it was an image that the empire wished to project.
40
Benjamin, Convolute M [The Flâneur], 421.
41
Pushkin was said to be included in The Panorama.
42
The term “flâneur” in relation to a particular city type was already in use in
Russian in the 1830s. Dostoyevsky, for example, used it ironically in his 1847
“Petersburg Chronicle.” See Buckler, 99-100.
43
Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, Convolute M [The Flâneur], 421.
44
Contemporaneous to Gogol’s urban novellas are P.L. Yakovlev, A Sentimental
Journey on Nevsky Prospect (1828); V. I. Dal’, A Live of a Man, or A Promenade
on Nevsky Prospect (1843); E. I. Rastorguev, Promenades on Nevsky Prospect (in
sixteen promenades) (1846). Among foreign visitors to Petersburg, Marquis de
Custine’s and Théophile Gautier’s literary diaries shed important light on the role
of promenades in St Petersburg.
45
The daytime promenades on Nevsky Prospect occurred usually between two and
four in the afternoon on the sunny, left side of the street and covered the strip
between the Police Bridge and Annichkov Palace, that was favoured by the well-


to-do inhabitants of the city due to the abundance of fashionable shops, bookstores,
and restaurants.
46
Albin Konechny, “Introduction,” Progulki po Nevskomu prospektu v pervoƱ
polovine XIX veka [The Promenades on Nevsky Prospect in the First Part of
Nineteenth Century] (St Petersburg: Hyperion, 2002), 5.
47
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New
York: Verso, 2002), 35.
48
For an excellent overview of phantasmagoria’s nineteenth-century cultural and
literary history see Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the
Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry, 15: 1 (Autumn, 1988): 26-61.
49
On the importance of a Romantic context in the formation of Gogol as a writer
see, for example, Carl R. Proffer, “Gogol's Definition of Romanticism,” Studies in
Romanticism, 6: 2 (Winter, 1967): 120-7.
50
In her Frames of the Imagination: Gogol’s Arabesques and the Romantic
Question of Genre, Melissa Frazier examined the link between Schlegel and
Gogol: “Still something in Gogol has a decidedly Schlegelian cast of countenance,
as in Schlegel’s thought, and particularly in that thought as expressed in Dialogues
on Poetry, the arabesque is a literary genre, one which in fact bears a strong
resemblance to Arabesques” (5). On chaos in Gogol, see Susanne Fusso, Designing
Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1993).
51
Margaret Cohen, “Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria,” New German Critique
48 (1989): 89.
52
Walter Benjamin, “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century <Exposé of
1939>,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA, London, England: The Belknap Press, 1999), 14-15.
53
54
Ibid., 241.
55
Idem.
56
Ibid., 243.
57
Ibid., 244.
58
Ibid., 263.
59
Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, Convolute M [The Flâneur], 417.
60
61
Ibid., 246.
62
63
Ibid., 260.
64
Schiller and Hoffmann, the names given by the author to the German artisans
punishing Pirogov, connote the names of Gogol’s favorite Romantic writers. This
arabesque of surnames expresses Gogol’s playful tribute to German culture.
Melissa Frazier discusses Gogol’s “imaginary Germans” along with the writer’s
particular identification with German culture. See Frazier, 5.
65
66
Ibid., 239.

204 Chapter Seven

67
Susan Fusso, “The Landscape of Arabesques,” in Essays on Gogol. Logos and
the Russian Word, ed. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston, IL;
Northwestern University Press, 1992), 120-1.
68
Bernard Comment, Le XIXe siècle des panoramas (Paris: Nouvelle Adam Biro,
1993), 93.
69
“[c]et ensemble disons-nous, forme en coup d’œil admirable pour lequel le nom
de Perspective que porte la rue, ainsi que beaucoup d’autres de Saint-Petersbourg,
nous parait merveilleusement juste et significatif. Tout est combiné pour l’optique
et la ville, créé d’un seul coup par une volonté qui ne connaissait pas d’obstacle est
sortie complète du marécage qu’elle recouvre, comme une décoration de théâtre au
sifflet du machiniste” (Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Russie (Paris: Charpentier,
1875), 75).
70
Nikolai Gogol, “Karl Briullov's The Last Day of Pompeii” in Arabesques, trans.
Alexander Tulloch (Ann Arbor, MI : Ardis, 1982), 133.
71
For Benjamin, the flâneur is particularly sensitized to the opposition between the
exterior and interior in the city: “The city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It
opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” (Benjamin,
Passagen-Werk, Convolute M [The Flâneur], 417).
72
73
Ibid., 272.

CHAPTER EIGHT
FLÂNEURS, MONSTERS, MADMEN

AND WANDERERS:
THE FUNCTIONS OF ANXIOUS FLÂNERIE
IN ANDREI BELY’S PETERSBURG
CLAIRE GHEERARDYN
Andrei Bely’s novel entitled Petersburg, first published in 1916, makes up

an interesting case to investigate the geographical alterations of the
flâneur. The city of St Petersburg, as opposed to Moscow, might be
European enough to house this emblematic French figure. And yet, in St
Petersburg West meets with East, Orient and Occident coexist with great
difficulties, and the city has long appealed to the Russian mind as
representing a larger problem of national identity. As a consequence, the
Petersburgian flâneur might be contaminated by Russian culture and
altered to the point of being barely recognizable. Bely’s novel brings to
light the plasticity of the flâneur figure and reveals how different the
Petersburgian flâneur is from his Parisian counterpart. Besides, in Bely’s
case, the flâneur is not just a walker, but comes with a halo of motifs, such
as for instance crowd watching or streetlamp effects,1 that Balzac and
Poe—even if the latter is American, and describes a London flânerie—just
as much as Baudelaire memorably created. When an author like Bely
displaces and reinvents flânerie, he pays as much attention to those
adjacent details as to the person of the flâneur. He transforms the entire
cosmos of flânerie. There is much to be gained from observing how Bely
distorts his potential European sources.
Bely evokes a city of unrealities, permeated with fog, a city of greenish
waters teeming with germs, where streets transform passers-by into
shadows. St Petersburg is haunted by the Antichrist who appears as a
phosphorescent Wagnerian Flying Dutchman; Falconet’s monument to
Peter the Great turns into a horseman of the Apocalypse. The action takes

206 Chapter Eight
place during the 1905 Revolution. The main plot of the novel weaves
terrorism and political assassination: Nikolai Apollonovich, a philosophy
student belonging to a terrorist organisation, is asked to plant a bomb
against his father, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nikolai’s
subsequent insanity is mirrored by another terrorist’s dementia: Alexander
Ivanovich Dudkin, an alcoholic mystic, who spends his days either reading
the Apocalypse in his garret or walking the city. Those three main
characters all undertake long flâneries: they walk in the midst of crowds,
they stroll at night, driven by unbearable anxiety, desiring to “extinguish
the raving by exercising [their] legs.”2 In Bely’s novel flânerie and anxiety
are co-substantial.
However, even if Bely’s characters are constantly compelled “to start
pacing again, to pace on and on until the brain [is] completely numbed, so
that [they] would dream no more of phantoms dark” (P, 171), they are but
momentary flâneurs. According for instance to the early formulation of
Louis Huart’s criteria, none of them could strictly be defined as a flâneur.3
However one should probably not expect to find unadulterated flâneurs in
full-size novels, since the nature of the flâneur as a type and the
complexity of novel characters are somewhat mutually exclusive. One
should therefore shift one’s attention from the flâneur himself to the long
scenes of flânerie woven in the structure of the novel. In the 1910s,
authors no longer needed patiently to build up the flâneur’s physiology nor
to study flânerie as a social phenomenon. The figure of the flâneur has
been fully established as a type, easy to recognize for the readers, and one
could even argue that the smallest allusion to city strolls is enough to make
the entire cosmos of the flânerie spring to the readers’ minds.4 Authors
may no longer be interested in portraying the flâneur for the flâneur’s
sake, but they still favour the peripatetic perception of the city. Flânerie
remains an indispensable device to build up the experience of the city: the
city is still seen through the flâneur’s eyes, it is felt through his body. One
should therefore consider the functions of flânerie in the economy of a
novel.
In Petersburg, Bely makes flânerie part of a larger strategy. The author
aims at examining Russia’s fate. He tries to define what is Russian and
conversely he firmly condemns anything un-Russian as preventing Russia
from accomplishing its spiritual mission. The novel, staged at the time of
Russia’s defeat against Japan, is an occasion to develop the author’s pan-
Slavism. According to Bely, St Petersburg is threatened both by Asiatic
and European influences. He constantly refers to the Japanese and Mongol
hordes that will soon come to destroy the city. In such a context, nothing
can remain purely Russian: even a harmless Russian name such as

Flâneurs, Monsters, Madmen and Wanderers 207
“Ivanov” is inverted and becomes “Vonavi,” an ominous Japanese name

(P, 208). To make it worse, what is European often turns out to be Asian
and vice versa: the two threats merge to destroy Petersburg. The main
function of flânerie is certainly to reveal the city’s instability and evilness,
but Bely even goes further. To him flânerie might be a device to expose St
Petersburg’s national and spiritual problem.
Of Dots, Ghosts and Fog:

the Flâneur and the New-born Monster
As early as 1819 Shelley claimed that: “Hell is a city much like London.”5
St Petersburg belongs to this paradigm of cities assimilated to evil and
monsters by literature. It is cruel and spiteful, it tortures those who walk in
the streets. The Petersburgian flâneur is not the city’s lover but the city’s
victim.6 St Petersburg, both a weapon and a disease, surrounds the flâneur,
infecting and invading his porous body:
From over there pierced Petersburg, with the arrows of prospects … A

Petersburg street in autumn is piercing; it both chills you to the marrow
and tickles. As soon as you leave it and go indoors, the street flows in your
veins like a fever (P, 13-17).
In such a city, flânerie cannot be pleasurable. French writers, for their part,
leave little doubt: flânerie is an exquisite and refined pleasure, a
“jouissance.”7 Baudelaire underlines how in old capitals, everything, even
horror, is metamorphosed into enchantment.8 Bely’s Petersburg embodies
evil without any possibility of redemption, not even on an aesthetic level.
Besides St Petersburg differs from other monstrous cities insomuch as it
is a newborn monster. Instead of developing in a natural way over
centuries, the city was created from nothing, on Finnish swamps, by Peter
the Great, in 1703. It is precisely this artificial birth that dooms St
Petersburg to monstrosity. As a result Saint Petersburg looks like Paris,
Amsterdam, Venice and Rome, it is nothing more but an amalgam of all
European cities combined in the same space. The city is an unnatural,
composite chimera that does not obey physical laws. Bely uses the device
of flânerie to accumulate glimpses of its manifold monstrosity.
Flânerie reveals that in St Petersburg the notion of topography is
invalid. Bely voluntarily debunks the tradition of topographical exactitude
that one usually finds in novels of the city. Balzac, Hugo, Dostoevsky,
Dickens, Joyce and Virginia Woolf all make their characters move
according to trajectories that a reader can follow precisely on a map. But
in Bely’s novel, the Ableukhovs’ house seems to have at least three

208 Chapter Eight
different locations and the flâneurs don’t move according to the laws of
realism. Wherever they go, they cross over bridges, they meet the Nevsky
prospect or Falconet’s monument to Peter the Great: the nightmarish
scenery seems to follow the characters. The city is thus reduced to a few
landmarks as moveable as inflatable theatre props.ͻ Accordingly, in the
prologue, Bely provides the readers with a provocative map of
oversimplified geometrical forms, preventing any practical reconnaissance:
However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does
appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one inside the other,
with a black dot in the centre, and from precisely this mathematical point,
which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here,
from this very point surges and swarms the printed book (P, 2).
This strange map alludes to the city’s artificiality: before suddenly

appearing from the void, the metropolis originally existed as an abstract
map in Peter’s head. It is impossible to interpret the circles as canals or
streets, or the dot as, for instance, the Admiralty. The circles seem to
radiate from this ominous central dot. It is less a map than a diagram of the
city’s ambiguity and malevolence. Just as the prologue reminds us that
Petersburg belongs to the Russian Empire, “and yet is ‘unRussian’,” the
mathematical dot is something and yet nothing. It seems to exist on the
map, and still it doesn’t occupy space. The dot is a non-entity, a mere
mental creation that opens space to infinity. The dot and, therefore, the
city are both a reality and a negation of reality.10 Here the verb “to appear”
does not denote the stable evidence of what is visible, but transforms the
city into a ghost.
In Petersburg, the flâneur strolls through perpetual fog pouring from
swamps and canals. That fog characterizes the city, increasing its ghostly
aspect. One could argue that in Petersburgian flâneries, fog plays the same
part as speed in other countries: it is what makes one single detail spring
out, then disappear, it conveys a sense of the ephemeral, and it fragments
perception. In fog, things exist only on the mode of emergence or
dislocation: the flâneur sees the city rise from fog entirely constituted, as it
did from Peter’s head; he witnesses the city’s sinking, foreseeing its
impending end. The depiction of sunrise at the end of Apollon
Apollonovich’s long flânerie illustrates how the flâneur, strolling through
fog, experiences the city’s fate from its creation to its destruction:
The red rust street lamps which had been casting light all around were
gradually drained of light. They became dull dots, peering in surprise into
the grayish fog. It seemed that a gray procession of lines and walls, with

their planes of faint shadows and their gaping window apertures, were airy
lace made in pattern of the most delicate workmanship. … From
somewhere afar came a sound—something like the singing of a violin
bow: the crowing of a Petersburg chanticleer. … The procession of lines
and walls grew more massive and distinct. Heavy masses of some sort
emerged—indentations and projections, entryways, caryatids, cornices of
brick balconies.
The lace metamorphosed into morning Petersburg. There stood the
five-storied house, the color of sand. The rust red palace was bedawned (P,
139-40).
Even the beauty of the sunrise beauty gives way to the evil ugliness of
sand and rust. The buildings are newly born, yet they are already old. Such
notations of fog prolong Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil where “A yellow
fog engulfed the space between.”11 Here Bely continues Baudelaire’s “Le
Crépuscule du matin,” where a lamp is compared to a “bloodshot eye …
throbb[ing] and mov[ing] a red stain.” The unexpected cockerel directly
echoes Baudelaire’s “rooster crow[ing] somewhere” in a “sea of mist”
“like a sob cut off by a clot of blood.”12 However, in the evil city of Peter
the Great, the Baudelairean cockerel acquires a more immediate meaning
and reminds one of Saint Peter’s betrayal. In St Petersburg, where Christ is
constantly betrayed, the Antichrist cannot fail to appear and destroy the
city. Thus, in foggy Petersburg, the city’s birth always announces its
imminent death, the myth of origins comes with a myth of destruction.
Petersburgian streetlamps not only quote Baudelaire’s, they more
directly recall Gogol’s malevolent streetlamps lit up by the Devil to show
everything in false colour.13 Bely’s slippery palimpsest emphasizes how
texts about flânerie and texts about St Petersburg share a common nature:
they all feed on intertextuality. When one writes of flânerie, one cannot
avoid alluding to Balzac, Baudelaire and Poe, and one decade later, the
Surrealists and Walter Benjamin will be added to the cumulative pantheon
of flânerie literature. Texts about St Petersburg all share that palimpsestic
quality. Wladimir Troubetzkoy, among many other critics, explains that
Pushkin, as much as Peter the Great, created St Petersburg, and that in the
realm of Russian literature, texts about Petersburg agglomerate to form a
genre of their own. Petersburg is both a city and a book, constantly re-
written, including all the texts about the city with all their simultaneous
variants.14 When Bely entitles his novel “Petersburg”, he points out that
double nature. One could add that in the “Petersburg genre,” as well as the
“flânerie genre,” prose and poetry merge to exchange their motifs. The
two bodies of texts ignore the usual generic distinctions: they are

210 Chapter Eight
constituted of newspaper articles and chronicles, of poems, short stories

and novels alike.
Bely’s novel, saturated with allusions, is like a library where these two
genres meet. Bely interweaves Occidental models, favouring Poe and
Baudelaire, with Russian models—Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and
Tolstoy to a lesser extent. And indeed, since Dostoevsky was among the
most enthusiastic readers of Balzac, many Russian flânerie scenes are
indirectly derived from French literature. For instance Bely explicitly
quotes Dostoevsky when Apollon Apollonovitch, during his long
nocturnal flânerie, notices a young girl followed by an ominous silhouette
and offers the girl his protection (P, 138-9). Louis Huart himself describes
such a chivalrous scenario as one of the greatest joys of flânerie.15 A
parallel scene is to be found in Crime and Punishment (1866), where
Raskolnikov saves a drunken girl from being raped, as well as at the
beginning of The White Nights (1848), where a nameless narrator, after
similarly saving a girl from a would-be seducer, walks her home and falls
in love with her. Apollon Apollonovich becomes conspicuously similar to
this young personification of the Petersburgian flâneur: an unhappy, shy
and lonely dreamer, befriending buildings rather than people, despairing
when his favourite pink house is painted yellow. However since in
Petersburg the potentialities of the encounter remain suspended, the scene
seems to exist purely for the sake of echoing Dostoevsky twice, and it is
up to the reader to recognise and unpack the imitation. Bely requires his
readers to know by heart the Russian classics he fragments and transforms.
Similarly the reader of Petersburg should memorize every turn of phrase
in order to perceive how the novel moves forward in a constant process of
quotation and displacement. Bely’s treatment of flânerie magnifies the
way he treats the rest of his fictional material. Such a constant
interweaving of references reflects the ambiguous Russian identity of the
city. It becomes part of the strategy to expose the city’s monstrous
heterogeneity and absurdity.
The Petersburgian Man of the Crowd:

a Portrait of the Anxious Flâneur as a Criminal
St Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, the Nevsky prospect, had famously
given its name to Gogol’s tale. In Bely’s novel, the Nevsky Prospect is
ubiquitous, and it becomes a stage on which Bely hybridizes Gogol and
Poe to reinvent a seminal theme of flânerie, crowd-watching.
Bely fuses together all the Petersburg Tales to extract from the
Gogolian subtext themes on which he embroiders variations with

virtuosity. He invents his own version of The Nose in which Gogol’s

single nose now proliferates: “Noses sprang out from everywhere.
Beaklike noses: eagles’ and rooster’s; ducks and chickens; and so on and
so on—greenish, green and red. Rolling toward them senselessly, hastily,
profusely” (P, 178). Bely literally multiplies Gogol’s absurdity.16 The
following section, conspicuously entitled “Nevsky Prospect,” debunks the
typical movement of the flâneur’s gaze, which is to go from the general to
the particular, as it is made explicit when Baudelaire and Poe evoke
crowd-watching.17 Yet in Bely’s novel the particular is always absorbed
by the general and disappears. Nikolai Apollonovich for instance, far from
singling out details in the midst of a crowd, watches people lose their
individuality to become a collective monster:
All the shoulders formed a viscous and slowly flowing sediment. The
shoulders of Alexander Ivanovich [Dudkin] stuck to the sediment … he
followed the shoulder and thus was cast out onto the Nevsky.
What is a grain of caviar?
There the body of each individual that streams onto the pavement
becomes the organ of a general body, an individual grain of caviar, and the
sidewalks of the Nevsky are the surface of an open-faced sandwich.
Individual thought was sucked into the cerebration of the myriapod being
that moved along the Nevsky … There were no people on the Nevsky, but
there was a crawling, howling myriapod there (P, 178-9).
No sooner has Bely created an image than he transforms it, making it a

metamorphic metaphor. This disturbing device creates an atmosphere of
constant instability. Thus, the disgusting image of viscous sediment, the
puzzling images of the caviar and sandwich, give way to the monstrous
myriapod that in addition is accompanied by a parallel transformation of
language. Flânerie in Petersburg reveals how language itself becomes
meaningless and monstrous:
The damp space poured together a myria-distinction of voices into a myria-

distinction of words. All the words jumbled and again wove into a
sentence, and the sentence seemed meaningless. It hung above the Nevsky,
a black haze of phantasmata (P, 179).
Descriptions of crowds are yet another strategy to elicit a sense of

grotesque and absurd, to bring forth horror and disgust, to make the city
monstrous. In the context of the 1905 Revolution, watching crowds is
more than ever a political activity, whether to repress them or to encourage
their struggle for freedom. In Bely’s novel everybody observes them:
terrorists, policemen, agents provocateurs and Senator Apollon Apollonovitch

212 Chapter Eight
whose role is to enforce the law. But the activity of crowd-watching,

which was such a source of delight in Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire or
Hoffmann, has become dysphoric. Even terrorists look fearfully at those
crowds whose liberty they fight for.
On the Gogolian Nevsky Prospect, Bely re-enacts the scenario of
Edgar Allan Poe’s Man of the Crowd.18 In Poe’s tale, the convalescent
narrator watches from behind a window the London crowd, finding
himself horrified and yet fascinated by an old man’s terrible countenance,
a face of “excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair.”19 In a typical
fashion, Bely inverts Poe’s scenario and makes the old man watch the
young one: at the beginning of the novel, Bely’s narrator comments
alternatively on two trajectories: Apollon Apollonovich’s and Dudkin’s.
The two meet by chance on the Nevsky Prospect where Apollon
Apollonovich sees Dudkin from behind the glass of his carriage. Just like
Poe’s narrator, the Senator is stopped by Dudkin’s horrible face:
Contemplating the flowing silhouettes [of the crowd] Apollon

Apollonovich likened them to shining dots. One of these dots broke loose
from its orbit and hurtled at him with dizzying speed, taking the form of an
immense crimson sphere—
—among the bowlers on the corner, he caught sight of a pair of eyes.
And the eyes expressed the inadmissible. … They grew rabid dilated, lit up
and flashed (P, 14).
Just as the mysterious old man longs to hide in the crowd, Dudkin longs
“to get out of the room—into the dingy fog, there to merge with shoulders,
backs, greenish faces on a Petersburg Prospect” (P, 170). From Poe’s text,
Bely retains and amplifies all the possibilities for horror. Poe suggests a
resemblance between the old man and the Devil by likening him to
Retszch’s pictures of fiends;20 Bely expatiates on Dudkin’s demoniac side.
Apollon Apollonovich reflects that Dudkin’s terrible eyes are “such as you
would encounter in the Moscow chapel of the Martyr Panteliemon” (P,
20), the saint who cures demonic possession and insomnia. Bely implies
his flâneur might be possessed by the demon.21 Among all the potential
flâneur figures, Bely is only interested in the most excessive variations. In
his world, flânerie is associated with the worst possible states of humanity:
madness and possession.
When it comes to defining flânerie, Louis Huart and Balzac seldom
agree. Huart claims that no flâneur ever committed suicide, and that
flâneurs are essentially happy beings.22 Balzac, as for him, never limits the
type but opens up a wide spectrum of possibilities and presents many
different flâneurs side by side.23 To Balzac, the anxious flâneur is as valid

a version of the type as the happy idler taking delights in reading theatre
bills. Balzac frequently associates flânerie, despair and suicidal
temptation: the beginning of the Peau de Chagrin (1831) is nothing but a
long flânerie preceding suicide. In The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau
(1837) Balzac writes:
[Birotteau] acknowledged later that in those days of despair, his head had
boiled like a saucepan, and that several times, if it had not been for his
religious sentiments, he should have flung himself into the Seine.
Harassed by some unprofitable enterprise, he was lounging [il flânait]
one day along the boulevard on his way to dinner,—for the Parisian
lounger [flâneur] is as often a man filled with despair as an idler.24
As early as 1837, Balzac seems aware of the danger to misread and

oversimplify the flâneur figure. He reminds his readers that flânerie can be
turned into an existential process: the Balzacian flâneur is often a thinker
and a philosopher.25 Bely inherits that conception of flânerie as hesitation
between life and death, between sense and madness.
Balzac accounts for his anxious flâneur’s mental process by comparing
his boiling head with a saucepan. Bely goes further. His novel is but a
materialisation of what he calls “cerebral play”26 through monstrous
images, as Dudkin’s flânerie illustrates:
Alexander Ivanovich was returning home along a prospect running parallel

to the Neva. … Alexander Ivanovich’s observation had led him to the
thought that peace at night depends on how you spend the day. You bring
home with you what you have experienced during on the streets, in squalid
restaurants, in tearooms.
Then what was he returning home with?
His experiences dragged after him, like a tail invisible to the eye; … It
seemed to him that his back had opened up. Out of his back, as out of a
door, something like the body of a giant reared and prepared to fling itself
out of him: the experiences of today’s twenty-four hours (P, 63-4).
This is not a specific crisis but the terrorist’s quotidian experience.

Possessed by visions, Dudkin cannot remain in his horrible bedroom (a
place redolent of Raskolnikov’s garret). He exemplifies the human fault
evoked in the prose poem “Solitude,” where Baudelaire warns his readers
that “the Devil gladly haunts barren places,” and that “the spirit of murder
and of lust inflames itself miraculously in solitudes.”27 Dudkin behaves
like a typical flâneur, spending the day on the streets, in restaurants and
tearooms. However the readers are not told what Dudkin has seen, nor do
they gain direct access to the city through the flâneur’s eye. Instead they

214 Chapter Eight
are given monsters. The terrible image of the dragged tail starts as an
image of physical tiredness, telling of the exhausting multiplicity of what
is to be observed in the city. The transformations of the tail into a door and
a giant reveal how flânerie modifies the experience of one’s own body. In
anxious flânerie, the alienated body becomes a monster that might attack
oneself. This anxiety is mostly caused by guilt since the Petersburgian
flâneur proves above all to be a criminal and since Russian flânerie is
irrevocably grafted onto crime.
Dudkin the terrorist epitomizes Alain Montandon’s analysis of the
flâneur as a being who maintains himself at the margins of society by
refusing to work or to use public transportation, thus rejecting the common
social law of speed and acceleration.28 Montandon names two main kinds
of marginal flâneurs: the artist and the criminal, consequently
contradicting Louis Huart who claims that to encourage flânerie is to
encourage virtue.29 Terrorists, condemned by their political missions to
live in clandestinity, might make the ultimate marginal flâneurs.
The two characters in Poe’s The Man of the Crowd illustrate the two
sides of Montandon’s marginal flâneur: on the one hand, the convalescent
narrator, who tries to read people as if they were books, is a figure of the
writer and the artist; on the other hand the man he observes is “the type
and the genius of deep crime.”30 This alternative—either the watcher or
the watched, either the artist or the criminal—seems to condense most of
the developments on the flâneur type. The flâneur-artist might be more
often selected, for instance by Hoffmann and Balzac, whose writer
characters endeavour to read people in crowds,31 or by Baudelaire with
Monsieur G. in Le Peintre de la vie moderne. In a symptomatic fashion,
when Baudelaire sums up Poe’s tale, he barely mentions at all the
mysterious old man. On the contrary, it is the criminal, anxiously moving
amidst the throng, that Dostoevsky and Bely retain from Poe’s duo.32
Russian literature favours the criminal flâneur more than the artist one,33
and in the genealogy of criminal flâneurs, Dudkin’s literary ancestor is
Raskolnikov, who anxiously strolls through the city before and after
committing murder in Crime and Punishment. Indeed, according to
Georges Nivat, the trope of parricide structures Petersburgian literature:
everybody tries to kill their father—especially when the father is the tsar.34
Accordingly, in Bely’s novel, Nikolai tries to spare the Senator, but
nonetheless triggers the bomb by mistake. In evil St Petersburg, the
flâneur, doomed to criminality, has forever lost his blessed innocence.

The Flâneur’s Transformative Anxiety

Anxiety allows Bely to summon up St Petersburg’s first pedestrian
mythical figure, Pushkin’s wandering Evgeny. Pushkin’s long poem The
Bronze Horseman, a Petersburg Tale was published in 1833: the creation
of Evgeny was contemporaneous with the heyday of the French flâneur. It
tells of a mediocre civil servant whose fiancée perishes in a devastating
flood. Evgeny, seized by madness, walks the city at night and confronts
Falconet’s statue, reproaching Peter for having badly planned the city. The
statue chases Evgeny until he dies. Pushkin makes his character’s madness
tangible by making him wander in the city, as does Bely with his
demented flâneurs. Anxiety and nocturnal flânerie are the ingredients Bely
uses to transform his characters into new versions of Evgeny, a
transformation completed when the bronze horseman visits them all:
The Bronze horseman stood there. … The destinies of Evgeny were

repeated. … The bronze-headed giant had been galloping through periods
of time right up to this very instant … racing through the days, through the
years, through the damp Petersburg Prospect, in his dreams and when
awake. And in pursuit of him … Alexander Ivanovich—Evgeny—now
understood for the first time that he had been running in vain for a century
(P, 213-14).

The Petersburgian flâneur and Evgeny the mad wanderer share many
similarities, and they can be interpreted as contiguous figures. However
Evgeny himself is no flâneur. In Pushkin’s poem, he is described as a
“stranger to the world” who has lost the “skill of picking his footsteps,”
who is blind and deaf to everything.35 Such a depiction makes him the
direct opposite of a French flâneur: paradoxically, the Petersburgian
flâneur is related to a figure that negates the typical flâneur. One could
argue that when his anxiety reaches a threshold, the Petersburgian flâneur,
who bears a resemblance to European figures, is transformed so deeply
that he stops being himself, giving way to a purely Russian mad wanderer.
Bely uses the transformative quality of anxiety as part of his strategy to
destroy what is too European in St Petersburg, and to make it Russian
again.
Madness and anxiety—inherited from Pushkin as well as from Balzac,
Poe and Baudelaire—is essential to Bely’s strategy insomuch as it
transforms the way characters perceive things. It opens the different
flâneurs to what had so far been hidden to them. Nikolai Apollonovich and
his father both have an extremely reductive vision of the world. One
believes only in Kant, the other only sees a geometrical version of reality.

216 Chapter Eight
During the same night, peaks of anxiety lead each of them to undertake a
long flânerie—Apollon Apollonovich consequently breaking his life-long
habit of always riding his carriage back home. Father and son do not walk
together but face complete loneliness as their convictions about the world
are utterly destroyed. It is their anxious flâneries that enable them to catch
glimpses of the radical strangeness of things. Apollon Apollonovich, when
he is told that terrorists will soon target him, beholds a change around him
in a scene that strikes a Sartrean note and seems to announce Sartre’s
Nausea (1938):
Something strange occurred. All the objects around suddenly cowered,

dampened and looked nearer than they should have. … Then he shrank,
lowered his head, and looked at the dirty rivulet that gushed at his feet.
Everything around was babbling and whispering: autumn’s old-womanish
whisper. … The night was black, dark blue, and lilac, shading off into the
reddish blots of the street lamps. There loomed gateways, walls, fences,
yards. And from them issued a babbling of some kind.
Ooo! How damp, how brain-chilling! (P, 130-1).
The father’s experience explicitly mirrors what Nikolai goes through when
he understands that he will have to commit parricide: “Horrible darkness!
Looking around, he crept up to a blot of light from under a street lamp.
Under the blot a stream of water babbled in the gutter, an orange peel
swept past” (P, 127). In both cases, the characters pay attention to minor
details they would never have noticed before, and those details, along with
the babbling they hear, betoken the world’s new unintelligibly.
Most importantly, their anxious flâneries modify the characters’
perception of space. Apollon Apollonovich’s stroll is framed by the
appearance of immense spaces behind the apparent flatness of the city:
“His fear of space awakened. … An icy hand touched him. It took him by
the arm and led him past the puddles. And he walked and walked and
walked, led by an icy hand. Spaces flew to meet him” (P, 130). Just before
dawn this new experience of space reaches its paroxysm: “At this point
cerebral play rapidly erected misty planes before him. All the planes where
blown to bits. The gigantic map of Russia rose before him” (P, 139). Bely
sees as the “Fourth Dimension” those spaces holding the complete Russian
empire, and destroying what previously existed.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, non-Euclidian geometries
attracted a lot of attention. Mystics, and particularly adepts of theosophy,
seized the phrase “Fourth Dimension” to refer to a cosmic and astral kind
of space, housing ethereal beings, accessible only to those who have been
initiated. Einstein’s article exposing the theory of special relativity,

published in 1905, had immediate impact. Bely, the son of a great

mathematician, and himself a student of mathematics, was particularly
well equipped to appreciate Einstein’s proposition, and he could not fail to
be interested in how it paved the way to a revaluation of time as well as
space. Freed from Newton’s and Kant’s irretrievable conception, time had
become elastic. In Bely’s novel, the Fourth Dimension is both spatial and
temporal. There past, present and future are simultaneous, Dudkin
becomes Evgeny, and time stops being irrevocably closed. It becomes
possible to go back to a Russian past before St Petersburg was created.
In the novel, the heuristic, almost epiphanic, function of anxiety is to
give access to the cosmic Fourth Dimension.36 In that respect, Bely
appropriates the anthroposophical theories of Rudolf Steiner, whom he
admired much, and turns them into a novel. Fear and terror, according to
Steiner, give a physical shock that modifies the relation between the
different components of the body. Parts of the body are liberated, thus
enabled to reach cosmos. One realizes the possibility of accessing levels of
existence that were previously hidden. Dreams, alcoholism, dementia as
well as mystical awareness can trigger that revelation. Dudkin the mystic,
familiar with all these experiences, explains those theories to a terrified
Nikolai (P, 184), and an inhabitant of the Fourth Dimension himself
completes these teachings during one of Dudkin’s horrifying visions:
Petersburg is the fourth dimension, which is not indicated on maps, which

is merely indicated by a dot. And this dot is the place where the plane of
being is tangential to the surface of the sphere and the immense astral
cosmos (P, 207).
Bely opposes the complex use of the Fourth Dimension to the artificiality
of an ordinary space made of flatness and geometry. As soon as the
Prologue, Bely appends the question of geometry to the issue pan-Slavism.
When Bely asks whether St Petersburg is European or the capital of the
Russian Empire, he contemplates the issue from a spatial point of view.
Bely first grudgingly admits that Petersburg “actually does belong to the
Russian empire” (P, 1), and yet immediately amends his statement, calling
St Petersburg an “unRussian city” (P, 2). He joins in a long tradition of
comparing the unnatural St Petersburg to Moscow “the original capital
city” and Kiev “the mother of Russian cities.” The author stresses that it is
the geometrical or mathematical organisation of space that makes the city
European and unRussian:
Nevsky Prospect is delimitated by numbered houses. The numeration

proceeds from house to house. … Nevsky Prospect is rectilineal (just

218 Chapter Eight
between us), because it is a European prospect; and any European prospect

is not only European but (as I have already said) a prospect that is
European, because…yes…
For this very reason, Nevsky Prospect is a rectilineal prospect.
Nevsky Prospect is a prospect of no small importance in this un-
Russian—but—nonetheless—capital city. Other Russian cities are a
wooden heap of hovels (P, 2).
Bely works on new equations: Peter the Great created a flat geometrical
city of lines, an unRussian city: “Oh, you lines! In you has remained the
memory of Petrine Petersburg. The parallel lines were once laid out by
Peter” (P, 12). Lines are therefore connected with Europe as well as
oppression and tyranny. Saint Petersburg is the un-Russian, coercive city
of lines. Senator Apollon Apollonovich, the head of the secret police,
delights in reading a textbook entitled Planimetry. Lines, prospects and
streets, associated with daggers and arrows, become the weapons he uses
to imprison the Russian crowds into a terrible net. Moreover, numbers and
lines turn out to be part of the Asiatic plot to doom Russia to immutability,
as a terrible Mongol reveals to Nikolai in a nightmare (P, 166). As a
consequence, those un-Russian lines need to be broken. Chronological,
rectilineal time is represented by the Nevsky prospect: “Most of all,
[Apollon Apollonovich] loved the rectilineal prospect; this prospect
reminded him of the flow of time between two points of life” (P, 10). The
Senator’s anxious flânerie transforms his perception of geometrical space
by giving him momentary access to the Fourth Dimension. It is up to that
Fourth Dimension to push the flat ordinary un-Russian space down, and
eventually to destroy it. From that destruction salvation will come. The
Fourth Dimension almost merges with the Apocalypse that Bely both
dreads and constantly calls for. In that complex dispositive, the anxious
flânerie is but an element, but it is an essential one. It transforms
characters, makes them perceptive to the irruption of the Apocalyptic
Fourth Dimension, and prepares them for the final change.
There is a Petersburgian flâneur. He does exist, at least temporarily: he
is a demented criminal driven by anxiety, who fearfully discovers St
Petersburg’s monstrosity. Flânerie, in St Petersburg is a figure of torture,
of despair, of torment and lunacy. However, in the context of St
Petersburg, the plastic flâneur is constantly undergoing deep
transformations. Like his Parisian counterpart, he might look for signs that
he tries to interpret but the nature of these signs has changed. They do not
concern the city anymore but encode the Apocalypse and the Fourth
Dimension. The demented Petersburgian flâneur might become a mystic
who is not so much interested in the city as in what lies beyond the city,

and who awaits his city’s impending destruction. The Petersburgian

flâneur progressively merges with a peripatetic figure provided by Slavic
culture, the Strannik: the wandering pilgrim, often himself demented for
madness is a way leading to Christ.37 Bely’s novel ends on the name of
Skovoroda. This wandering Ukrainian philosopher and mystic, who lived
during the eighteenth century, appears as a Slavic substitute for the far too
European, un-Russian flâneur. In the economy of Bely’s novel, the
anxious flâneur is but a transitory figure, his fate is to prepare the advent
of the Slavic mystic wanderer.

Notes

1
For a thorough investigation of nocturnal flânerie in the paradoxical light of
streetlamps, see Alain Montandon (ed.), Promenades nocturnes (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2009).
2
Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert Maguire and John Malmstad
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 170. All further references to this
work will be made in the text, accompanied by the abbreviation “P.”
3
Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (Paris: Aubert et Cie, 1841), 10-23. Chapter
II (“Est-il donné à tout le monde de pouvoir flâner?”) and Chapter III (“Des gens
qui s’intitulent très-faussement flâneurs”) tackle the difficulty of finding a real
flâneur.
4
Rilke’s novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, translated as The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, written between 1903 and 1910, embodies this
evolution. Rilke’s character Malte Laurids Brigge undertakes painful flâneries
through Paris, during which he observes cripples unable to control their spasms.
Rilke never calls Malte a “flâneur,” and yet the reader identifies Malte as such.
This identification is all the more justified since Malte quotes Baudelaire’s poetry
at length.
5
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Peter Bell the Third” (1819), in Poetical Works, 3 vols
(New York: James Miller, 1871), vol. 3, 16.
6
Balzac in Ferragus divides people in two categories: those who marvel at the
delicious monster that Paris is, and those who are the city’s lovers. Those lovers
are the flâneurs. Honoré de Balzac, Ferragus in La Comédie Humaine (Paris:
Gallimard, Pléiade 1977-1981 [henceforward CHP]), vol. 5, 794.
7
See for instance Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), in
Œuvres complètes, ed. Yves Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard, 1961 [henceforward
OC]), 1156-62. Baudelaire writes of the “immense jouissance” of finding oneself
at home in a great crowd. The flâneur experiences the “fugitive pleasure of
circumstances” and he is in love with universal life.
8
See Baudelaire, “Les Petites Vieilles”: “Dans les plis sinueux des vieilles
capitales / Où tout, même l’horreur tourne aux enchantements” (“In the sinuous
folds of the old capitals, / Where everything, even horror, turns into delight,” my
translation), Les Fleurs du mal, in OC, 85.

220 Chapter Eight

9
On the idea of a city as inflatable theatre set, see Corinne Fournier Kiss, La Ville
européenne dans la littérature fantastique au tournant du siècle: 1860-1915
(Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2007), 221. Bely wrote a stage version of the novel
that is still to be translated in English.
10
For further details on the ambiguity of the mathematical dots in Petersburgian
literature, see Waldimir Troubetzkoy, Saint-Pétersbourg, mythe littéraire (Paris:
Presse Universitaire de France, 2003), 54.
11
Baudelaire, “The Seven Old Men,” in Les Fleurs du Mal: The Complete Text of
The Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), 92.
“Les Sept Vieillards,” Fleurs du mal, OC, 83: “Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de
rêves / Où le spectre en plein jour accroche le passant! […] Un brouillard sale et
jaune inondait tout l’espace.”
12
Baudelaire, “Twilight: Daybreak,” Flowers of Evil, 108-9; “Le Crépuscule du
matin,” Fleurs du mal, OC, 99: “Où comme un œil sanglant qui palpite et qui
bouge / La lampe sur le jour fait une tache rouge / […] Comme un sanglot coupé
par un sang écumeux / Le chant du coq au loin déchirait l’air brumeux.”
13
Nikolai Gogol, Nevski Prospekt (1835), Arabesques in The Complete tales of
Nikolai Gogol, ed. Leonard Kent, vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1965), 239.
14
Troubetzkoy, “La Russie est-elle le nord de l’Europe?,” Le Nord, latitudes
imaginaires, Actes du XXIXe Congrès de la Société Française de Littérature
Générale et Comparée (Lille 1999), ed. Monique Dubar et Jean-Marc Moura
(Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Université Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille 3, 2000), 94. See also
Saint-Pétersbourg, mythe littéraire, 128.
15
16
See Gogol, The Nose, also published in Arabesques in 1835. The Nose himself,
who is said to stroll everyday on the Nevsky Prospect, might be considered as a
grotesque flâneur.
17
See Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd, in Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick
Quinn (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 391: “At first my
observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in
masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I
descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties
of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.”
18
Poe is one of Bely’s great references. Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red
Death” probably inspired the intriguing red silk domino worn by Nikolai, a
carnivalesque sign of subversion, of everything going amiss in the world.
19
Poe, The Man of the Crowd, 392.
20
Ibid.
21
Through complex dialogues and allusions, the reader might understand that
Dudkin has met an incubus in the past (P, 206).
22
23
It is very striking, for instance, that Balzac often uses flâneurs as social experts
who comment on the characters’ social positions. Balzac constantly refers to the


flâneurs’ opinion about his characters. See for instance Madame Firmiani (1832),
in CHP, vol. 2, 143.
24
Balzac, Rise and Fall of César Birotteau, trans. Katherine Prescott Wormeley
(Boston : Little, Brown & Co, 1901), 39. “Il avoua plus tard qu’en ce temps de
désespoir la tête lui bouillait comme une marmite, et que plusieurs fois, n’était ses
sentiments religieux, il se serait jeté dans la Seine. Désolé de quelques expériences
infructueuses, il flânait un jour le long des boulevards en revenant dîner, car le
flâneur parisien est aussi souvent un homme au désespoir qu’un oisif” (Balzac,
Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau, marchand
parfumeur, in CHP, vol. 6, 63).
25
Karlheinz Stierle, one of the most perceptive specialists of Paris in literature,
particularly insists that the flâneur is a semotician and a philosopher. See La
Capitale des signes, Paris et son discours (Paris: Editions de la maison des
sciences de l’homme, 2001), 25.
26
On the notion of “cerebral play,” in Russian “mozgovoi,” see Georges Nivat, “La
Ville cérébrale” in Vivre en russe (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2007), 161-79.
27
Baudelaire, “Solitude”, Little Poems in Prose, trans. Aleister Crowley (Paris:
Edward W. Titus, 1928), 60-1; Petits Poèmes en prose, in OC, 263-4: “Le Démon
fréquente volontiers les lieux arides, et que l’Esprit de meurtre et de lubricité
s’enflamme merveilleusement dans les solitudes.” Dudkin will finally give way to
the spirit of murder.
28
Alain Montandon, Pour une Sociopoétique de la promenade (Clermont-Ferrand:
Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000), 149.
29
According to Louis Huart, a flâneur can be nothing but virtuous for one cannot
undertake a flânerie if one’s consciousness is not at peace (Huart, Physiologie du
flâneur, 24-5).
30
Poe, The Man of the Crowd, 396.
31
See for instance E.T.A. Hoffmann’s My Cousin’s Corner Window (1822), a
delightful and paradoxical tale where a paralysed flâneur-writer watches people
going to the market through his window; and see Balzac’s Facino Cane (1836)
where the narrator, to relax from his efforts to write a novel, follows people in the
crowd.
32
The watching flâneur-writer might become a journalist. This transformation is
already present in Balzac. In Lost Illusions (1836-1843), one of Lucien de
Rubempré’s first articles is a charming chronicle entitled “The Paris Passers-by.”
Lucien thus invents a new genre in journalism. It is to be noted that Poe himself
provides the readers with yet another variation on the observing flâneur type: the
flâneur who watches the crowds might also become a detective, like C. Auguste
Dupin in The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841). Detectives and policemen invade
Petersburg, a novel written at a time when the Russian Empire was passionately
reading Sherlock Holmes.
33
Gogol’s painter-flâneur in The Portrait would be an exception to that rule.
34
Nivat, “La Ville cérébrale,” 167.

222 Chapter Eight

35
Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, A Petersburg Tale (1833), trans.
Waclaw Lednicki and published in Waclaw Lednicki, Pushkin's Bronze Horseman
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1955), 148.
36
On the complex matter of Bely’s Fourth Dimension, see David Bethea, The
Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton University Press,
1989), 122-3, and Fournier Kiss, La Ville européenne, 228-37.
37
On the question of the Strannik, see Nivat, “Fuga Mundi,” in Vivre en russe, 71-
9.

CHAPTER NINE
ROVING ANARCHIST FLÂNEURS:

THE VISUAL POLITICS OF POPULAR PROTEST
VIA PARISIAN STREET ART
IN L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE (1900-1914)
KEVIN C. ROBBINS
The most raucous and outrageous of all Parisian new social media after
1900 was the totally irreverent, all-seeing, and deeply critical, purely
illustrated weekly L’Assiette au beurre circulating 1901-1913 (Colour
Plate 1). Derisively taking the name of the dainty “butter dish” gracing
élite urban tables, this upstart, radical, and explicitly anarchist publication
sought, literally and figuratively, to smash such crockery and to smear the
callous pretentions and vicious malfeasance of the wealthier governing
classes in France and Europe. Vital to the success and notoriety of the
Assiette was a close coterie of French and immigrant graphic artists drawn
to the radical media of Paris. This peripatetic group included some of the
greatest and most inventive print makers of the era, like the Czech,
Frantisek Kupka, the German, Hermann Vogel, the Greek, Dimitrios
Galannis, the Pole, Louis Marcoussis (Ludwig Casimir Markus), the
Portuguese, Thomas Leal da Camara, the Spaniard, Juan Gris, and the
Swiss, Félix Vallotton (Fig. 9-1). Some of these visiting artists would later
go on to start similar satirical publications and to animate the most
innovative, twentieth-century artistic and popular protest movements both
in France and in their own home countries from Brazil to Russia.
The Assiette’s entrepreneurial editor entrusted the illustration of each
sixteen-page, weekly issue to a single artist or team of creators. While
successive editors of the Assiette compiled long lists of potential topics or
themes for exposé, associated print makers also had the freedom to suggest
critical subjects and views. This was a proposition deeply appealing to
some of the most politically engaged and socially progressive artists
224 Chapter Nine
working in modern Paris. For the most sardonic of multi-media exploits,

Assiette staff paired artists with noted, left-wing essayists, poets, or
novelists who provided suggestions for timely or provocative captions for
each image submitted.1 Even more unusual for the era and for such media,
advertising was banned from most editions of the Assiette. Virtually no
text appeared in any early editions of the Assiette, only accusatory and
incendiary images with the most trenchant of captions. No wordy
commentaries or risqué stories were to detract from the sharp-edged clarity
and expressive power of the art works printed. This presentation strategy
emanates from the conjoined aesthetic and socio-political ambitions of the
Assiette’s founder, the enterprising Parisian press baron Samuel Schwarz.
Schwarz himself was a Jewish, Austro-Hungarian immigrant who arrived
in France in the later 1870s.2 Abundant evidence in Parisian commercial
and notarial archives shows that Schwarz, via partnerships, quickly
embarked on a publishing career specializing in cheap, mass production,
and door-to-door sales and distribution of classic French literary works
such as the writings of Victor Hugo.3 This foray into the intensely
competitive, rapidly evolving Parisian publishing world quickly made the
astute Schwarz a very wealthy man. Installing himself comfortably in a
series of ever better Parisian neighbourhoods, Schwarz moved into the
wealthiest ranks of the capital’s Jewish professionals. Schwarz evidently
befriended and forged close alliances with other industrious, modern men
of letters who were publishing simultaneously in multiple media.4
Schwarz’s adroit business history shows that initial success in innovative
marketing of a traditional cultural product, like books, often became the
catalyst for far more audacious and unprecedented publishing ventures like
artful, purely illustrated serials such as the Assiette.5
Schwarz took pains to point out the conjoined visual and pro-social
ambitions of his most audacious serial. In an early printed appeal to
readers, Schwarz asserted his conception of the Assiette as “a veritable
artistic history of all progress so far realized not only by the arts of the
printer but also by engravers and paper makers.”6 Note the emphasis here
on the artful and the artisanal. Schwarz apparently envisioned a publication
fusing analysis and display of creativity and the laborious means of
production by which modern impressions of the city circulated. However,
to this weekly résumé of mutually inspirational aesthetic and technical
achievement, Schwarz considered it a duty to add the artful confrontation
of contemporary social problems. This was to be done in a manner so
incisive and so comprehensive that the Assiette would advance the social
solidarity of the French at a momentous period in their nation’s history.
This was especially important, Schwarz averred, for a new publication
Roving Anarchist Flâneurs 225
specifically aimed at appealing to all artists and intellectuals.7 The first

editor’s wishes were certainly fulfilled. The striking visual indictments of
social injustice regularly published in the Assiette often provoked the
outrage of the great and the resilient solidarity and mirth of the humble.
The Assiette quickly became profitable. Apparently, Schwarz earned
far more from the Assiette than he did from the seven other serials he had
created and with which he was experimenting to capture the widest
possible Parisian readership.8 The Assiette gained a wide circulation in
Paris (25,000 to 40,000 copies weekly) and some more scandalous or
provocative issues are known to have raced through multiple editions,
reaching total sales of 250,000 copies or even more within weeks of first
printing.9 This was a smashing, innovative publishing success for an artful
serial and a trick that rivalled Schwarz’s earlier, hard-earned triumphs in
novel marketing of more classical urban artifacts like books. The Assiette
became a noted, indeed a notorious publication stirring deep emotions
within an avid readership and among more conservative members of the
citizenry outraged by the penetrating, scandalous imagery it dispersed via
news kiosks and street sales throughout the capital. Uniformed and secret
agents of the Paris Préfecture of Police regularly denounced the Assiette as
one of the most popular, incendiary, and subversive of the capital’s new
serials.10 A public display of any issue of the Assiette might easily draw a
boisterous and irreverent crowd. Striking industrial workers are known to
have ripped rousing images out of the Assiette and employed them as
banners to lead their protest marches.11 Thus the police, for years, kept all
members of the Assiette’s production crew under the closest surveillance.
Fabricators of the Assiette displayed remarkable ingenuity and
invention in nearly every issue, experimenting with paper stocks of
different colours and weights, employing artists with a diverse array of
graphic styles, and quickly seizing on the most controversial and
scandalous contemporary events for pictorial investigation. In production,
the Assiette transmitted original artists’ lithographs, watercolours,
woodcuts, and prints via photo-engraved zinc plates carefully stocked to
yield more images according to popular demand. Here, Schwarz adeptly
capitalized on the contemporary proliferation in Paris of technicians and
ateliers specializing in chromo-lithography.12 The Assiette clearly
succeeded both as a weekly sampler of stunning French and international
graphic artistry and as a prized visual and satiric commentary on a vast
array of contemporary social problems and injustices.
But what stands out amidst these frequent visual attacks on the many
outrages of the urban world is the superabundance of street scenes
focusing on the proliferating inequities of a supposedly “civil” French
226 Chapter Nine
republican society. The creators of the Assiette clearly made street art a
primary vehicle for the expression of its most comic and most severe
indictments of contemporary urban society and its failings. Individually
and collectively, the artists closely associated with the Assiette worked
diligently to craft graphic images of social protest most often as seen and
interpreted by the sharp-eyed and irreverent, wandering “man in the
street.” In the Assiette, the streetscapes of Paris, often seen in popular
pedestrian perspective, become both backdrops and amplifiers for a new
generation of itinerant social critics emerging from within the ranks of the
ordinary mass of the citizenry. This satirical publication, often with an
anarchist and progressive teaching bent, thus amply supports Tom Gretton’s
recent contention that: “the metropolitan experience as personified in the
flâneur” was “mimicked in the illustrated weekly.”13 I would add that the
Assiette both mimicked and transformed that experience, expanding its
franchise to a far wider array of townspeople, including poorer artists,
working men, women, and children, rarely if ever encountered before
among earlier, widely admired French personifications of the flâneur. The
ultimate objective here became new and instructive popular, pedestrian
visions of the city charged with the ability to arrest the eye and to inform
viewers on how to recognize and how to cope with the real meanings,
risks, dangers, and opportunities impelling their assimilation into modern
urban life.14
My objective here is thus to query whether and how, exactly, the new,
illustrated media of the later French Third Republic effected both a
politicization and a democratization of the observant flâneur. Can flânerie
be popularized with an ever sharper, politically engaged and reformist
edge? Did the irreverent, politically engaged artists flocking to Paris in this
era, tirelessly walking its streets, and seeing their revelatory, often
infuriating sights for the first time, appropriate and re-shape the flâneur? In
that process, did these artists, especially new, poorer immigrants to
graphic Paris, cast off the flâneur’s imagined or stereotypical bourgeois
status and wry detachment from the urban scene?
I believe that these gifted and experimental graphic artists bent on
social protest progressively infused the flâneur and flânerie itself with
visible outrage and an illustrious commitment to social reform. A radical,
even anarchist flâneur evolved in new, synthetic, richly illustrated print
media like the Assiette. This new flâneur was a visually informed figure
devoted to progressive social reform and a graphic counter-attack on
capitalism and its plutocratic, outrageously selfish and destructive
beneficiaries. Moreover, his (or her) effective representation required not
the debasement or sentimentalizing of the artist’s pictorial craft, but rather
a visual inventiveness and formal élan unprecedented in the illustrated

French serial press. These challenges became deeply attractive to the
artists who evidently devoted themselves to working for the Assiette and
long treasured their affiliation with the publication.15 Thus we can inquire:
how and why were highly innovative and iconoclastic new media like the
Assiette vital to the transformation of an indigenous urban cultural type?
By way of new and deeply irreverent, artful, and satirical media, did the
flâneur go abroad, mutate or hybridize into a politically astute and socially
engaged urbanite exemplifying a new skepticism of all established
authorities everywhere? Can there be a touring, anarchist flâneur
graphically propelled beyond ambivalent social commentary and toward
the advocacy of real social reform? Via the Assiette, I believe, one may
witness the early twentieth-century evolution of graphic artists as
politically engaged flâneurs. One sees here flânerie itself developing in
various new art forms directed at a mass market of more observant
citizens. The mobile, urban spectator (of all social ranks and both genders)
emerges as a determined and informed social critic in the spacious,
cosmopolitan, and graphic print worlds of Paris.
For this chapter, I am particularly interested in images drawn from the
first five years of the Assiette’s operations (1901-1906).16 By “street art,” I
am referring consistently to images in the Assiette, primarily high-quality,
strikingly experimental, often multi-colour lithographs, like the work of
Théophile Steinlen (Fig. 9-2), that position the viewer as a pedestrian,
encountering equally dynamic urban populations in readily identifiable
and permeable urban spaces: the street, the park, the café, the shop, and
other workplaces—licit and illicit. This street art commonly empowers
viewers by depicting entirely fortuitous but instructive collisions among
jostling, sharp-witted, ironic urbanites, giving us the chance to spy on, to
overhear or to eves-drop on—and to learn from—their convivial, often
satiric exchanges and opinions. This street art, I would argue, is also
deeply democratic in nature, confronting the itinerant viewer with voluble
and visually expressive citizens of both sexes and many ages drawn from
all the walks of city life.
Clearly impressed by earlier, celebrated French episodes of flânerie,
artists for the Assiette, both domestic and foreign-born, enthusiastically
embraced the raucous, eclectic, and electric urban crowd. A recent French
provincial migrant to Paris, the artist/entrepreneur Georges Dupuis
furnished Assiette viewers with multiple out-takes of the noisy, jostling,
and variously fascinating urban mass (Fig. 9-3). The Swiss emigrant to
Paris, Théophile Steinlen, gave early viewers of the Assiette fair warning
of the city crowd’s capacity for brusque, even menacing and violent
228 Chapter Nine
popular police action against the socially deviant and the criminal (Fig. 9-
4). An adroit, tireless flâneur himself, Steinlen infused most of his images
for the Assiette with a trenchant, observant urbanity. This work amply
justifies the more recent, apt identification of Steinlen as “l’œil de la
rue”—the eye of the street.17
But, from the very first issue of the Assiette, such images of the
enraged or malevolent urban crowd got balanced out with far more
consoling images of the anonymous citizenry’s humane capacity for
mutual aid, especially in service toward the most fragile or vulnerable
members of the urban community (Fig. 9-5). Charles Huard here gives us
an amiable picture of the usual Parisian suspects, men and women, old and
young, and from a host of classes. But, this time, they have pitched in
together, shown real solicitude, and kindly carried an ailing elderly woman
to the pharmacist. The caption of Huard’s image reads: “On a porté la
vieille dame chez le pharmacien” (They carried the old lady to the
pharmacist). The crowd-collective as shown now re-groups after
collaborative, pro-social action on behalf of the needy. Huard’s endearing
scene of a temporary band of helpful (otherwise nameless) Parisian
pedestrians treats us to an image that occurs only after the principal
generous action of the crowd has occurred well before our arrival and
inspection on site. In this sense, the picture mimics a common predicament
of the flâneur, ambling onto a notable urban stage only after the real drama
has passed. Assiette artists apparently revelled in such contingencies of
urban life, placing them in graphic relief better to sensitize viewers about
the opportunities and frustrations of existence in the modern city.
To me, Huard here depicts and re-energizes Baudelaire’s original and
essential aperçu regarding the artist-flâneur and his searching works. For
Baudelaire, that urbane character is a “pure pictorial moralist” and “[w]hat
constitutes the specifically beautiful quality of these pictures is their moral
fecundity.”18 In Huard’s Assiette image, a pedestrian urbanite’s roving eye
falls on a transient civic and didactic event: a manifestation of collective
good conscience and care for the aging and the sick who share the city’s
precincts and to whom better care is certainly due.
It is precisely this instructive, moralizing or civilizing element in
modern French urban imagery that most animates the artful graphic
commentaries published in the Assiette. But the artists who worked most
frequently for the Assiette give their lessons on urban life and its inequities
a vital and innovative twist. Whereas Baudelaire’s morally formative
dandy/flâneur is a man of leisure disposing of some wealth or even a
distinctive, acquired nobility, working artists of the Assiette expose us to
the wit and wisdom of far humbler fellow pedestrians (Fig. 9-6). Steinlen’s
lithograph, published in the Assiette for 11 July 1901, gives us a burdened

ragpicker’s free advice on condescending élite largesse as a national
holiday approaches. (This plays on the picture’s short caption, the
proletarian advice delivered here is another représentation gratuite.)
Observing a long, far too patient line of the menu peuple, the little people,
placidly awaiting a free concert on Bastille Day, the passing, lowliest
labourer spits out: “Four o’clock in the morning and still more than nine
hours to wait… poor prole, when will it ever enter your thick head that it’s
you, and it’s always you who pays even for a “free” show?”19 The
humblest working man in the street has a lesson for us all. That is the
popular aesthetic of visual protest pervading almost every issue of the
Assiette.
In a further break from the traditions of leisured, male flânerie, the
Assiette’s ranks of visually acute teachers always include working-class
city women and children out looking on the streets. Indeed, they are often
depicted as the most penetrating, unpretentious, and unbowed, wandering
visionaries and critics of the gross inequities imposed by the current urban
socio-economic hierarchy. A commodified urban culture of super-
abundant, conspicuous consumption becomes the chief target of the
pictured waifs whose evident poverty prevents their corruption (see Colour
Plate 2).
In poignant, dream-like imagery of surpassing beauty, accompanied by
the simplest of captions, artists for the Assiette, like the native Parisian
lithographer and painter Fernand-Louis Gottlob, made poor women and
children embody how habits of conspicuous consumption in the city
continually humiliate and starve the needy. Emerging wraith-like from the
frost of a snowstorm, a single mother and her hungry children are
momentarily caught in the back-shine from a bakeshop window. The
parent tells her malnourished lot: “Ça, mon enfant, c’est du pain” (“That,
my child, is bread”). In the same issue of the Assiette, the street-eye
Steinlen memorializes a sidewalk glance revealing the incredulity of poor,
hungry boys and girls before a glowing shop window overflowing with the
super-abundant food unjustly reserved for the rich (Fig. 9-7). The starving,
astonished children can only ask: “Tout ça, c’est-il pour manger?” (“Is all
of that is to eat?”).
During the first months of the Assiette’s publication, the migrant
German print maker, Hermann Vogel, used its pages to embark on an
ominous, nearly surreal walking tour of Paris and its many risks. He
recorded his impressions of an often malevolent capital city in a running
suite of images he commonly called Danse Macabre (Fig. 9-8). In number
8 of this series, grotesquely entitled “Eau de vie”—the water or juice of
230 Chapter Nine
life, Vogel hijacks the flâneur’s now classic café interior scene and gives
us a glass of absinthe as the emerald focal point of an urban still life.
While death himself, caught in the play of mirrored reflections and
advertising slogans, presides at the bar, a convivial working-class couple
nurses their drinks and their child courtesy of the notoriously intoxicating
beverage, the “green fairy.” Is this an innocent and inconsequential gesture
or the fatal first step on the road to total perdition? Vogel gives us no easy
pacifiers and his starkly rendered slice of city life suggests that a brush
with liquid death can be a quotidian event in the lives of working families.
Artists of the Assiette fabricated such stark contrasts at every turn.
They were especially adept at skewering the hypocrisy, false philanthropy,
and bogus notability of the moneyed élites contending for socio-political
dominance in the Belle Époque (Fig. 9-9). Gottlob adroitly juxtaposed the
charity snob ostentatiously spending a gold piece on a rose at a society
benefit but, in callous and ghostly green fashion, rejecting as “too much”
the four-penny bid of a poor flower-seller in the street (see Colour Plate 3,
detail). As witnessed in the street and in the company of the true poor, the
rich man’s self-glorifying “humanity” evaporates, becoming jaundiced,
spectral, and haunting. These are the ambient spectres of modern urban
life against which graphic artists of the Assiette sought to warn and to
incite their mass audience of viewers. The differing inks and paper colours
and weights with which Assiette production workers experimented in its
pages helped these images of protest and reform to achieve a most striking
and memorable effect.
Armand Gallo was a very lucky Neapolitan illustrator-immigrant to
graphic Paris. Described in surviving sources as a street-smart dandy with
long experience in the frenetic, nocturnal production of Italian comic
reviews, Gallo settled in Paris by 1905 and quickly went to work
producing comic and caustic images for at least three of the illustrated,
satirical weeklies owned by Schwarz and his successors.20 Gallo’s talents
apparently meshed perfectly with the critical ethos and ambitions Schwarz
conceived for the Assiette au beurre. Gallo’s deeply irreverent, anti-
capitalist sympathies made him a frequent contributor to the Assiette after
1906. Gallo used that journal to circulate a far more garish, street-scene
indictment of gluttonous élite self-indulgence publically masquerading as
benevolence (Colour Plate 4). Here, as a homeless man and his children
sitting at the curb look on, a drunken toff vomits all over a Parisian
sidewalk. The laconic caption reads: “He’s just come from a charity ball.”
The bilious colour fields of Gallo’s streetscape image sharply convey his
acid critique of urban, class-based, socio-political inequalities and
injustice. Roving city eyes celebrated in the imagery of the Assiette made
certain that so-called élite “philanthropy” was seen to be merely a pretense

for sickening self-indulgence and self-glorification by the immoral and
undisciplined wealthy. This is a vital, recurrent, and provocatively
illustrated theme established early in the production of the Assiette and one
that continues throughout the entire press run of the publication, ably
advanced by an international cadre of sharp-eyed graphic artists.
A migrant Russian artist to Paris, working under the pen-name Caran
d’Ache (a comic play on the Russian word for “pencil”), used the pages of
the Assiette to take a more audacious and joking turn at the local rich so
importunate for personal distinction at the cost of everyone else (Fig. 9-
10). Via a whole issue of robust, starkly coloured, block-print images,
Caran d’Ache makes street theatre out of a wheedling top hat’s ambulant,
obsequious pestering of a government minister for a state decoration. The
artist goes on to mock such successful supplicants with another brusque
café scene (Fig. 9-11). Here a bearded, boisterous, petit-bourgeois in a
down-market, yellow checked suit demands: “Monsieur le chevalier,
swear to me on your new medal that this white fish is the freshest to be
found!”. The mischievous diner feigns to mistake the new “notable” for a
waiter. Through jest piled upon jest, one sees that this is the only good use
to which the once coveted decoration can be put. From the perspective of
the Assiette’s newly arrived artists, loud, irreverent humour is the only
decoration or distinction really worthy of pursuit in a raucous and grasping
modern Paris.
But, behind the scenes, as the wandering caricaturist displays, one sees
that a newly decorated couturier, the perfect embodiment of an overly
indulgent Parisian consumer culture, maltreats his seamstresses and forces
them to work inhuman hours (see Colour Plate 5); its caption reads: “What
are you telling me? You want to go to sleep? But it’s only 12:30 in the
morning!”). The peripatetic flâneur’s capacity to see into things (first
saluted by Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life) and to discern the
real rapports of force in any society continue to inform and envenom the
images of the Assiette. Early connoisseurs of the modern Parisian
caricature saluted the stark power of Caran d’Ache’s graphics, their ethical
grounding, and their capacity to move the viewer in sympathy with the
abused humanity they so often portray.21 Caran d’Ache’s earlier
experience producing acclaimed shadow puppets and live-action shadow
plays at the raffish Parisian café-theatre, Le Chat noir, gave added visual
force to his print images. Innovative publications like the Assiette readily
capitalized upon and catalyzed such revealing syntheses of modern urban
art forms.
232 Chapter Nine
A wild Dutch visitor to Paris, the Fauve painter and print-maker Kees
van Dongen, took a special liking to the early Assiette, contributing a large
number of innovative and provocative images for which he got very good
pay and gained a wide Parisian celebrity. Even by the outré works and
methods of the publication, van Dongen’s satirical inventions are
exceptional, revealing the synthetic and critical powers of a new medium
like a purely illustrated, politicized, urban comic review. This was the
perfect vehicle for the incisive street art van Dongen himself favoured at
this time. He regularly referred to his cherished visual studies of Parisian
street scenes and street people as “instantanés.” These were rapidly
executed, really near instantaneous visual captures of local streetscapes
and their human animators, often done in pencil or ink briskly highlighted
with daubs of water colour, coloured inks, and specks of pastel or oil
paint.22 As befits a newly arrived “beast” in art, van Dongen showed no
respect whatsoever for the usual borders of genre or propriety. His most
audacious contribution to the Assiette was his Petite histoire pour les petits
et grands n’enfants (Assiette au beurre, no. 30 of 26 October 1901; Fig. 9-
12). This is a sordid visual tale of a Parisian mother and daughter each
compelled into prostitution by economic necessity and the fatal dynamics
of what’s tragically now become a family trade.
Van Dongen outrageously casts his critique in the guise of a child’s
bedtime story book. He does so, in part, with the theft of a stock urban
character, la marchande de quat’ saisons—the female costermonger or
itinerant, year-round street seller (Figs 9-13 and 9-14). To the
accompaniment of sing-song, juvenile captions, one sees the spring,
summer, fall, and miserable, dying winter of one ill-fated seller of herself
in the urban, sex-work marketplace. Both van Dongen’s immediate subject
matter and the purloined style of his presentation caused a public sensation
and assured his entrée into the ranks of notable, even scandalous Parisian
artists.23
Here, the sad history of the human merchandise on offer gets played
out through a series of oblique and rhyming street scenes. Van Dongen’s
flâneur, displaying a strong social conscience, steals into the otherwise
sedate and respectable genre of juvenile literature, hijacks it, and careens
off toward searing visual denunciations of an exploitive urban economy
that consigns generations of vulnerable women to the ultimately deadly
marketing of themselves. Not a wholesome, childish tale at all and that is
precisely the point van Dongen’s roving eye captures and asserts so
brilliantly. Here, I believe, we see in part how new media, like irreverent,
illustrated, satirical weeklies, accomplished the artful social engagement
and politicization of the old, allegedly indifferent or blasé flâneur. They
did so by a comic, even a slap-stick (but still instructive) theft, parody, and
recombination of other classic genres to make more acute observations of
the urban scene by every pedestrian the basis of progressive social and
moral reform. Parisian consumers within a burgeoning urban print
marketplace heartily endorsed these visual exploits, snapping up copies of
the Assiette via brisk newsstand sales and paid subscriptions assuring the
publication an exceptionally long and influential run.
The socio-political utility of this mocking street art also emanates from
its clear sympathy for all of the marginal figures in modern urban life,
especially those most vulnerable to abuse by corrupt and violent agents of
municipal police. Flâneurs old and new are overtly concerned with the
police of the streets. I would go further to argue that vintage and
contemporary flâneurs vie with one another and with the duly established
state forces of order to enforce, here graphically, differing visions of a just
and equitable society, pedestrian but fair to all the walks of city life. That
is precisely the theme taken up by one of the most accomplished
immigrant lithographers who utilized the Assiette for the widest possible
export of his masterly, jet-black, and sardonic images. (Fig. 9-15).
The Swiss traveller Félix Vallotton turned up in Paris in 1882. Toward
the end of the century, his most ardent work came in the form of energetic
wood-block prints, line drawings, and lithographs starkly evoking the
intensities and conflicts of Parisian life.24 For the March 1, 1902 edition of
the Assiette (no. 48, a numéro special) editors and artist spared no
expense, putting forth an issue comprised solely of fourteen real
lithographs, printed from cut stones, and impressed on only one side of
each carefully chosen, thick-paper page. Each page was perforated for
easy removal should avid consumers wish to have Vallotton’s admonitory
pictures framed. In keeping with the anarchist precepts of the art
community regularly furnishing images to the Assiette, Vallotton’s
objective here was circulation of a “high art” form, the real lithograph, via
a far more popular medium like an unprecedented, mass-circulation,
purely illustrated weekly easily affordable by even humble workers.
Breaking with the heroic, rarified artistry of the Baudelairean flâneur,
collaborators at the Assiette employed premier lithographs in humbler and
more effective campaigns of observant social protest. With their scathing
images, they especially targeted a corrupt and dangerous Paris police force
preying at will upon the weakest and most economically vulnerable
members of urban society.
Vallotton took as one of his special visual themes the crimes and
punishments of Paris (Colour Plate 6). On the title page, a real marchande
de quat’saisons gets surrounded by officious and madly gesticulating
234 Chapter Nine
cops. On the inside of this issue (Fig. 9-16), the viewer learns that official
efforts to suppress all forms of street beggary and quotidian charity are
only stymied when cops on patrol, anxious to protect their chances for
promotion, refuse to intervene to stop a gift act when they spy their chief’s
wife giving alms to a poor man. These are the new, urban margins of a
supposedly “Christian” and generous French civic charity.
Vallotton’s progressively intensifying street art via the Assiette
culminates with his observations on the multiple, competing indecencies
of urban life. Most vulnerable here are the ragged homeless, incapable of
covering themselves decently in the cruel capital of the international
fashion industry (Fig. 9-17). Acting on the ludicrous, trumped up charge of
infringing the civic code through public nudity, burly policemen grab and
roughly march off a dishevelled beggar missing the seat of his pants. By
the seat of their pants, missing or not, on the fly, that is how ever more
mobile and visually alert pedestrians are now encouraged to judge just
what really constitutes a crime in an urban world whose heartless state
policemen are perpetually primed to tell the poor: “Circulez!” (“Move
Along!”) or just disappear. Vallotton’s superb lithographs, widely
disseminated via the Assiette, make the real class agents of indecency
(cops on the beat and the bourgeois regime they violently protect)
painfully obvious.
In my opinion, the flâneur did, most definitely, go abroad. In part, that
migration occurred via highly innovative and synthetic, illustrated,
satirical publications like the Assiette au beurre. In this novel medium, the
flâneur moved on, assuming both genders, rejuvenating through a new
identification with children, and integrating multiple social ranks of the
urban community. A remarkably diverse array of wandering international
artists here made common, progressive cause in a new visual politics.
They took the flâneur and flânerie—as a process of collective moral
improvement through insightful and incisive urban social criticism—in
multiple new directions at once. They did so, in part, through the wily,
satiric theft, recombination, and reapplication of previously staid or
respectable print genres. Migrant artists, new to Paris and especially
sensitive to all its charms and all its horrors, became vital agents
democratizing and politicizing the old indigenous archetype of the
detached, indifferent flâneur. By re-moralizing and re-valuing socially
conscious, observant pedestrians, by encouraging and retraining those
citizens to see into the city better and to demand greater social equity via
such transcendent and provocative visions, the artists of the Assiette
advanced the principles of mutual aid and reciprocity at the core of
European anarchism. This achievement required no diminution and no
cheap commercialization or sentimentalization of the artists’ skills and

illustrative talent. Quite the contrary: the ambitions of the Assiette’s first
highly innovative editor, Schwarz, to employ modern artistry of the
highest order as the avant-garde of thoughtful social reform were fully
realized. His visionary success assured that the Assiette became a vehicle
of uncompromising and catalytic graphic expression long admired and
long remembered within the print worlds of modern Paris.
236 Chapter Nine
Illustrations
Fig. 9-1. František Kupka, L’Argent, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 41, 11 January
1902, cover, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-2. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, Hiver, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 1, 4 April,

1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
238 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-3. Georges Dupuis, La Hurle, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 153, 5 March 1904,
cover, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-4. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, La Foule, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 13, 27

June 1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University
240 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-5. Charles Huard, Parisiens! L’Assiette au beurre, no. 1, 4 April 1901, 19,
photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library, Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-6. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, Représentation gratuite, L’Assiette au

beurre, no. 15, 11 July 1901, 256, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
242 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-7. Théophile-Alexander Steinlen, Tout ça, c’est-il pour manger? L’Assiette
Fig. 9-8. Hermann Vogel, VIII. Danse Macabre. L’Eau de vie, L’Assiette au
beurre, no. 16, 18 July 1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
244 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-9. Fernand-Louis Gottlob, Le Snob charitable, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 20,
15 August 1901, 322-3, photoengraving of original lithograph. Rare Book
Collection, Indiana University Library, Indianapolis.
Fig. 9-10. Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), Les démarches, L’Assiette au beurre,
246 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-11. Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), Alimentation, L’Assiette au beurre,

Fig. 9-12. Kees van Dongen, Petite histoire…, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 30, 26
October 1901, cover, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University
248 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-13. Kees van Dongen, La marchande de quat’saisons, L’Assiette au beurre,

no. 30, 26 October 1901, 466 bis, photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
Fig. 9-14. Kees van Dongen, L’Hiver étant venu…, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 30, 26
October 1901, n.p., photoengraving. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University
250 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-15. Félix-Edouard Vallotton, Le jour de boire est arrivé, L’Assiette au

beurre, no. 48, I March 1902, 768, lithograph. Rare Book Collection, Indiana
Fig. 9-16. Félix-Edouard Vallotton, Bougeons pas…, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 48,
1 March 1902, 760, lithograph. Rare Book Collections, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
252 Chapter Nine
Fig. 9-17. Félix-Edouard Vallotton, Ah! mon gaillard! L’Assiette au beurre, no. 48,
1 March 1902, 775, lithograph. Rare Book Collection, Indiana University Library,
Indianapolis.
Notes
1
On the operating protocols of the Assiette, see for example, the letter of the
editor, Samuel Schwarz, to the radical man of letters, Jehan Rictus, soliciting the
assistance of Rictus for captions to the illustrations of the print maker Ricardo
Florés, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (henceforward BNF), Manuscripts,
Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises (NAF), Papers of Jehan Rictus Correspondence,
NAF 24572, letter dated 9 April 1902.
2
Key details in the working career of Schwarz can be reconstructed from the
business papers and private contracts he filed with his chief Parisian notary, Maître
Adrien-Constant Marc. See, for examples, the early documents on Schwarz’s
publishing partnerships in Marc’s notarial registers, Archives Nationales (AN),
Paris, MC/ET/LXXII/1050, dossier dated 2 March 1882.
3
For details on Schwarz’s book printing and distribution business in Paris see
Elisabeth and Michel Dixmier, L’Assiette au Beurre: Révue satirique illustrée
1901-1912 (Paris: Maspero, 1974), see in particular 19-23.
4
More detail on Schwarz’s business ventures, material comforts, style of life, and
close friendships can be found in his elaborate wedding contract laying out his own
financial resources, the dowry gifts brought to the new household by his bride, the
immensely wealthy Fanny Laure Rothschild, and his social networks as visible in
the witnesses to and close participants in the ceremony. That document was
prepared by Maître Hippolyte Megret, chief notary for Schwarz’s father-in-law,
Jules Rothschild, the great Parisian editor/publisher of scientific books and learned
journals. See Megret’s notarial registers, AN Paris MC/ET/XXXI/1252, wedding
contract dated 26 February 1887. The senior witness to this event and probably
Schwarz’s closest friend was Paul Meurice one of the most noted editors of Victor
Hugo’s works, a playwright himself, and the originator of (or contributor to)
numerous Parisian newspapers and weekly journals.
5
This close connection between successful, experimental mass-marketing of books
and periodicals in Paris and the inception of new, weekly serials would continue
under Schwarz’s entrepreneurial successors in the editorship of the Assiette. André
de Joncières, who took over direction of the Assiette from Schwarz in 1904, had
previously founded a corporation, Les Publications modernes, to handle the
simultaneous production of at least nine other weekly or monthly publications
aimed at niche markets of the Paris reading public. See the Dixmiers, L’Assiette au
beurre, 28-31 and Joncière’s various business contracts in the registers of the Paris
Tribunal of Commerce, Archives Départementales de Paris (ADP) D31U3 888, no.
1805; D31U3 1019, no. 1744; and D31U3 1021, no. 54 for examples.
6
See the tipped-in letter to the readership, signed “The Editor,” appearing in the
edition of the Assiette for 16 May 1901. The original, official expression of the
journal’s ambition includes: “Nous désirons qu’au bout de l’année la collection de
“L’Assiette au beurre” constitue une véritable histoire artistique de tous les progrès
réalisés, tant par l’art de l’imprimeur que par celui du graveur et du papetier.”
7
“Est-il besoin d’ajouter que “L’Assiette au beurre” dépassant le point de vue
même de l’art se consacrera à la défense sociale? Nous sommes, en effet, arrivés à
254 Chapter Nine
ce tournant de l’Histoire où il est du devoir d’aborder de front, particulièrement

dans un journal qui s’adresse aux penseurs et aux artistes, la question sociale sous
ses aspects le plus divers…” (ibid.).
8
See details on the operating profits of Schwarz’s various serials detailed in the
dossier handling Schwarz’s temporary declaration of bankruptcy (due to ever
mounting journal production costs) before the Paris Tribunal of Commerce in
1902. See ADP, Pérotin 25/64/1 1945, No. 619, Liquidation judicière, dated 14
March 1902.
9
Recall that the Assiette comprised merely one part of a vast Parisian publishing
and press empire built up by the entrepreneurial immigrant Schwarz. At one point,
he directed the compilation and distribution of no fewer than eight separate
illustrated and comic or satirical serial publications. However, the complex dossier
at the Paris Tribunal de Commerce detailing Schwarz’s financial débâcle clearly
shows that the Assiette long reigned as one of his most profitable publishing
ventures. See ADP, Paris Tribunal de Commerce, Pérotin 25/64/1 1945, No. 619.
10
See the voluminous files on the Assiette still maintained in the Archives of the
Paris Preéfecture of Police (APPP), series 2B.
11
When Gustave-Henri Jossot, one of the leading artist contributors to the Assiette
came to reminisce about his experiences there, even forty years after the events, he
still expressed amazement at how his images circulated via the Assiette often
animated other street protestors and deeply shocked onlookers. See Jossot’s
“Souvenirs de l’assiette au beurre,” in La Rue, no. 7, 19 July 1946, 1-3, BNF Paris,
MICR D-1391.
12
On the capital-intensive requirements for opening Paris shops specializing in
chromo-lithography and the numbers of such new ventures, see, for examples,
registrations of incorporation maintained by the Paris Tribunal of Commerce,
ADP, D31U3 918, No. 15, dated 4 January 1901.
13
Tom Gretton, “Not the Flâneur again: reading magazines and living the
metropolis around 1880,” in Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds), The
invisible flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century
Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 95.
14
As here and in her earlier published work on lessons about the praxis of
observing the city conveyed in Spanish illustrated serials, Vanesa Rodriguez-
Galindo notes: “The readership was encouraged to engage with the image, and
visual experience thus entered the mind and affected interpretations of everyday
life and, by extension, the city. The reader encountered and internalized
illustrations on the basis of his knowledge and from the subjective mechanism of
vision, allowing the image to enter his sensory apparatus and ‘visual imagination’,
which in turn affected his perception of the city and made it possible for him to
eventually return to the image with a more educated eye…This interest in the
panoramic view responds to the panoptic ideology manifested in the periodicals
during the period, an ideology that not only served as a means of social control but
also as a way of educating citizens in the rapid transformations taking place, thus
facilitating their ability to operate with the city… Though Madrid lagged behind in
terms of material culture or modern infrastructure, its education in looking was
enhanced by stressing this quotidian relationship with social spaces, giving way to
what can be called a sensory basis that was modified, altered and enhanced by the
effects of modernization and new forms of visual culture. Modern practices of
looking should therefore be sought out in all realms of public space…”. In my
opinion, this adroit analysis equally applies to the Assiette and to the progressive
empowerment of ordinary viewers as knowing citizens and sharp-eyed agents of
socio-policitcal reform as championed by the publication’s working artists and
editors. See Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo, infra, and also her “Visuality and
Practices of Looking in Late Nineteenth-Century Madrid: Representations of the
Old and Modern City in the Illustrated Press,” in R. Beck, U. Krampl, and E.
Retaillaud-Bajac (eds), Les cinq sens de la ville. Du Moyen Age à nous jours
(Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2013), 227-42. Here at 230-1,
233, and 242.
15
See, for example, Jossot’s “Souvenirs de l’assiette” as cited above.
16
Although analysis here draws upon factual information supplied in the one and
only serious, prior published French history of the Assiette, my own work aims to
correct and surpass the aesthetic and cultural historical limitations of earlier, very
limited scholarship on the subject. See in particular: Elisabeth and Michel Dixmier,
L’Assiette au beurre, Revue satirique illustrée 1901-1912 (Paris: Maspero, 1974).
17
See the recent exhibition catalogue of Philippe Kaenel, Théophile-Alexander
Steinlen: l’oeil de la rue (Lausanne: Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne / 5
Continents Editions, 2008).
18
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire: Selected
Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (London: Penguin Books,
1972). Here at 399 and 433. In the French original, Baudelaire extols his painter of
modern life, Constantin Guys (1805-92), as a “pur moraliste pittoresque.” For
Baudelaire, “la beauté particulière de ces images, c’est leur fécondité morale”
(Baudelaire, Critique d’art, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais,
1992), 351 and 382.
19
Steinlen, “Représentation Gratuite,” in Assiette au Beurre, no. 15, 11 July 1901,
246.
20
On Gallo’s earlier exploits in the Italian print trades, see Vittorio Paliotti and
Paola Pallottino, La satira a Napoli nei giornali dal 1848 al 1951 (Naples:
Langella Editore, 1981), 9ff.
21
See, for example, Emile Bayard, La caricature et les caricaturists (Paris:
Librairie Delagrave, 1900), 281-97.
22
On van Dongen and his roving, pedestrian habits of illustration earning him ever
greater Parisian celebrity especially after his debut in the Assiette, see Anita
Hopmans, Van Dongen: Fauve, anarchiste et mondain (Paris: Production Paris-
Musées, 2011). Catalogue of the exposition of the same title, Musée d’Art
moderne de la Ville de Paris, 25 March-17 July 2011. See in particular “Le
‘Kropotkine’ du Bateau-Lavoir,” 16-31 and accompanying illustrations.
23
See ibid., 21.
24
Quite in keeping with these visual preoccupations, one of Vallotton’s most
prized collections of prints got the striking title “Paris Intense.”
CHAPTER TEN
HENRI BÉRAUD’S FLÂNEUR SALARIÉ

ABROAD IN IRELAND
OLIVER O’HANLON
J’étais, je suis toujours intensément curieux des hommes

[I was, I still am intensely curious about people].1
—Henri Béraud.
Berlin, Paris and Rome; these great cities of Europe are the cities
traditionally associated with the flâneur. Conversely, the relatively small
Irish cities of Belfast, Galway, Cork and Dublin are not at all the usual
setting for the flâneur. With the possible exception of Leopold Bloom’s
odyssey through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s critically acclaimed
masterpiece, Ulysses, the words Ireland and flâneur are seldom mentioned
in the same breath. However, thanks to the French journalist Henri Béraud
(1885-1958), a new type of flâneur, the flâneur salarié, or paid flâneur has
become associated with Ireland. In September 1920, Béraud travelled to
several Irish cities to report on the increasing levels of violence during the
Irish War of Independence for the popular, mass selling French daily Le
Petit Parisien. This chapter examines both the form and content of
Béraud’s journalistic writings during his visit to Ireland with the aim of
seeing how Béraud’s flâneur salarié differs, if at all, from earlier
interpretations of the flâneur with particular emphasis on Walter Benjamin
and Charles Baudelaire.
The exact origin of the word flâneur is often disputed. However, in a
curious twist of fate, it would seem that when Béraud brought his flâneur
salarié to Ireland, he could have been bringing the flâneur back home. One
nineteenth-century French encyclopaedia entry suggests that the word
flâneur may have derived from the Irish word for libertine.2 Whatever its
origins, writers and critics have for centuries been fascinated by the
myriad possibilities and limitations associated with this urban archetype.
From Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life,” to Poe’s man of the crowd,
Henri Béraud’s flâneur salarié Abroad in Ireland 257
and from Huart’s physiological description, to Benjamin’s arcades stroller,

I would argue that Béraud’s flâneur salarié is merely another step on the
flâneur’s evolutionary chain. It is necessary therefore, that in order to
explore the flâneur abroad, we must examine the genesis of Henri
Béraud’s flâneur salarié.
Béraud coined the term flâneur salarié or paid flâneur to describe his
work as a newspaper special correspondent. It first appeared in his 1927
book, Le Flâneur salarié. The book was a collection of reportage that he
wrote for the mass-circulation newspaper Le Petit Parisien while covering
various high profile news stories in Ireland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt
and France, between September 1920 and January 1924.3 His use of the
term was even acknowledged by Walter Benjamin in his wonderful
fragmentary and unfinished Arcades Project.4 Béraud’s use of the word
flâneur in the book’s title was a bold move designed to show that the
flâneur was not the preserve of any one cultural élite or social group. This
talented and charismatic baker’s son from the city of Lyon carved out a
niche for himself in the competitive environment of the Paris newsroom
by creating the flâneur salarié. In appropriating this well-established
cultural type, that had in the past been associated with such canonical
French writers as Honoré de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire among others,
the ambitious Béraud assured for himself a ready-made literary reputation
in France and further afield.
It is hardly surprising when we consider that this is the same writer
who achieved instant notoriety by being the only journalist to write from
inside the Paris Peace Conference. Days after he joined the staff of
Gustave Téry’s left-leaning daily newspaper L’Œuvre in January 1919,
Béraud gained access to the seemingly impenetrable Quai d’Orsay by
pretending to be a member of one of the visiting foreign delegations.
Béraud was not long out of the army and the beard he grew in the trenches
together with his tanned complexion would have easily helped him to
blend in with the assembly of foreign representatives. He would go on to
become an award winning journalist and novelist, winning the prestigious
Prix Goncourt in 1922 for two books, Le Vitriol de lune and Le Martyre de
l'obèse. The latter, which cast a wry look on the trials and tribulations of
the fat man in France, highlighted Béraud’s easy ability to move between
literary genres. Béraud’s legacy has been severely tainted, however, by his
support for Marshal Pétain’s Vichy régime and his virulent Anti-British
writings in Gringoire, the popular weekly newspaper he edited during the
Second World War. Controversial to the last, an obituary describes him as
“a lover of the most violent form of polemic and the gentle art of making
enemies.”5 After the war, Béraud was tried, convicted and sentenced to
258 Chapter Ten
death for the crime of intelligence avec l’ennemi (contact with the enemy).
His sentence was subsequently commuted to hard labour for life by
General de Gaulle.
Reportage, the form of journalism practiced by Béraud in Ireland, is
the perfect mode of expression for the flâneur. This descriptive form of
journalism came to France in the 1880s, having been developed in
America during the Civil War. For Béraud, reportage was simply a matter
of describing what he saw on his travels around the world. He described it
as “the story without invention, the true story, clear and still hot, that
prolongs life’s palpitations.”6 Béraud was writing during what has come to
be seen as a golden age for French journalism, when the reporter was
considered “la lorgnette du Monde” (the eye glass of the world).7 The
process of gathering reportage was, for Béraud, a matter of getting behind
the scenes to investigate the very essence of the story: “to gather reportage
is to look at society from the inside, get amongst the public, touch the
wounds of the humble, investigate the motives of the great ones, observe
from the wings the world’s tragedies and comedies, wander in the city and
see the merchants in their offices, the workers in their suburbs, the priests
in their presbyteries, the politicians in their corridors, the assassins before
the guillotine, the diplomats giddy with excitement over nothing and the
great ones in the misery of their glory.”8
The supreme author of reportage in France in Béraud’s time was the
journalist known as the grand reporter. This revolutionary journalistic
figure would typically have enjoyed a higher salary than their peers in the
newsroom, as they travelled around France or to more exotic locations in
France’s colonial outposts, exposing the shortcomings and injustices of
venerable state-run institutions such as prisons and hospitals. Other
popular destinations for the grand reporter at the beginning of the
twentieth century included revolutionary Asia, fragmenting Europe and
Soviet Russia. Their investigative articles, known as grand reportage,
were very popular amongst the newspaper reading public and were used as
a marketing tool to sell newspapers, just like the roman-feuilleton was
used to woo a previous generation of newspaper readers. The genre of
grand reportage has also been linked to detective and adventure novels, as
well as travel writing.9 Along with Béraud, this fabled group of journalists,
whose ranks included reporters such as Albert Londres, Joseph Kessel and
Andrée Viollis, trotted around the globe to report on significant
newsworthy events as they happened. The similarities between the grand
reporter and the traditional flâneur in the way in which they read and
negotiate their way around the city cannot be overstated.
When Béraud was invited by his newspaper editor to embark on a trip

to Ireland in September 1920, he reasoned that he was an ideal candidate,
saying: “I have been, I am always intensely curious about people, of the
way they act and live, of their condition, their institutions … and the
dramas of their existence. Travelling round the world, hanging around in
ocean liners and sleeping cars, witnessing the birth of wars and the end of
revolutions… I was attracted to travel. I wanted adventures. I was going to
get what I wanted.”10 This honest declaration of his natural curiosity about
people, about life seems to bode well for his planned journalistic mission.
On the face of it, Béraud seems to be enthusiastic about his future career
as a roving reporter and brimming with selfconfidence, but would this be
enough for the flâneur in Ireland?
The first stop on Béraud’s Irish itinerary is Dublin city. Dublin was at
the time a Second City of the British Empire and Dublin Castle housed the
nerve centre of the British administration on the island. The city was also
home to the leadership of the Irish nationalist movement. Situated on
Ireland’s east coast, the 1911 census records a population of 304,802
inhabitants.11 In his first article, which appeared on 16 September 1920,
Béraud says that the first thing one notices on arrival in Dublin port are the
ranks of ‘Tommies’ (British soldiers) lining the quays.12 By 1920, the Irish
War of Independence, also known as the Anglo-Irish War, which began in
1919, had developed into a full-scale guerrilla war in the south. This show
of military strength by the British force was intended to send out a
message of supreme power and authority, and it leaves the newly arrived
Frenchman in no doubt as to who is in charge. Ultimately, the presence of
these uniformed and primed men announces the constraints that will be
placed on Béraud’s movements during his time in Ireland. Béraud goes on
to describe in detail in his later articles how this state of siege impinged on
his ability “flâner” about the city, restricting his movements and causing
him great difficulty in his newsgathering.
On the nighttime sailing from Holyhead in Wales to Dublin, Béraud
had plenty of time to study his fellow passengers. Ever the observant
journalist, he goes on to describe the diverse group who sailed with him.
The old gentleman who hummed strange sounding tunes while pacing up
and down the corridor outside the cabins all night. The jovial fat man who
railed against the sailors when he was not cracking jokes. A group of
unfortunate men who look like they are carrying the weight of the world
on their shoulders. And lastly, himself, the special correspondent of Le
Petit Parisien, who, he says, is there to satisfy his professional curiosity. It
is a Sunday when he arrives in Dublin and the station is deserted. The city
too is like a ghost town - he calls Dublin “a dead city.” The streets are
260 Chapter Ten
devoid of people and even when he knocks on doors to talk to some of the
contacts that he was given in London, nobody answers. Instead, he says
that he must make do with examining the city, but isn’t that what a flâneur
is supposed to do in the first place? This gives us an indication as to
Béraud’s order of priorities during his time in Ireland. He is to seek out
sources first and then to “flâne” about the city. Béraud is staggered on
examining Dublin: could this really be the city where it is said abroad that
a civil war is about to break out, he wonders?
When some sense of normality resumes over the following days,
Béraud manages to interview the commander of British troops in Ireland.
He is very impressed by the physical appearance and presence of the tall
English general, Sir Nevil Macready, who stands before him in his office.
Béraud says that he is privileged to have the opportunity to meet with the
general, as he does not normally give interviews. During this very candid
meeting they discuss the ongoing attacks by the rebels on the army and the
inevitable reprisals carried out by the soldiers. Béraud is shown a map of
Ireland with flags marking British troop deployments on the island. The
young French journalist is taken into the confidence of the British general.
He is given a pass signed personally by the general to allow him free
access throughout Ireland. This will help him later on when he is stopped
by British troops in Galway. Ironically, he also receives a pass of sorts
(complete with Gaelic writing and symbols) from the Sinn Fein leaders
that he meets and that too ensures that he is afforded safe passage, when
he needs it, from the rebels. This issuing of passes merely serves to
underline for the newspaper reader the tense security situation that Béraud
finds himself in. Crucially, it also highlights the strict constraints placed
on his ability to negotiate his way around the city, or wander about at will,
again marking him out from the classic flâneur, who does not traditionally
face such obstacles.
In a further deviation from the classic flâneur who, almost always,
remains solitary and acts independently, Béraud must collaborate with
others if he is to perform his task of newsgathering and reporting. Like
many journalists before him, he becomes caught up in the middle of a
tangled symbiotic relationship with the various protagonists when he
arrives in Ireland. Each side must impress on the flâneur salarié the
legitimacy of their own struggle and he must engage with them to gain
information for his articles. For example, Béraud describes several
clandestine meetings in hushed tones with shadowy figures from the rebel
movement. He also details how the Sinn Fein Minister for Propaganda,
Desmond Fitzgerald, would come to his hotel room in Dublin city
practically every afternoon and entertain him and other foreign journalists
with cigarettes and several bottles of Irish stout.13 Another encounter with
the rebels affords Béraud an exciting newspaper headline. The Sinn Fein
leader, Arthur Griffith, invites Béraud to attend a bizarre gathering, the
unmasking of a British spy in a city hotel. “Comment j’ai fait partie d’un
tribunal sinn-feiner et vu démasquer un espion” (How I took part in a Sinn
Fein tribunal and saw a spy unmasked), reads the front page headline that
leaves the reader in no doubt as to who did what, where and when. This
first person narrative is typical of Béraud’s journalistic writings around
this time. A few short years after reporting from Ireland, Béraud covered
many more unfolding dramatic events in other European capitals. His
books, which sold in the hundreds of thousands, based on his newspaper
articles speak directly to the reader; Ce que j’ai vu à Rome, Ce que j’ai vu
à Moscou, Ce que j’ai vu à Berlin (What I Saw in Rome, …Moscow,
…Berlin). Therefore, Béraud’s flâneur salarié is implicated directly in the
action he describes, marking a clear distinction with the earlier flâneur
who merely strolls around, observing life without any specific objective in
mind, or intention to create any type of product based on his flânerie.
Béraud tells his readers that before leaving Dublin city, he had asked
the ministers in the provisional government to contact him if anything
comes up. He receives a telegram a few days later in Cork that simply says
“Come.”14 When he arrives at the train station in Dublin, he is met by a
stranger and told to go to Balbriggan. Balbriggan is a seaside town about
twenty miles from Dublin and it is the site of an attack by the temporary
police constables, or the Black and Tans. The carnage is considerable; he
reports that thirty-two houses were burned, along with the local factory
that employed four hundred people. Rather than finding this news story by
himself, Béraud’s flâneur is contacted by the Irish rebels and is then sent
to Balbriggan. This marks yet another distinction with the classic
stereotype whereby the ordinary flâneur would presumably find this scene
simply by walking past it, almost serendipitously, and would not have
needed to be informed about it.
From Dublin Béraud travelled north to Belfast. This prosperous and
modern city, where the seemingly unsinkable RMS Titanic was launched
in 1912, was at the time of Béraud’s visit the most industrialised city on
the island of Ireland. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, where the ill-fated
ship was built, employed 14,000 people in 1914.15 Belfast’s population
had grown steadily to keep up with the demand for workers for the
thriving shipbuilding, textiles and ropeworks industries. It had even
outgrown Dublin, until Dublin expanded its borders. When Béraud visited
the city in 1920, sectarian tensions that had been simmering in the
background for some time were beginning to spill over into the streets.
262 Chapter Ten
The unprecedented levels of violence led one historian to say that during
this period, Ulster was plunged “into the most terrible period of violence
the province had experienced since the eighteenth century.”16 Béraud’s
articles talk of the violence he witnessed, making flânerie a dangerous
pastime, as well as the perceived differences between the north and south
of the island. Even though Ireland was not actually partitioned at the time,
Béraud talks as if it were. He picks out the distinctions between the north
and the south that are immediately evident to the outsider’s eye.
Béraud outlines for his readers the quintessential differences, as he sees
them, between the north and the south of Ireland. When a foreigner asks to
meet the most eminent citizens in the south, they are brought to see the
poets. In Ulster, the same foreigner will be brought to see the merchants.
Put simply he says, “here, the business men, there the intellectuals,” or
“here, they make their fortune; there, they believe in miracles.”17 The other
big difference he notices is the lifestyle differences between the two parts
of the island. According to Béraud, the disparity becomes even more
pronounced when one observes the private lives of these two countries, as
he calls them. He makes the distinction between an Irish club and an
Ulster club. In Dublin, they are usually in small cosy rooms, with
armchairs to sit down. You would typically find old prints or paintings
hanging up and bookcases lining the walls. It seems to be a place designed
to encourage the exchange of ideas and the discussion of issues. In Belfast
by contrast, where business seems to be the sole motivation, the clubs are
merely an extension of the stock exchange. One cannot sit down on the
shiny heavy wooden furniture, that is not how deals are done, he says.
Travelling south west from Belfast, Galway was Béraud’s next port of
call. This ancient city, washed by the Atlantic Ocean, is where the most
sinister news stories emanate from, Béraud tells his readers. It is very
difficult, he says, for him to describe accurately the nature of the
revolution in Galway. It is both localised and general all at the same time.
For example, he says that when one rushes to see some “action”, the
“action” has moved on to somewhere else.18 He is one of only two
passengers on the train that arrives in Galway at midnight. The curfew was
nine o’clock and when he steps onto the station platform, he is
immediately marched onto a waiting lorry by a “Black and Tan.” The
Black and Tans were a force of ten thousand strong veterans of the British
Army from the Great War who “became notorious for their violence and
lack of discipline, and especially for taking reprisals against known and
suspected revolutionaries.”19 He fears for his life, but when he produces
the pass that General Macready had given to him in Dublin, he is allowed
to go. This is probably the first time that a flâneur has ever needed a
special pass to make his way around a city. There is a deadly tension
present in the city and Béraud can hear gunfire outside his hotel all night,
not exactly ideal conditions for either flânerie or newsgathering.
In the morning, now that the fighting has ended, it is time for the
journalist to carry out his duty and he can at last admire the city, which he
likens to an old Spanish town. It is true that Béraud romanticises certain
aspects of life in Ireland, but he excels at this when describing life in
Galway. From the strange appearance of the city’s women folk, whose
Moorish-looking shawls frame their pure Castilian faces, to the
Mediterranean architecture all around him, he exoticises practically
everything he sees in the city. Béraud also mentions briefly that he
travelled to the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, where he says the
lifestyle of the two thousand fishermen who live there hasn’t changed for
the last two thousand years. This pithy reference to a place that is both
bucolic and quintessentially Irish, yet also extremely isolated and rural, is
very apt. It is very much in keeping with the flâneur’s fetishisation of the
city and almost lack of interest in any aspect of the countryside or rural
life.
Throughout his articles and books based on his time in Ireland, Béraud
paints a very colourful picture of what he witnesses for his readers back in
France. The north of Ireland looks more like the north of Germany, and
the city’s houses are the colour of wine, the trams a savage scarlet and the
women, young and old alike, are enveloped in brilliant silks, he remarks.20
It is debatable whether an Irish person would recognise these vivid
descriptions of their home place. Béraud is always conscious when
describing Irish towns and cities to include what he sees as their French
equivalent, in order to help his readers visualise the landscape and
understand what is happening. For example, he equates Dublin with
Tourcoing, Belfast with Roubaix and Cork with Grenoble. Rather than
focus too intensely on marginal or peripheral figures, Béraud’s flâneur
salarié focuses instead on the key personalities of the story of Ireland.
Whilst Béraud does notice some of those on the margins, the barefoot
children and the beggars for example, he concentrates on the political and
military leaders, reporting almost word for word his conversations and
interviews with them.
The worlds of journalism and flânerie have often been linked. One of
the “fathers” of the flâneur, Walter Benjamin, maintained that “the social
base of flânerie is journalism.”21 Another flâneur theorist, the modernist
prose-poet Charles Baudelaire, started and ended his working life in
journalism. Much of Baudelaire’s poetry, including the celebrated
collection Les Fleurs du mal, appeared for the first time in the press before
264 Chapter Ten
later being published in collected volumes. Baudelaire’s diverse journalistic

output which included fiction, prose and verse poetry, translations and
critical reviews of theatre, art, music and literature, appeared in a wide
variety of periodicals, from the respectable Revue des deux mondes, to the
revolutionary Le Salut public.22 As he had no one editor looking over his
shoulder, he could decide on the subject matter and the deadline for his
next piece of writing and in which form it would appear. In light of this,
we could say that Baudelaire’s working life as a journalist resembled the
roaming life of the flâneur, in so far as he moved around, writing different
types of articles for different types of publications.
Béraud described his flâneur salarié as “a tireless or indefatigable
passer-by, the curious one that we meet wherever there is something
happening. Be careful though, not to confuse the flâneur salarié with the
writer out for a walk, making notes at his leisure, to be printed later for
posterity. The flânerie of our flâneur ends at the end of the news wires.”23
Straightaway therefore, we can see that there is a specific and indeed
limited purpose to his flâneur’s flânerie. He is there to observe life around
him and to report what he sees, nothing more, and nothing less. Béraud’s
new breed of flâneur is therefore not necessarily the same type of person
that would have been found strolling through the arcades of nineteenth-
century Paris or loitering in the city with no clear objective in mind.
On further inspection, other disparities between the flâneur of Baudelaire
and Benjamin and that of Béraud become apparent. Béraud’s flâneur
salarié is rarely idle; he does not have the luxury of lounging around. He
is sent from place to place, often at very short notice, on the whim of an
editor who senses that an incident abroad is about to develop into a big
news story. Furthermore, unlike previous incarnations, Béraud’s flâneur is
constrained in a number of ways. Firstly, he has a deadline hanging over
him, he has a newspaper article to write and that is of course the sole
reason for his flânerie. He is further constrained by the fact that Ireland is
in a state of war when he arrives and his movements are therefore
restricted. Nevertheless, in spite of these deviations from earlier
interpretations, Béraud’s flâneur also shares some of the classic
characteristics of the idle man-about-town. His flâneur observes life
around him. That is, after all, what he is paid to do.
As David Frisby recalls, “for Benjamin, ‘the flâneur is an uprooted
person. He is at home neither in his class nor in his birthplace but rather
only in the crowd.’”24 This observation is very appropriate when we
consider Béraud’s back-story and that Béraud’s flâneur is not at all passive
and rather than be held captive indoors, this new breed is released out into
the open, to get amongst the crowd. The crowd nourishes the flâneur
salarié, it is both his raison d’être and his master, feeding his appetite for
news stories whilst also dictating where he goes and who he sees. The
flâneur has been likened to a plant that would be killed if kept in a
greenhouse; we are told that “the flâneur flourishes only in the open air.”25
For Baudelaire, the crowd is an essential component in the flâneur’s
ontological makeup. Writing about the flâneur in The Painter of Modern
Life, Baudelaire said that “the crowd is his element… 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.”26 Béraud’s flâneur must be in the crowd to
get a feeling for the mood of the people, but he must also be disciplined
enough not to be carried along by the crowd and lose his sense of
journalistic objectivity. Béraud’s flâneur should also be outside the crowd,
observing from the outside.
The twentieth-century Parisian history and culture specialist, Anna-
Louise Milne, sees the flâneur as “a solitary figure whose haughty gaze
resists the appeal of specific commodities, yet conveys a passionate desire
for the city, that is, a desire to consume the spectacle of the city as a
whole.”27 Béraud does indeed have a desire to consume the town or city he
visits, emanating from his basic need to file an article with his editor. But
solitary is not how to describe him. The very nature of his work means that
he must collaborate with others to gather information that will form the
basis of his next piece of work. He must make connections and develop a
network of contacts. When travelling around Ireland, he does so in the
company of other journalists. For instance, he talks about travelling from
Tullamore in the midlands to Galway in the west with the special
correspondent of Madrid’s El Sol newspaper, Ricardo Baëza.28 He also
travelled in the company of fellow French journalist, Joseph Kessel, the
special correspondent of La Liberté. Béraud’s flânerie around Ireland was
typical of a great number of foreign journalists who were sent to Ireland at
this time. Newspaper editors were extremely interested in the popular
uprising, the outcome of which might have grave implications for the
future of the British Empire and other major colonial powers around the
world.
As stated earlier, Béraud laid out a clear distinction of what the flâneur
salarié is and is not. His flânerie ends at the end of the news wires, he
said. When he invented the flâneur salarié, Béraud reinterpreted what it
means to be a flâneur. Being paid to be a flâneur may seem completely at
odds with earlier interpretations of this independently wealthy cultural
type who roamed the (continental European) city, looking for divertissement
266 Chapter Ten
or inspiration, or both. When the word flâneur is followed by the word

salarié, as in the case of Henri Béraud, we can see that the production of a
text of some description based on that flânerie marks a clear distinction
with the classic flâneur of Baudelaire or Benjamin. Walter Benjamin said
that “basic to flânerie, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of
idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour.”29 It would seem
however, that in creating the flâneur salarié, Béraud combined these two
opposites. His reportage is both the result of idleness and labour. He must
work or labour to gather information, but he must also be idle to allow
nature take its course and not intervene in the natural course of events that
he is reporting on.
One of the key characteristics of the flâneur is his ability to take his
time and stroll around. Béraud’s flâneur does not have the same liberty in
his flânerie. On the one hand, it would have been too dangerous for him to
wander around the Irish cities he visited after dark for fear of being
arrested or shot. He is also constrained by his role as a journalist; he must
witness events for a purpose. He is not free to wander for the sake of it,
due to time constraints and security concerns. It would certainly have been
too dangerous for him to partake in irrkunst, the “art of erring and getting
lost.”30 It seems as if there is no serendipity involved in his wandering in
Ireland, something that every flâneur needs in abundance to satisfy his
natural curiosity.
The figure of the flâneur has been, and remains in a constant state of
flux since it first came into being. It is constantly being reinterpreted and
remoulded by successive generations of writers and thinkers, eager to pin
it down or expand its frame of reference. Béraud’s appropriation and use
of the word flâneur and indeed his creation of the flâneur salarié
encourages us to think about this important cultural type in a whole new
light. In freeing the flâneur from the Parisian arcades, he has made us
question what it means to be a flâneur. Is one a flâneur simply because one
calls oneself as such, or is it a case that one has to do something specific,
fulfil certain criteria, before one is allowed to call oneself a flâneur?
Béraud democratised this pastime by opening up the possibility of flânerie
for all. He has also professionalised it, taking it out of the hands of the
amateur. This closed world, once open solely to those of independent
means, is now open to everyone. No longer is the flâneur only to be seen
as a foppish, dandyish figure who has all the time (and money) in the
world to lounge around the city. In creating a new breed of flâneur, Béraud
has joined a centuries-old conversation on what it means to be a flâneur.
He liberated the flâneur who is no longer consigned to roam the Parisian
arcades, but can instead be seen walking in smaller cities such as Dublin,
Belfast or Galway, or indeed any place where people gather.
Notes
1
Henri Béraud, Les Derniers Beaux Jours (Paris: Plon, 1953), 54.
2
Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, vol. 8 (Paris:
Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1872), 436.
3
Henri Béraud, Le Flâneur salarié (Paris: Les Editions de France, 1927).
4
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 804.
5
“M. Henri Béraud,” The Times, 25 October 1958, 10.
6
“le récit sans affabulation, le récit véridique, net, chaude encore, prolongeant les
palpitations de la vie” (Henri Béraud, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 2 August 1924).
7
Gaston Leroux, “Sur mon chemin,” Le Matin, 1 February 1901, 1.
8
“Faire du reportage, cela signifiait: regardez l’envers de la société, mêlez-vous
aux hommes, percez les mobiles des grands, touchez les plaies des humbles;
observez de la coulisse des tragédies du monde et ses comédies, errez dans les
villes de cristal ou l’on voit les négociants dans leurs bureaux, les ouvriers dans
leurs faubourgs, les prêtres dans leurs presbytères, les politiciens dans leurs
couloirs, les assassins devant la guillotine, les diplomates en proie au vertige du
néant et les grands hommes dans la misère de leur gloire” (Béraud, Les Derniers
Beaux Jours, 54).
9
Catharine Mee, “Journalism and travel writing: from grands reporters to global
tourism,” Studies in Travel Writing, 13 (2009), 305.
10
“j’étais, je suis toujours intensément curieux des hommes, de leurs façons d’agir
et de vivre, de leur condition, de leurs institutions, …et des drames de leurs
existences. Courir le globe, hanter paquebots et sleepings, voire naître les guerres
et finir les révolutions… Je voulais des aventures. J’allais être servi” (Béraud, Les
Derniers Beaux Jours, 54).
11
Ruth McManus, Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2002), 444.
12
Henri Béraud, “Un dimanche à Dublin: L’Émeute invisible,” Le Petit Parisien,
16 September 1920, 1.
13
Henri Béraud, “Souvenirs sur Desmond Fitzgerald qui vient d’être arrêté à
Dublin’, Le Petit Parisien, 14 February 1921, 1.
14
Henri Béraud, “Le Drame irlandais: Vision de Guerre Civile,” Le Petit Parisien,
28 September 1920, 1.
15
Stephen Royale, “The Growth and Decline of an Industrial City: Belfast from
1750,” in Irish Cities, ed. Howard B. Clarke (Dublin: Mercier, 1995), 33.
16
Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1994), 465.
17
“ici, les businessmen, là les intellectuels, ici l’on fait fortune; là-bas on croit au
miracle” (Henri Béraud, “L’Irréductible conflit entre l’Irlande et l’Ulster,” Le Petit
Parisien, 5 October 1920, 1).
268 Chapter Ten
18
Henri Béraud, “Sinn-Feiners et ‘Black and Tans’ dans Gallway la ville où on se
bat tous les jours,” Le Petit Parisien, 7 October 1920, 1.
19
David M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the
Irish War of Independence, 1920-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1.
20
Henri Béraud, “L’Autre Irlande: Les heures tragiques de Belfast,” Le Petit
Parisien, 2 October 1920, 1.
21
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 446.
22
Charles Baudelaire, ed. Alain Vaillant, Baudelaire journaliste: Articles et
chroniques (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), 9.
23
“ce passant infatigable, ce curieux que l’on rencontre partout où il se passe
quelque chose. Gardez-vous bien de le confondre avec l’écrivain en promenade ou
en croisière, auteur de ces relations de voyages que l’on écrit à loisir et que l’on
imprime pour la postérité. La flânerie de nos flâneurs s’arrête à l’extrémité du ‘fil
spécial’” (Béraud, Le Flâneur salarié, 15).
24
David Frisby, “The Flâneur in Social Theory,” in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester
(London: Routledge, 1994), 92.
25
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-
century City (London: University of California Press, 1994), 85.
26
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed.
Joanthan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 9.
27
Anna-Louise Milne, “From Third-Worldism to Fourth-World Flânerie? François
Maspero’s Recent Journeys,” French Studies, no. 60 (2006), 492.
28
Béraud, Les Derniers Beaux Jours, 64.
29
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 453.
30
Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature and Film in
Weimar Culture (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1999), 72.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ARCADES AND LOGGIAS:

WALTER BENJAMIN’S FLÂNEUR
IN PARIS AND BERLIN
KATHRIN YACAVONE
In 1927 Walter Benjamin made his first extended visit to Paris, a city that
played a key role in both his life and œuvre. He was travelling in the
company of his friend Franz Hessel, with whom he was in the process of
translating Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu into German.
This particular visit to the French capital together with this fellow German
writer and translator marks a pivotal moment in Benjamin’s nascent
engagement with the figure of the flâneur, as it was during this trip that
Benjamin and Hessel agreed to collaborate on an article on the Parisian
arcades, drafts of which now remain the earliest sketches of Benjamin’s
unfinished Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk). Together with his planned
book project on Baudelaire, known as the 1938 three-part article Charles
Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (Charles
Baudelaire. Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus), this
monumental attempt to establish a kind of archaeology of the nineteenth
century as an Ur-history of modernity is a canonical reference point for
any theoretical or historical discourse on this urban figure,1 since, in these
texts, the flâneur, or, more specifically, the Parisian flâneur, takes centre
stage. However, away from the Parisian context, Hessel provided another
significant impetus in Benjamin’s thinking on the flâneur, steering him
towards the German capital, and the city of his own and Benjamin’s
childhood, Berlin. It is in part through engaging with Hessel’s 1929 book
Strolling through Berlin (Spazieren in Berlin) that Benjamin first
considered the “flâneur abroad” in the context of turn-of-the-century
Berlin.
270 Chapter Eleven
While this article will mainly focus on the flâneur in Berlin, I shall
briefly discuss certain aspects of what may be called Benjamin’s “flâneur-
theory” according to, and in the wider context of, his writings on Paris;
especially the notion of the nineteenth-century flâneur as an anachronistic
figure, and the idea – closely linked to the architectural features of the
Parisian arcades – that the flâneur is a phenomenon of the threshold,
oscillating between inside and outside, past and present. I will then
compare and contrast the Parisian “archetype” with the Berlin flâneur, as
found in Benjamin’s creative engagement with this figure in the context of
turn-of-the-century Berlin (and mediated by Hessel), that is, with respect
to his Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Berliner Kindheit um
Neunzehnhundert), which is, at least in an English-speaking context, a
much less well-known variation of the Benjaminian flâneur.2 Although
this autobiographical text does not include theoretical reflections on the
flâneur per se, or indeed any explicit mention of the term, it does present a
flâneur-like figure, in the form of a wandering child. Finally, I hope to
show to what extent the two aforementioned aspects of the flâneur figure –
anachronism and threshold-phenomenon – are equally albeit differently at
play in Benjamin’s writings on Berlin. At the same time, it will become
clear how the Berlin Childhood around 1900 also entails and foregrounds
another dimension, or, more precisely, function3 of the flâneur – or
flânerie – one that is complexly related to memory and imagination on the
part of the child-flâneur, as the alter ego of the adult writer. The shift of
focus from the Parisian flâneur to the Berlin child-flâneur within
Benjamin’s œuvre, I suggest, marks the point at which the flâneur as an
observer of modern life gives way to mnemonic flânerie as a critical and
creative approach towards autobiographical writing, which in turn reveals
a profoundly redemptive dimension of the flâneur motif in Benjamin’s
œuvre as related to the attempted saving of that which is about to vanish or
has already disappeared.
Parisian Arcades: The Flâneur as a French Archetype?

As is well known, the flâneur is a significant figure in Benjamin’s
endeavour to understand the process of modernisation and hence plays a
key role especially in his writings from the mid- to late 1930s. Yet, a
Benjaminian definition of the flâneur will most likely depend on the
specific texts and passages cited, and it is difficult, if not impossible – and
even perhaps not desirable – to arrive at any stable and conclusive
characterisation of this multivalent figure. Therefore, rather than defining
what the flâneur is or may be, in Benjamin’s view, I would like to draw
Arcades and Loggias: Walter Benjamin’s Flâneur in Paris and Berlin 271
attention to one short passage taken from his studies on Baudelaire, that is
his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (“Über einige Motive bei
Baudelaire”) from 1938, which highlights some of the problems and
difficulties on Benjamin’s part in differentiating between the Parisian
flâneur, the London ‘man of the crowd’ and the idle observer of Berlin as
seen through the prism of French, American and German nineteenth-
century writers. He argues that:
Baudelaire was moved to equate [Poe’s] man of the crowd ... with the
flâneur. It is hard to accept this view. The man of the crowd is no flâneur.
In him, composure has given way to manic behaviour. He exemplifies,
rather, what had to become of the flâneur after the latter was deprived of
the milieu to which he belonged. If London ever provided it for him, it was
certainly not the setting described by Poe. In comparison, Baudelaire’s
Paris preserved some features that dated back to the old days. ... Arcades
where the flâneur would not be exposed to the sight of carriages ... were
enjoying undiminished popularity. ... He [the flâneur] is as much out of
place in an atmosphere of complete leisure [Privatisieren] as in the
feverish turmoil of the city. London has its man of the crowd. His
counterpart, as it were, is Nante, the boy who loiters on the street corner, a
popular figure in Berlin before the March Revolution of 1848. The Parisian
flâneur might be said to stand midway between them.4
Benjamin further contrasts different types of the flâneur as they relate to

the protagonists of Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” and of a
story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, called “The Cousin’s Corner Window” (“Des
Vetters Eckfenster”), arguing that “the differences between the two are
worth noting. Poe’s narrator watches the street scenes from the window of
a public coffeehouse, whereas the cousin is sitting at home” (SW, IV,
326).5
It is clear that Benjamin proposes to differentiate between three types
of flâneur according to the three cities, whereas the archetypical flâneur is
associated with Paris and specifically its arcades. However, if we look
more closely at Benjamin’s explanation for his distinction, certain
problems arise, as Harald Neumeyer has highlighted: The arcades were an
architectural reality of nineteenth-century Paris, whereas Benjamin’s
justification for the different, London flâneur-type is based on a fictional
story by Poe; and as Adorno, in his critique of Benjamin’s essay,
laconically remarks, Poe had, in fact, never been to London.6 Finally, the
Berlin-type is similarly based on a story which demonstrates, according to
Benjamin, how the character of the cousin reigns over the crowd, i.e. from
his private and secluded corner window. This latter type is hence
explained with reference to the history of national mentality, as it were,7
272 Chapter Eleven
apparently excluding a German version of the urban stroller. These

problems notwithstanding, it is difficult fully to accept Benjamin’s
classification and one wonders why Berlin and London should not have
produced a local flâneur, especially since, as we shall see, Benjamin did
acknowledge and indeed celebrate the Berlin flâneur about a decade prior
to writing this passage in the Baudelaire essay.
In his chapter on the flâneur in the planned book project on Baudelaire,
Benjamin argues that “flânerie [in Paris] could hardly have assumed the
importance it did without the arcades” and he goes on to describe the
arcades as “something between a street and an intérieur” (SW, IV, 19).8
For Benjamin, the specific perception and experience of the flâneur is
reflected in this characterisation of the arcade as a threshold between
inside and outside: the flâneur is both in the midst and at the margin of
society; he is both a lonely wanderer, perhaps even an outcast, and a
bourgeois citizen for whom the street becomes a comfortable home. In
fact, the street
becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among

house façades as a citizen is within his four walls. To him, a shiny
enamelled shop sign is at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is
to a bourgeois in his living room. ... Newsstands are his libraries; and café
terraces are the balconies from which he looks down to his household after
his work is done.9
Benjamin here celebrates the symbiosis of the flâneur and his urban
environment, of which the arcades represent the sheltered core. However,
given that the arcades as a key architectural feature of nineteenth-century
Paris were for the most part destroyed by the Haussmannisation under
Napoleon III (with its peak between 1853 and 1870), it would seem that
the flâneur as a socio-historical phenomenon dependent on the arcades
likewise came under threat. And it is fair to say that in Benjamin’s work,
even though there might not be a clear-cut definition of the flâneur, he
remains associated with the nineteenth century and hence is a
quintessentially anachronistic figure (which does not, however, exclude a
“return of the flâneur” in later times). Indeed, we shall see how the notion
of the threshold recurs in his writings on the Berlin flâneur, and also how
the flâneur – when he returns – remains an anachronistic figure that is seen
as suspicious in the context of early twentieth-century Berlin.10
‘The Return of the Flâneur’: Franz Hessel’s

Influence on Benjamin
As previously noted, in a Berlin context Franz Hessel is an important
reference point for the metaphorical relocation of the Parisian flâneur. In
fact, as Eckhardt Köhn has argued, with regards to writing on the
metropolis of both Paris and Berlin, Hessel was the leading “authority” for
Benjamin.11 This was in part due to Hessel’s publication of Strolling
through Berlin (in 1929),12 which is regarded as the first sustained attempt
to move the flâneur from his birthplace Paris to Berlin,13 as Benjamin
already acknowledged. In the same year, he wrote a favourable review of
his friend’s book for an important literary magazine of Weimar Germany,
The Literary World (Die Literarische Welt), entitled “The Return of the
Flâneur” (“Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs”). This review is important for
two reasons: first, it is Benjamin’s first documented engagement with the
flâneur in a Berlin context. (And, in fact, given that the bulk of the
material for the Arcades Project was gathered in the mid- to late 1930s,
this is Benjamin’s first published text on the flâneur tout court.14)
Secondly, it includes a reference to the child as a flâneur and hence
anticipates his later use of this figure within his own memoirs.
It must be emphasised that Hessel’s book does not recapture a
childhood Berlin, as Benjamin would do in his Berlin Childhood around
1900 (the earliest version of which dates back to 1931/32). Rather,
Hessel’s present-day flâneur-observer simultaneously functions as the
narrator who wanders through the modern Berlin of the 1920s in a
systematic fashion, from west to east and north to south, evoking much of
the Prussian and hence collective history through his “reading of the
street,” as Hessel calls his flânerie.15 Although Hessel does make
occasional references to childhood memories, albeit not necessarily his
own, it is instead Benjamin who explicitly emphasises this in his review.
He writes: “Spazieren in Berlin is an echo of the stories the city has told
him [the author] ever since he was a child” (SW, II, 262).16 Although
certain passages of his review later re-appear in the chapters on the flâneur
in his Arcades Project – that is, they are re-used verbatim in the context of
Paris – Benjamin draws a clear distinction between the Parisian and Berlin
flâneur. The specificity of the latter, for Benjamin, lies in the fact that he
strolls through a very familiar city, one in which he grew up, which in turn
evokes the motif of the child. As a consequence, the flâneur observes in a
very different way; Benjamin argues that the foreigner’s perception of a
city is centred on surfaces, the impressionistic, exotic and picturesque and
that, by contrast, “to depict a city as a native would call for other, deeper
274 Chapter Eleven
motives – the motives of the person who journeys into the past, rather than
to foreign parts” (ibid.).17
According to Benjamin, such “deeper motives” stem from one’s own
childhood; and although the autobiographical is de-emphasised or even
absent in Hessel’s text, Benjamin clearly foregrounds this aspect. He thus
continues in his review:
As he [the flâneur] walks, his steps create an astounding resonance on the

asphalt. The gaslight shining down on the pavement casts an ambiguous
light on this double floor [doppelter Boden]. The city as a mnemonic aid
for the lonely walker: it conjures up more than his childhood and youth,
more than its own history (ibid.).18
For Benjamin, the city – Berlin – initiates what he calls the “endless
spectacle of flânerie” (ibid.),19 which, as the quotation makes clear, is a
combination of the personal and the collective: the city evokes more than
one’s personal childhood memory and more than its own history. The
“ambiguous light” emphasises the equivocal nature of the flâneur’s
activity, his position on the threshold of past and present. This goes hand
in hand with the fact that flânerie in one’s childhood city is, paradoxically
perhaps, not necessarily pre-meditated, but also not arbitrary. Benjamin
contends that the native flâneur avoids the popular attractions, which he
leaves for the tourists, and instead follows the streets that prompt a
remembering of one’s own as well as a collective past in the signifiers of
the city. All this informs Benjamin’s opinion, as stated in his review, that
Hessel was a “great connoisseur of thresholds,”20 and the notion of the
threshold recurs in the Berlin Childhood around 1900, where it is related
to a characteristic of Berlin architecture, that is, the loggia. Thus, in
Benjamin’s review, the theme of childhood memory is paired with the
notion of the threshold, in a way similar to, yet also different from, this
conjunction with respect to the Parisian flâneur.
Another significant aspect of Benjamin’s Berlin flâneur is his
anachronistic activity of flânerie. The first chapter in Hessel’s book is
entitled The Suspect (Der Verdächtige) and Benjamin draws attention to
what he calls the “atmospheric resistance”21 of the German metropolis
which makes the Parisian brand of flânerie – one of philosophical strolling,
as Benjamin argues – difficult if not impossible. If the disappearance of
the Parisian arcades, the quintessential home of the flâneur, caused by the
city’s Haussmannisation, condemned him to being an anachronistic figure
in the nineteenth century, the Berlin of the early 1920s, with its speeding
up of the pace of life and other effects of modernisation made the flâneur-
figure utterly anachronistic, even suspicious. However, this anachronism
becomes an important aspect of Benjamin’s own Berlin flânerie, when he

treats this figure in his Berlin Childhood around 1900.
Berlin Loggias: The Flâneur-as-Child

In first introducing certain aspects of Benjamin’s “theory” of the Parisian
flâneur prior to the Berlin child-flâneur, I do not wish to suggest that the
former precedes the latter in Benjamin’s thought and writing. In fact, as I
mentioned earlier, Benjamin’s review “The Return of the Flâneur” was
written before the bulk of his studies on Baudelaire and his Arcades
Project, and he repeats verbatim a number of the passages from his review
on the Berlin flâneur in later works on Paris, which again hints at
Benjamin’s problematic attempt clearly to distinguish between the Paris,
London and Berlin flâneur types. The thorny issue of chronology
notwithstanding, in Benjamin’s œuvre there is a clear connection between
the Berlin flâneur and childhood memory. In 1931, when he realised that
his life in Paris would turn into a permanent exile, he started working on a
project that he first called Berlin Chronicle (Berliner Chronik). By 1932,
he decided to change the title to Berlin Childhood around 1900 and
worked on different versions of the book up until 1938. This text, then,
consists of short essayistic chapters, with suggestive titles ranging from
The Sock, The Desk and A Ghost to Hiding Places, The Telephone and
Market Hall. A number of these titles further indicate specific
topographical details of turn-of-the-century Berlin, including, for example,
Victory Column, Tiergarten and Loggias.
Surprisingly, although Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 has
become one of the important texts of urban literature in early twentieth-
century Germany,22 the terms flâneur or flânerie are absent from this work.
However, in the wake of his review of Hessel’s Strolling through Berlin,
in which Benjamin not only states that the flâneur “returns” in a Berlin
context, but also identifies a number of aspects of this conceptual figure –
most importantly the notion that flânerie is “memorising while strolling,”
that the city is a “mnemonic aid,” and also his emphasis on childhood
memory – it is clear that Benjamin’s autobiographical text is based on, and
driven by, ideas concerning the flâneur, or, more precisely, by flânerie, as
an activity that mirrors the unpredictable wandering of memory.
In the earlier version of the text, known as the Berlin Chronicle, the
theme of the flâneur is much more explicit. At the beginning of this
version, Benjamin self-reflexively ponders the writing of his
autobiographical text and acknowledges that Paris taught him the “art of
strolling,” adding that he can hardly think of the city without recalling his
276 Chapter Eleven
“endless flâneries” (SW, II, 598).23 He furthermore acknowledges Franz

Hessel (by name) as one of his “guides” (ibid.)24 for the attempt of a
“topography of childhood,”25 or, as he says, for his “idea of setting out the
sphere of life – bios – graphically on a map” (SW, II, 596).26 Here, life-
writing is understood as a kind of cartography, based, one might add, on
the wanderings through the streets of the child-flâneur.
This is apparent when one considers two key chapters of the later
Berlin Childhood around 1900, one on the Berlin Tiergarten in the
Western part of the city (which Benjamin, in his earlier review of Hessel’s
book, calls a “sacred grove of flânerie” (SW, II, 263)27) and the other one
called Loggias. In the Tiergarten chapter, Benjamin presents flânerie as a
form of getting lost in a city – not, however, owing to topographical
ignorance, but due to the temptations and stimulations of the big city. In
Benjamin’s words:
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s
way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry
twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day,
for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in
life (SW, III, 352).28
The flânerie Benjamin presents here is not the result of wandering around
the city because one has lost one’s way, since again, like Hessel,
Benjamin’s Berlin flâneur is a native of the city. Instead it is an art that
requires schooling, whereby the city itself appears to be the teacher; and
these seductive, luring and transformative aspects of the streets resonate
with surrealist thought. Indeed, the fact that Benjamin saw Hessel’s Berlin
flânerie as closely connected to surrealism is evident from his reference to
Hessel as the “Berlin peasant” (ibid.),29 in the Berlin Childhood, alluding
to Aragon’s Paris Peasant (Le Paysan de Paris), which was of great
importance for Benjamin’s project on the Parisian arcades. But, how
exactly does a city succeed in speaking to an urban stroller in these ways?
The answer appears to lie in the fact that the wanderer – Benjamin in this
case – spent his childhood and youth in this city and it therefore reveals
more than that which can be found on any map. Along these lines, the
function of the flâneur figure in the context of Benjamin’s Berlin
Childhood around 1900 is a kind of initiator for an exploration of
autobiographical clues, both imagined and real, remembered and present,
in the mirror of the metropolis. This aspect of the flâneur returns us to the
notion of the threshold: like the Parisian flâneur who is both in the midst
of society and at its margin, so too, or similarly, is the Berlin flâneur on

the threshold between past and present.
Moreover, the architectural feature that illustrates this position in a
Paris context, i.e. the arcade, which Benjamin characterised as a threshold
between inside and outside, has a Berlin counterpart too, namely the
loggia. The loggia is a central motive in Benjamin’s book, not least in the
chapter that takes its titles from this characteristic feature of Berlin
architecture. Benjamin describes how the loggia represents simultaneously
the content of a specific childhood memory and a mnemonic aid to the
adult alter ego of the child, writing:
For a long time, life deals with the still-tender memory of childhood like a
mother who lays her newborn on her breast without waking it. Nothing has
fortified my own memory so profoundly as gazing into courtyards, one of
whose dark loggias, shaded by blinds in the summer, was for me the cradle
in which the city laid its new citizen (SW, III, 345).30
And he goes on to remember how, as a child, he was actually put out on

the loggia to get fresh air: “The rhythm of the metropolitan railway and of
carpet-beating rocked me to sleep” (ibid.).31 The Berlin Loggia, half
outside, half inside, where the child is both protected from as well as
exposed to the metropolis, represents a threshold in which both the
remembering child and the flâneur is at home, but at the same time, it also
points to another, more metaphorical threshold: between past and present.
And this latter spatio-temporal threshold has both a collective and a
private dimension: the loggia represents both the history of the city (e.g.
Wilhelminian architecture of nineteenth-century Berlin) and the history of
the child, as the younger, other self of the writer. It thus represents the
“ambiguous light” in which the Berlin streets appear to the native child-
flâneur.
In this sense, Benjamin’s child-flâneur pursues a double archaeology
of the modern metropolis, excavating the collective alongside the private
or vice versa. The function of the flâneur here, I would argue by way of
conclusion, is to guarantee a more detached observer position and prevents
the Berlin Childhood around 1900 and the personal childhood memory
depicted therein from becoming wholly inward-looking or even solipsistic.
By superimposing the topography of childhood onto the topography of
turn-of-the-century Berlin, Benjamin also attempts to save that which is
about to disappear or has already faded, in both socio-historical and
individual terms. The anachronistic figure of the flâneur is hence
simultaneously part of a history that is about to disappear and the means
by which Benjamin saves it. With this in mind, Benjamin’s engagement
278 Chapter Eleven
with the flâneur figure in the Berlin Childhood prompts us not only to
think the flâneur outside of Paris, but also to productively enquire about
his wider function in the process of modernity – as both a collective and
historical process and a concrete and lived experience.
Notes
1
See, for example, Keith Tester’s introduction to his edited volume The Flâneur
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. See also the seminal essay by Susan
Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of
Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99-138.
2
In German-speaking scholarship on Benjamin in relation to urban literature and
the flâneur, the focus on Berlin is more common and relatively well-researched.
See, for example, Eckhardt Köhn, Strassenrausch. Flanerie und kleine Form.
Versuch zur Literaturgeschichte des Flaneurs von 1830 - 1933 (Berlin: Arsenal,
1989), 153-223; and the excellent study by Harald Neumeyer, Der Flaneur.
Konzeption der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999), 295-387.
3
Rather than normatively defining the flâneur, Neumeyer convincingly theorises
this figure as a “Funktionsträger,” i.e. a vehicle for different functions and
meanings (see ibid., 21).
4
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael Jennings et al., 4 vols
(Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1996-2003), vol.
4, 326. Hereafter, references inserted parenthetically into the text are to this
edition, abbreviated as SW, followed by volume and pager number. “Baudelaire hat
es gefallen, den Mann der Menge … mit dem Typus des Flaneurs gleichzusetzen.
Man wird ihm darin nicht folgen können. Der Mann der Menge ist kein Flaneur. In
ihm hat der gelassene Habitus einem manischen Platz gemacht. Darum ist eher an
ihm abzunehmen, was aus dem Flaneur werden mußte, wenn ihm die Umwelt, in
die er gehöhrt, genommen ward. Wurde sie ihm von London je gestellt, so gewiß
nicht von dem, das bei Poe beschrieben ist. An ihm gemessen, wahrt Baudelaires
Paris einige Züge aus guter alter Zeit. … Noch waren die Passagen beliebt, in
denen der Flaneur dem Anblick des Fuhrwerks enthoben war…. Wo das
Privatisieren den Ton angibt, ist für den Flaneur ebensowenig Platz wie im
fieberhaften Verkehr der City. London hat seinen Mann der Menge. Der
Eckensteher Nante, der in Berlin eine volkstümliche Figur des Vormärz war, steht
gewissermaßen Pendant zu ihm; der pariser Flaneur wäre das Mittelstück” (Walter
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser, with the collaboration of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom
Scholem, 7 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972-1989), vol. 1, 627-8). Hereafter,
German references are to this edition, abbreviated as GS, followed by volume and
page number.
5
“Die Unterschiede zwischen den beiden Texten lohnt sich vermerkt zu werden.
Poes Beobachter blickt durch das Fenster eines öffentlichen Lokals; der Vetter
dagegen ist in seinem Hauswesen installiert” (ibid., 628).
6
See Neumeyer, Der Flaneur, 26.
7
Cf. ibid.
8
“Die Flanerie hätte sich zu ihrer Bedeutung schwerlich ohne die Passagen
entwickeln können. … Die Passagen sind ein Mittelding zwischen Straße und
Interieur” (GS, vol. 1, 538-9).
9
“[Die Straße] wird zur Wohnung für den Flaneur, der zwischen Häuserfronten so
wie der Bürger in seinen vier Wänden zuhause ist. Ihm sind die glänzenden
emaillierten Firmenschilder so gut wie im Salon dem Bürger ein Ölgemälde; …
Zeitungskioske sind seine Bibliotheken und die Caféterrassen Erker, von denen aus
er nach getaner Arbeit auf sein Hauswesen heruntersieht” (ibid., 539).
10
For an in-depth study of the idea of threshold in Benjamin’s work, see the
important study by Winfried Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde. Walter Benjamins
Passage des Mythos (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).
11
Eckhardt Köhn, “Walter Benjamin und Franz Hessel. Thesen zur Position des
‘aufgehobenen Ästhetizismus’,” in Global Benjamin: Internationaler Walter
Benjamin-Kongress, ed. Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm (Munich: Fink, 1999),
776 (774-85).
12
Hessel’s text has not been translated into English, a fact that accounts, perhaps,
for the aforementioned scarcity of English-speaking scholarship on the question of
Benjamin’s Berlin flâneur and Hessel’s mediating role in this respect. For an
exception, see the article on the flâneur in Weimar Germany by Anke Gleber,
“Criticism or Consumption of Images? Franz Hessel and the Flâneur in Weimar
Culture,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 31, no. 1 (1989): 80-93.
13
Hessel’s engagement with the flâneur, however, can be traced back to 1908, the
year of his first publication of novellas set in Munich. On this issue, see Helmut
Kiesel and Sandra Kluwe, “Großstadtliteratur: Franz Hessel, Walter Benjamin,
Alfred Döblin,” in Handbuch zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur des 20.
Jahrhunderts, ed. Daniel Hoffman (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 326 (323-62).
For more details on the relation between Hessel and Benjamin, specifically, see
ibid., 335.
14
However, in the earliest drafts for the Arcades Project from 1927, referred to in
the introduction, there is one paragraph on the Parisian flâneur, certain phrases of
which Benjamin reuses in his review of 1929 (see GS, vol. 5, 1052-1054).
15
“Lektüre der Straße” (Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (Berlin: Verlag für
Berlin-Brandenburg, 2011), 121). On the link between reading and flânerie in
Benjamin’s writings, see Michael Opitz, “Lesen und Flanieren. Über das Lesen
von Städten, vom Flanieren in Büchern,” in Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese
her. Texte zu Walter Benjamin, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Leipzig:
Reclam, 1992), 162-81.
16
“‘Spazieren in Berlin’ ist ein Echo von dem, was die Stadt dem Kinde von früh
auf erzählte” (GS, vol. 3, 194).
17
“Als Einheimischer zum Bilde einer Stadt zu kommen, erfordert andere, tiefere
Motive. Motive dessen, der ins Vergangene statt ins Ferne reist” (ibid.).
18
“Im Asphalt, über den er [der Flaneur] hingeht, wecken seine Schritte eine
erstaunliche Resonanz. Das Gaslicht, das auf das Pflaster herunterscheint, wirft ein
280 Chapter Eleven
zweideutiges Licht über diesen doppelten Boden. Die Stadt als mnemotechnischer
Behelf des einsam Spazierenden, sie ruft mehr herauf als dessen Kindheit und
Jugend, mehr als ihre eigene Geschichte” (ibid.).
19
“unabsehbare Schauspiel der Flanerie” (ibid.).
20
“[ein] große[r] Schwellenkundige[r]” (ibid., 197). This expression is omitted in
the English translation.
21
“atmosphärischen Widerstände” (ibid., 198).
22
See the discussion of Benjamin in Kiesel and Kluwe, “Großstadtliteratur,” 336-
48.
23
“endlosen Flanerien” (GS, vol. 6, 469).
24
“Führer” (ibid.).
25
I borrow this term from Lindner who describes the Berlin Childhood as a
“topography of childhood” versus the “topography of a century” mapped out in the
Arcades Project. See Burkhardt Lindner, “Das ‘Passagen-Werk,’ die ‘Berliner
Kindheit’ und die Archäologie des ‘Jüngstvergangenen,’” in Passagen. Walter
Benjamins Urgeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Norbert Bolz and
Bernd Witte (Munich: Fink, 1984), 28, 32 (27-48).
26
“Vorstellung, den Raum des Lebens – Bios – graphisch in einer Karte zu
gliedern” (GS, vol. 6, 466).
27
“heiligen Hain der Flanerie” (ibid., vol. 3, 195).
28
“Sich in einer Stadt nicht zurechtzufinden heißt nicht viel. In einer Stadt sich
aber zu verirren, wie man in einem Walde sich verirrt, braucht Schulung. Da
müssen Straßennamen zu dem Irrenden so sprechen wie das Knacken trockener
Reiser und kleine Straßen im Stadtinnern ihm die Tageszeiten so deutlich wie eine
Bergmulde widerspiegeln. Diese Kunst habe ich spät erlernt” (ibid., vol. 4, 237).
29
“Bauer von Berlin” (ibid., 238).
30
“Wie eine Mutter, die das Neugeborene an ihre Brust legt, ohne es zu wecken,
verfährt das Leben lange Zeit mit der noch zarten Erinnerung an die Kindheit.
Nichts kräftigte die meine inniger als der Blick in Höfe, von deren dunklen
Loggien eine, die im Sommer von Markisen beschattet wurde, für mich die Wiege
war, in die die Stadt den neuen Bürger legte” (ibid., 294).
31
“Der Takt der Stadtbahn und des Teppichklopfens wiegte mich da in Schlaf”
(ibid.).
CHAPTER TWELVE
PRAGUE FLÂNERIE FROM NERUDA TO NEZVAL
KARLA HUEBNER
The flâneur has been a celebrated figure in visions of Paris for at least 150
years – certainly since Baudelaire defined him in “The Painter of Modern
Life” and perhaps even since Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris.
He (or occasionally she) is usually seen as a particular type or set of types
of urban walker, and especially as a literary or artistic figure resident in
Paris. Scholars have questioned whether the flâneur could also be a dandy
or an idler, and whether flânerie must be a leisure, unpaid activity, but
most fundamentally the flâneur is a person who chooses to explore urban
space on foot, perhaps with a focus on landmarks and architecture,
consumer goods, or human activity. In the twentieth century, Walter
Benjamin struggled to further define and theorize the flâneur, but his
contemporaries, the surrealists, were the ones for whom the idea of the
flâneur took on particular significance, with André Breton’s Nadja and
Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris being perhaps the best-known
examples of Surrealist celebration of flânerie.1
What is not so well known is that flânerie was also of high importance
to the early Prague Surrealists, and that Parisian flânerie was not their sole
source for the practice. Long before they became Surrealists, Prague
avant-gardists VítČzslav Nezval (1900–1958) and JindĜich Štyrský (1899–
1942) followed the example of the Prague Symbolists and Decadents in
exploring the “city of a hundred spires.” Young men from the provinces,
both Nezval and Štyrský used their urban roamings to ignite the poetic
spark, whether that spark was primarily verbal (Nezval) or visual
(Štyrský). Among the results were their meditations on Prague’s Old
Jewish Cemetery, poems and novels of flânerie by Nezval, and many of
Štyrský’s photographs. This essay traces the development of Prague
flânerie, showing how these key Surrealists, and others of their generation,
followed in the metaphorical and even the literal footsteps of not just
282 Chapter Twelve
Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Breton, and Aragon, but also the likes of Neruda,
Karásek, and Leppin.
Angelo Ripellino, author of the itself (mentally) flâneurial study Magic
Prague, has suggested that the lineage of the literary Prague walker goes
back to Comenius (1592–1670) and his allegory The Labyrinth of the
World and the Paradise of the Heart.2 At its outset, the pilgrim’s guide
states: “I walk through the whole world, explore all corners, and inquire
into the words and deeds of every person. I see all that is revealed and spy
out and pursue all that is secret.”3 There is indeed a flâneurial quality to
this declaration. One might also posit a flâneurial impulse underlying
Antonín Langweil’s early nineteenth-century creation of a complete
cardboard model of Prague, a project which although reliant for its
footprint on existing cadastral surveys of the city nonetheless clearly
required Langweil to walk each street, carefully noting the details of every
building.4 Still, while Comenius’s pilgrim and his guide may be the
unlikely archetypal precursors to the many walkers of later Prague
literature,5 and while Langweil recorded the shape and appearance of the
city in minute three-dimensional detail, Prague flânerie can be more
concretely traced to Jan Neruda (1834–1891), who began his literary
career in 1860 (and, perhaps significantly, visited Paris in 1863). Neruda
was a journalist and author of short stories and poetry, who focused on life
in Prague and especially on the area known as Malá Strana or the
Kleinseite (Lesser Quarter). The Malá Strana described by Neruda was
home to the mostly ethnic German aristocracy’s baroque palaces, yet also
to Czech shopkeepers like Neruda’s father, a grocer.6 Neruda emphasized
naturalistic detail, and his 1877 collection Povídky malostranské (Tales of
Malá Strana) was particularly popular, while his earlier police scenes set a
precedent for younger writers like Ignát Herrmann (1854–1935), Karel L.
Kukla (1863–1930), and Egon Erwin Kisch.7
Neruda and his successors had an almost compulsive desire to
delineate spatial and historical detail, returning again and again to
particular districts, especially Malá Strana, the castle (Hradþany/
Hradschin), and the Jewish Ghetto. Their preoccupations can be linked on
the one hand to aspects of the city that Prague had in common with Paris,
and on the other hand to characteristics unique to Prague or at least to
Central Europe. Like Paris, late nineteenth-century Prague was a medieval
city in the process of rapid growth and industrialization. Its population had
swollen with job-seekers from the countryside, who became factory
workers, domestics, and prostitutes. Yet unlike Paris, nineteenth-century
Prague was a provincial rather than a national capital, and was home to
three main ethnic groups, the Czechs, Germans, and Jews. German had
Prague Flânerie from Neruda to Nezval 283
been a major administrative and cultural language for over 200 years, but
with the rise of nationalism, Czech was in the process of being reborn as a
literary language, and by 1900, the city was heavily Czechified, though
still tri-ethnic at heart.8 As German-language writer Johannes Urzidil has
said, “Try to imagine a city which was not simply a national capital with a
national language, but a very metropolis indeed, thanks to its being
bilingual, to its variety of creeds and classes.” Urzidil further stressed that
“Knowledge of Prague’s character formed the ethos of its authors, whether
German or Czech Christian or Jew.”9
During the fin de siècle, Prague writers enlarged on Neruda’s
explorations, cultivating a mythology of Prague as mystic, alchemical, and
seductive, even as a city somehow fossilized after the 1620 Habsburg
victory at White Mountain.10 This mythic city was the now-vanished so-
called Old Prague, which became the target of urban renewal in 1887.11
Ripellino suggests that fin-de-siècle German poets in particular “set their
works in Baroque churches, the Golden Lane, Saint Vitus’, the hovels and
passageways of the Old Town, the crumbling shanties of New World
Street, the Jewish Cemetery, the black synagogues, the shacks and narrow,
crooked alleys of the Judenstadt, the sinister palaces and shadowy byways
of Malá Strana.”12 He proposes that German writers, rejected by the
Czechs, sensed the impending end of empire, and used Prague as an
“emblem of death throes and decay” – portraying the city as a demonic,
ghostly sorceress.13 Scott Spector argues that while this mysterious,
dangerous, and eroticized image was envisioned by Prague German
writers “from Meyrink to Kafka,” it was an image not shared by Czech
intellectuals. It is true that this was not the Czech nationalist image of the
city. However, while critic Arne Novák excoriated the Prague Germans for
repeatedly presenting an image of the city in which noble, mystical,
sybaritic Germans preyed upon sensual lower-class Czech women, many
Czech writers enthusiastically participated in the mythologization of the
city, and both Czechs and Germans often cast the city as a femme fatale.14
The Ghetto, a favourite locale among these writers, was the smallest
Prague district. It remained essentially medieval in appearance and
topography until the mid-nineteenth century, for although its wooden
houses repeatedly burned, they were repeatedly rebuilt. Filled with
tenements and alleys, it attracted artists like Jan MinaĜík (1862–1937),
who sought to record the changing city, as well as landscapist Antonín
Slavíþek and others.15 And while originally it was a true Jewish Ghetto, by
the late nineteeth century it was more of a disreputable yet tempting slum
known for its bars and prostitution.16 In fact, the old Jewish Cemetery was
once surrounded by bordellos, tanneries, executioners, outcasts, and dog
284 Chapter Twelve
catchers, and Prague writers detailed these with loving care, just as they
emphasized the layers of tombs piled atop one another.17 For example, in
JiĜí Karásek ze Lvovic’s late Decadent novel Ganymedes (1925), the
Englishman Adrian Morris walks the cemetery, seeking Rabbi Loew’s
grave; there, in the “already-demolished Ghetto,” he senses the “ancient
humiliation” and the “dirt and filth” of the “stifling” busy slum. “He
looked at the pebbles piled on the headstones, examined the various signs
and symbols that adorned the stones in the form of lions, fish, cocks,
hands, pots, grapes, and stars.” Morris begins to go to the cemetery daily.18
And when the Ghetto became one of the main targets of asanace, or urban
renewal that emphasized sanitation, the cemetery became one of the few
surviving landmarks.19
Just as many Parisians mourned Haussmanization, many Prague
writers objected to the demolition of the Ghetto and other old parts of the
city.20 Author Vilém Mrštík (1863–1912) wrote an important anti-urban-
renewal pamphlet, Bestia triumphans, in 1897;21 artist and writer Miloš
Jiránek (1875–1911) grew lyrical over Old Prague’s charms and decried
the changes;22 and in the poem “Stará Praha,” Jaroslav Vrchlický (1858–
1912), who defined himself as chodec (walker or flâneur),23 rhapsodized
about the city’s “old corners,” “old temples,” “narrow winding lanes,”
“mystical Ghetto,” and “old embankments,” and predicted for the walker a
“city ruined by the modern age”.24 In another poem, Vrchlický wrote “You
are like widows, you grey synagogues, / in tattered garments, ashes on
your head, / yet when the night comes to earth in a black tallis, / I see your
windows shine, all flame and porphyry.”25
Not surprisingly, during this period, the flâneur was often nocturnal or
crepuscular, at least in terms of artistic expression. The work of painter
Jakub Schikaneder (1855–1924), for example, emphasized the city in
evening and night. From the gloaming courtyard horror of Murder at home
(Vražda v domČ, 1890), which is considered something of a breakthrough
for the artist, his many dusky scenes ultimately included a significant
number set in the streets of Prague and its suburbs, with such titles as
Podskalí (Podskalí, 1900–1910), Evening Street (Ulice naveþer, 1906),
Winter Evening in Town (Zimní veþer ve mČstČ, 1900–1910), Prague
Nocturne (Pražské nokturno, 1900–1910), Old Prague Nocturne
(Staropražské nokturno, 1900–1910), and Tram in a Prague Street
(Tramvaj v pražské ulice, 1900–1910). Some of these include figures
walking or deep in contemplation; all give the impression of the roaming,
observant artist.26
Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932) often used the streets and alleys of
Prague as settings for his fiction, and the illustrator Hugo Steiner-Prag
(1880–1945) recalled how one summer night he and Meyrink had climbed
“the crumbling wall of the Invaliden Cemetery” on Hradþany, “on one of
our many expeditions through the nocturnal city....” Steiner-Prag fondly
recalled how “the old city, this unique and matchless Prague ... became the
fantastical background for [Meyrink’s] characters.”27 In the story “Dr
Cinderella’s Plants,” for example, the narrator recounts:
And so one night I was again dragged awake and forced to wander
aimlessly through the silent alleyways of the Kleinseite, just for the sake of
the impression that the antiquated houses make upon me.
This part of Prague is uncanny, like nowhere else in the world.
The bright light of day never reaches down here, nor yet is it ever quite
as dark as night.
A dim, gloomy illumination emanates from somewhere or other,
seeping down from the hradschin on to the roofs of the city below, like a
phosphorescent haze. You turn into a narrow lane, and see nothing: only a
deathly darkness, until suddenly a spectral ray of light stabs into your eyes
from a chink in a shutter, like a long, malevolent needle.
Then a house looms out of the fog—with decayed, drooping shoulders
it stares vacantly up into the night sky out of blank lights set into the
receding forehead of its sloping roof, like some animal wounded unto
death.28
Meyrink also took many details in his novel The Golem from his Prague
walks,29 and Steiner-Prag’s illustrations for the novel draw from the
illustrator’s own intimate familiarity with the city.30
Another fin-de-siècle German-language writer, Paul Leppin (1878–
1945), also emphasized nocturnal wanderings, and his novella Severin’s
Road into Darkness takes as one of its themes a kind of obsessive flânerie.
The story opens with an account of how Severin, a young office worker,
walked nights: “Not until the streetlights were lit would he go out. Only
during the long, scorching days of summer did he see the sun as he made
his way round the city; or on Sundays, when the whole day was his own
and his wanderings took him back to his brief student days.” Leppin goes
on to describe how Severin’s “wide-eyed gaze was drawn toward the city
where the people moved like shadows on a screen,” how he listened to the
sound of cars, trams, and voices “with a tense alertness, as if he had just
missed something special.” Most of all, Severin prefers “streets that were
hidden from the bustle of the city centre.”31 “He remembered that even by
day he often found himself walking round a long-familiar district as if it
were new to him.”32 Unusually, Severin generates a joy in flânerie in his
Czech lover Zdenka, teaching her “an ear for nuances of sound and distant
cries” as [s]he closed her eyes and let him lead her, learning to recognise
286 Chapter Twelve
the street she was in by the smell the stones and asphalt gave off ... he
opened her eyes to the monotonous beauty in the landscapes of the
working-class districts, to the awesome majesty of the Vyšehrad with its
massive stone portals and the memorial to St Wenceslas.” Zdenka “came
to love the Moldau, when the lights from the shore shimmered on the
water in the darkness, and the smell of tar on the suspension bridges.”
During their affair, Zdenka joins Severin in watching burghers drinking
beer in Malá Strana taverns, exploring St Vitus cathedral in Hradþany, and
“gradually came to understand the silent language of the city, with which
Severin was more familiar than she was, even though she was Czech.” She
comes to realize that the ethnic German Severin “had grown up with a
sense of the uncanny pervading [the city’s] blackened walls, its towers and
aristocratic town houses” and that “every time he went into its streets it
was with the feeling that some destiny awaited him.” The two explore the
city together until Severin tires of her and their walks wither into mere
promenades in the parks.33 After that, Zdenka’s life as flâneuse is no
longer mentioned. That winter, after the end of the affair, Severin happens
upon her by the tent of a waxworks show at the Advent fair in Old Town
Square.34 Then, tired of all his lovers, his wanderings shift from day and
evening to after midnight, with the city gaining “an unknown, covert
power over him ... dragging him ... into its dark womb.” He walks
“shivering ... past the sleeping houses, listening to the singing of revellers
on their way home or to the heavy tread of the policemen.” Now he sees
“how all things were changed by night, how they lived a second, different
life from their daytime existence” and “bare, ordinary squares” transform
“into melancholy landscapes, narrow streets into damp-walled castle
dungeons.” He ventures to distant working-class districts, sees remnants of
the Jewish quarter amidst the “encroaching modern buildings still swathed
in scaffolding.” He steps into “late-night taverns”, where the sounds of
“hoarse violins” and “the clack of billiard balls” accompany his bowl of
“flaming punch.”35 As Severin descends into an increasingly psychotic
state, he continues to roam the city, feeling that he and everyone he knows
is “doomed.” By the end of the novella, ready to commit murder, he
climbs the Castle Steps, passing “the black stone statues on the parapet”
and compares this “peepshow with respectable citizens going about their
business” to “the city he knew” whose “streets led one astray” and where
“ill fortune lurked on the thresholds.”36 Leppin’s account of the obsessive
Severin is emblematic of the decadent fin-de-siècle Prague flâneur.
The Czech-language decadent JiĜí Karásek ze Lvovic emphasized a
medievalist flânerie in his own characters’ often nocturnal walks. This is
particularly striking in his autobiographical Gotická duše (Gothic Soul,
1905), where the protagonist walks the city’s churches and cloisters:
“People passed him by, and he passed them by,” we are told near the
beginning.37 “It was night. He stood on Hradþany in front of the Barnabite
monastery. In the alley, through which deposed kings passed, there was a
dark rustling.”38 Likewise, in his Román Manfreda Macmillena (1907) the
dandy Manfred asks “Why do you walk there? What lures you there?” To
which the narrator replies: “I like to walk through Prague at night. I feel I
can catch every sigh of her soul.”39 He recounts: “Thus we went day after
day. Most often we wandered through the streets at dusk and by night,
when in the deceptive light of the moon the dimensions of all things
expand to grandiosity. From the embankment we watched the river
flowing through the city with a mournful, funereal solemnity, and looked
up at the bleak silhouette of the Castle, from which wafted the melancholy
of a ruin.”40
Of a later generation, but influenced by the fin-de-siècle writers, Franz
Kafka wrote minutely about his walks in his diaries. “Small cities also
have small places to stroll about in,” he noted.41 He observed people in
cafes, streets and squares, and in synagogues.42 Alert to modern
innovations, he wrote: “On the Josefsplatz a large touring car with a
family sitting crowded together drove by me. In the wake of the
automobile, with the smell of gas, a breath of Paris blew across my
face.”43 He noted a “Beautiful lonely walk over the Hradschin and the
Belvedere…”,44 and how “one pillar of the vault rising out of the Elizabeth
Bridge, lit on the inside by an electric light, looked ... like a factory
chimney, and the dark wedge of shadow stretching over it to the sky was
like ascending smoke.”45 Again and again he noted observations from his
walks around the city, yet the story “Description of a Struggle” was his
only specific literary reference to Prague topography. Much of his other
work, however, uses aspects of the city anonymously.
A German-language Jewish writer of the same generation but very
different temperament, literary journalist Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948),
called the Raging Reporter, began his career in 1905 as an apprentice at
the Prager Tagblatt, then moved to Bohemia, the second-largest German-
language paper in Prague. His speciality there was local reportage with an
emphasis on crime, which provided material for his local-colour sketches.
As Harold Segal observes: “There was no section of the city that he did
not come to know well, but his predilection was for the out-of-the-way
places, the narrow lanes and alleyways, the cheap pubs, wine cellars,
cafés, and raunchy cabarets” of his early sketches. These appeared
regularly in the Sunday feuilleton section, headed “Prager Streifzüge”
(Prague Rambles); and were collected in 1912 as Aus Prager Gassen und
288 Chapter Twelve
Nächten, followed by Prager Kinder in 1913 and Die Abenteuer in Prag

in 1920.46
Just before Kisch began his career, which ultimately would lead him
all over the world, Apollinaire too began to write about Prague flânerie. In
“Le passant de Prague” (1902), his narrator visits the city and meets the
ancient Wandering Jew, now a flâneur. In “Zone,” the opening poem of
Alcools, Apollinaire contrasted modern Paris with a Prague where “The
hands on the clock in the Jewish Quarter run backwards / And you too go
backwards in your life slowly.”47 Prague, like Paris, had plenty of modern
office workers, but Apollinaire’s romanticizing vision would ensorcel both
the Czech avant-gardists and the French Surrealists. Czech writers
embraced “Zone,” which in Karel ýapek’s brilliant translation had an
enormous impact on both their style and content. Indeed, Alfred Thomas
posits that “Apollinaire ‘rewrote’ Prague for the Czech avant-garde” as “a
space of pleasure and hedonism rather than of ghosts and golems.”48
ýapek’s brother Josef (1887–1945) was responsible for a different
aspect of the shift in flâneurial sensibilities by way of his artistic
examination of the inhabitants of Prague and his theorization of what he
termed “the humblest art,” represented by popular art forms like shop
signs and shooting targets.49 Josef ýapek not only wrote about but created
art inspired by popular genres, emphasizing the poetic qualities of the
banal and prosaic in city life rather than seeking the gothic decay of the
preceding generation. His ideas in turn influenced Prague surrealist
practice.
Before Surrealism, however, came DevČtsil, the major Czech avant-
garde group of the 1920s, which emphasized enjoyment of ordinary
pleasures.50 Jaroslav Seifert, a DevČtsil poet from the working-class
suburb of Žižkov, imbued his poetry with a love of urban streets, skies,
gardens, and windows. From his “Prayer on the Sidewalk”: “since even
the doorways to shops were like heaven’s gates/with signs, with stars, /
listen, / the street burst into hosanna on the organ.”51 In “Electric Lyre,”
from the collection Sheer Love (Samá láska, 1923), the poet sang to his
“Muse of the street” saying “the street is my electric lyre, / I walk in its
midst, like strings above me are wires, / an iron song I want to intone for
the city of stone, / may it be a modern song and today’s sacred chorale.”52
Walks in Prague also made Seifert long to explore other, unseen cities.
In “Paris,” dedicated to Ivan Goll, he lamented:
I no longer feel like strolling along the riverbanks,

when over Prague misty darkness is hovering,
the water is murky, it has no meaning,
it empties into the Elbe somewhere near MČlník;
I no longer delight in roaming

the same streets with nothing new to see,
and in sitting on a bench in the park at night,
where police peek at couples with a flashlight;
here everything is so sad, even things taking place,
life never derails in its trace,
and if something comes to pass, some uprising, strike, or killing,
all will again conspicuously grow chilly,
My sweet, isn’t everything here rather silly,
there is no delight for us in this place.53
While perhaps Seifert responded to “Zone” by writing a poem about a

Paris he had not yet seen, fellow DevČtsil poet and founding Surrealist
VítČzslav Nezval responded in a more ýapek-like manner with the poem
“Prague Walker” (1920, equally translatable as “Prague Flâneur”) which
recounts the narrator’s arrival in and exploration of the city:
One day in April 1920 I arrived in Prague for the first time
At the station as sad as ashes huddled a dejected crowd
They were emigrants
And there I first saw the world I shall never understand
Midday was noisy but this was twilight and the station stretched far into
the suburbs.54
Over and over, in countless works, the prolific Nezval drew upon his
walks in the city. From the long poem “Edison”:
Walking home from the casino where he had

spent some hours gambling a young man
saw the lights above the night-clubs span
the night reverberating like a prairie
pounded by the stars’ artillery
listened to by drunks who’d had their fill
at tables at which half their drinks they’d spill
listened by half-dressed girls in peacock feather
melancholical like rainy weather….55
Nezval repeatedly emphasized the magic aspect of the city. His poem
“City of Spires” begins “Hundred-spired Prague / With the fingers of all
saints / With the fingers of perjury / With the fingers of fire and hail / With
the fingers of a musician.” It goes on to conjure “the fingers of
beggarwomen and the whole working class,” “the fingers of a mummy,”
“the fingers of church bells and an old pigeon loft,” “the fingers of
chimney-sweeps and of St Loretto.” It moves on to “the sunburnt fingers
290 Chapter Twelve
of ripening barley and the PetĜin Lookout Tower” and “the cut-off fingers
of rain and the Týn Church on the glove of nightfall” and ends “With the
fingers with which I am writing this poem.”56
His 1935 Paris wanderings, some of which were undertaken with
fellow Surrealist Toyen after the hospitalization of their companion Štyrský,
prompted him to write:
On one of those steamy nights the end of June in 1935

I walked past the Luxembourg Garden
It was just striking midnight
& the streets were empty
With the emptiness of moving vans
Deserted like Ash Wednesday
& I thought of nothing
Had no wishes
No I wished for nothing rushed to nowhere
Nothing weighed on me
Like a man sans memory I walked & walked....57
Nezval’s Surrealist, Breton- and Aragon-inspired prose poem Pražský

chodec (Prague Walker or Prague Flâneur) of 1938 could be called his
manifesto of flânerie. He ruminated “One realizes what it is to be a flâneur
as soon as fate pins one to a chair.” He stated: “It is because life flies by
that the role of the flâneur seems so ideal. When we walk, and mainly
when we walk aimlessly about the town, the subtle images of our desires,
which impose themselves on our footsteps, cause us to cease seeing the
end of the walk, the other side.” He remarked: “This new sensibility,
which materializes in momentary encounters with anything, does not
distinguish the beauty that is important from the one that is unimportant. It
wanders outdoors and through the core of life itself. This new sensibility
turns me into a Prague flâneur.”58
Like Nezval, JindĜich Štyrský restlessly explored the streets of Prague,
Paris, and small Bohemian towns, seeking visual sustenance – he asserted
“my eyes must be thrown food”59 – and the surreal. Primarily a painter, he
wrote: “The only thing that interests me, indeed, fanatically attracts me in
photography today is the search for the surreality hidden in real objects.”
Thus, in his photography he pursued sites of popular entertainment, shop
windows, cemeteries, and ruins; in his photographs living people are
nearly absent, replaced by dummies, prosthetic limbs, circus posters, and
coffins. These photographs are reminiscent of Atget, but his close-ups take
things out of context, transforming them.60 This desire for transformation
was, of course, of vital importance within the Surrealist movement, since
encountering the surreal was merely a first step in a larger journey. As
Nezval suggested: “In the Golden Lane in the Hradþany / time almost
seems to stand still / If you wish to live five hundred years / drop
everything take up alchemy.”61
During and after the Second World War, artists and writers in and
connected with the Surrealist-related Group 42 continued this fascination
with the poetic qualities of urban life. JiĜí KoláĜ’s (1914–2002) early
poetry, as in the collection Ódy a variace (1946) emphasizes close
observation of the city’s moods and times of day.62 Ripellino points out
that the night walker – noþní chodec – “becomes the protagonist of an
entire period in Czech art and letters”63 who is particularly memorable in
František Hudeþek’s (1909–1990) paintings, drawings, and prints of a
looming, faceless, yet ethereal night walker.64 Vladimír Holan’s (1905–
1980) První testament (1940), tells of a “vrátký kráþivec” (small unsteady
walker) during the Nazi occupation, who is not a dandy but a sad collector
of “verbal detritus.”65
Subjects from the city’s periphery fascinated Group 42. Ripellino
observes: “The poets and painters of Group 42 resolved to describe in
obsessive Surrealistic detail the most desolate aspects of the metropolis,
placing special emphasis on the sordid existence in the industrial slums
ringing the city where the houses are lost amid swamps and weeds.”66
Thus, artist František Gross (1909–1985) often painted the industrial
outskirts, in particular repeatedly painting the LibeĖ gas reservoir in the
1940s.67 Likewise, paintings by František Janoušek (1890–1943),
photography by Miroslav Hák (1911–1978) and photos by JiĜí Sever
(VojtČch ýech, 1904–1968), and poems by Ivan Blatný (1919–1990)
emphasize the periphery, the crumbling, the abandoned aspects of the
city.68 Thus, flânerie remained significant for certain Prague creative
figures, although ultimately Prague flânerie was seriously curtailed under
Communism, when surveillance of the intelligentsia was not uncommon.
To conclude, the Prague writers and artists limned here are but a few of
the most significant characters in the city’s rich history of flânerie. If we
allow some latitude for regional and chronological shifts in the nature and
meaning of flânerie, we can begin to ask what constitutes a flâneur in a
given period and place, as well as what a flâneur’s purpose (stated or
unstated) might be, and which spaces attract the flâneur. Some points to
ponder: first, there are multiple Czech terms for walkers, but although the
Czech language has adopted many French words (for example, garaž,
pasaž, montaž), “flâneur” is almost nonexistent, while chodec is frequently
used in contexts where one might expect “flâneur” (particularly in the
work of Nezval). Second, flânerie is usually considered a solitary practice,
but the Prague writers provide evidence that to some extent it could be
292 Chapter Twelve
practiced with a friend or lover. While it may be that Kafka’s walks with
friends, or the companionate walks described by Karásek or Steiner-Prag,
were more other-focused than strictly flâneurial – presumably the walkers’
attention was often on each other rather than on their surroundings –
Leppin’s description of Severin teaching Zdenka multi-sensory flâneurial
techniques is quite striking – especially given that Leppin’s portrayal of
women typically focuses on their sexuality. The possibility of flânerie à
deux should not be dismissed, especially when we consider the fact that
both French and Czech Surrealists often wandered in pairs.
Finally, Prague flâneurs were clearly aware of French flânerie –
Neruda spent time in Paris, and Baudelaire was much read by Czech
intellectuals—but the practice appears to have come very naturally to all
three major Prague ethnic groups (Czechs, Germans, Jews), which
suggests – not surprisingly – that flânerie developed among inhabitants of
both Paris and Prague at similar points in the cities’ histories. Prague
flânerie has a strong relationship to a fascination with local history and
geography, combined with a desire to record aspects of the city before or
shortly after its alteration. This passion for local history (“Pragensie”) has
spurred the production of numerous books over the past 150 years,
although not all such works relate to flânerie. Even the early Prague
Surrealists, who emphasized modernity, were drawn to aspects of the past,
particularly objects and places uncannily reminiscent of their own
childhoods. However, unlike many of the earlier Prague flâneurs, the first
Prague Surrealists were not antiquarians or preservationists; like their
Paris comrades, they sought “objective chance” and a “revolution of the
mind” that encompassed psychological, social, and political change. In
this, they were thwarted by historical circumstances far beyond their
control. Nonetheless, along with the Paris Surrealists they were
instrumental in developing a nineteenth-century mode of observant
strolling into a potentially transformative early twentieth-century practice.
Notes
1
My thanks to the Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and the
Urban Culture Network at the University of Nottingham for their support of the
conference The Flâneur Abroad, and to the conference participants for their
comments. Additional thanks go to David Cooper of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, for his linguistic advice.
2
Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague, trans. David Newton Marinelli (Berkeley
& Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 38–41. Ripellino’s
unclassifiable love song to the city is a veritable—if labyrinthine—guide to literary
and artistic Prague up to 1968. Another useful English-language text for flâneur-
hunters is Alfred Thomas, Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010).
3
Jan Amos Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart,
trans. Howard Louthan (Paulist Press, 1998), 63. Comenius was exiled as a result
of the 1620 battle of White Mountain, when Habsburg domination of the Czech
lands commenced and the Counterreformation took hold there.
4
Langweil’s model is on permanent display at the Museum of the History of
Prague. It can also be explored online at http://www.langweil.cz/index_en.php.
5
Ripellino, Magic Prague, 38–41. Ripellino notes various terms for walkers,
including poutník (pilgrim), chodec (pedestrian), tulák (vagabond), kráþivec
(walker), kolemjdoucí (passerby), and svČdek (witness).
6
See Linda Marie Mayhew, “Eccentric Cities: Nikolai Gogol’s Saint Petersburg
and Jan Neruda’s Prague” (Ph.D. diss., Austin: University of Texas, 2005), 109;
also Thomas, Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City, 88.
7
See Ripellino, Magic Prague, 29. Neruda’s “Obrázky policejní,” part of Pražské
obrázky, can be found in Jan Neruda, Studie krátké a kratší (Prague: Topiþ, 1911).
Herrmann and Kukla wrote voluminously on Old Prague. See for example Ignát
Herrmann, PĜed padesáti lety: Drobné vzpomínky z minulosti, I, Sebrané spisy
(Prague: Topiþ, 1926) and Karel L. Kukla, Ze všech koutĤ Prahy: Rozmarné
obrázky z pražského života (Prague: Jos. R. Vilímek, 1894). On Kisch, see below.
8
For an overview of Prague history, see for example Peter Demetz, Prague in
Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1997). Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the
Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2013) are also useful in understanding these cultural complexities. On the
literary and cultural renewal of the Czech language, see Hugh LeCaine Agnew,
Origins of the Czech National Renascence, Pitt Series in Russian and East
European Studies No. 18 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993).
9
Johannes Urzidil, The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 11: The Living Contribution
of Jewish Prague to Modern German Literature, trans. Michael Lebeck (New
York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1968), 8.
10
See Ripellino, Magic Prague, 160–1.
11
Countless Czech-language books discuss Old Prague. English-language
scholarship focuses primarily on the demolition of the Jewish Ghetto. See for
example Cathleen M. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto
Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics Around 1900 (East
European Monographs, 2003) and David Ira Snyder, “The Jewish Question and the
Modern Metropolis: Urban Renewal in Prague and Warsaw, 1885–1950” (Ph.D.
diss., Princeton: Princeton University, 2006).
12
Ripellino, Magic Prague, 28.
13
Ripellino, Magic Prague, 30–1.
14
See Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural
Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), 6, 177, 243.
294 Chapter Twelve
15
16
Ripellino, Magic Prague, 124–25; Ignát Herrmann, PĜed padesáti lety: Drobné
vzpomínky z minulosti, IV, Sebrané spisy (Prague: Topiþ, 1938), 131–32.
17
18
“Adrian got lost in the old Jewish cemetery. He recalled the wise rabbi Jehuda
Lev, ... about whom he had read much, and went to look at his grave. He walked
among the many tombstones, stopped at the larger sarcofagi, and as he knew
Hebrew, interpreted the inscriptions.” “Adrian zabloudil na starý židovský hĜbitov.
VzpomnČl moudrého rabbiho Jehuda Lva, ... o nČmž tolik þítal, a šel se podívati na
jeho hrob. Procházel se mezi spoustou náhrobních kamenĤ, zastavoval se u vČtších
sarkofágĤv, a ježto znal hebrejsky, Ĝešíl nápisy.” “bezdČky zde cítil ponížení
starobylého, ted’ již zboĜeného ghetta, neþistotu a kal jeho otluþených budov, jeho
klikatých ulic a uliþek, plných hemživého obyvatelstva, jak vyšlo ze svých
dusných a ošklivých pelechĤ, ve stínu synagog, kam za pronásledování utíkaly
židovské rodiny...” “Díval se na kaménky, položené na náhrobky, Ĝešil rĤzné
odznaky a symboly, zdobící kameny, podoby lvĤ, ryb, kohoutĤ, rukou, konvic,
hroznĤ a hvČzd” (JiĜí Karásek ze Lvovic, Ganymedes (Prague: Aventinum,
1925), 42–3).
19
On the asanace, see Hana Volavková, Zmizelá Praha: 3. Židovské mČsto Pražské
(Praha—Litomyšl: Paseka, 2002), 66–79; Giustino, Tearing Down Prague’s
Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics
Around 1900; Snyder, “The Jewish Question and the Modern Metropolis.”
20
Ripellino, Magic Prague, 124–5; “ŽbluĖk. Obrázek života v noþní krþme” in
Kukla, Ze všech koutĤ Prahy: Rozmarné obrázky z pražského života, 165.
21
See Vilém Mrštík, Bestia Triumphans (Prague, 1897).
22
Miloš Jiránek, Dojmy a potulky (Prague: SVU Mánes, 1908), 69–73.
23
See Vrchlický’s cycle Pražské obrázky (Prague pictures): “Slavík v mČstČ,” “U
SemináĜské zahrady,” “Motiv z Hradþan,” in Mythy. Selské balady. Má vlast
(Prague, 1955), 413–14, 424, 426.
24
“stará zákoutí, staré chramy,” “úzké uliþky kĜivolaké,” “ghetto mystické,” “stará
nábĜeží,” “kríþi mČstem zkaženým novou dobou,” Vrchlický, “Stará Praha” from
cycle Pražské obrázky in Má vlast (1903) or in Mythy Selske balady Ma vlast
(1955).
25
Vrchlicky, “Staré synagogy” from cycle Nové hebrejské melodie in Západy
1907, translated in Ripellino, Magic Prague, 125.
26
The 2012 Schikaneder retrospective in Prague provided a fine overview of the
artist’s work and resulted in two useful catalogs: the shorter, English-language
Veronika Hulíková, Jakub Schikaneder, trans. Gita Zbavitelová (Prague: National
Gallery, 2012), and the in-depth, Czech-language Veronika Hulíková (ed.), Jakub
Schikaneder (1855–1924) (Prague: Národní galerie, 2012).
27
Hugo Steiner-Prag, “Hugo Steiner-Prag to Gustav Meyrink,” in The Golem,
trans. Isabel Cole, Gustav Meyrink (Vitalis, 2007), 267, 269.
28
Gustav Meyrink, “Dr Cinderella’s Plants,” in The Dedalus/Ariadne Book of
Austrian Fantasy: The Meyrink Years 1890–1930, ed. and trans. Mike Mitchell,
trans. Maurice Raraty (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus, 1992), 268–9.
29
E. F. Bleiler, “Introduction,” in The Golem/The Man Who Was Born Again: Two
German Supernatural Novels, trans. Madge Pemberton, Prince Mirski, and
Thomas Moult, by Gustav Meyrink and Paul Busson (New York: Dover,
1976), xii. A superior translation of this novel is: Gustav Meyrink, The Golem,
trans. Isabel Cole (Vitalis, 2007).
30
According to the Leo Baeck Institute’s finding aid to Steiner-Prag’s papers, the
artist not only made many drawings and lithographs of Prague locations, but was
preparing a book on the Ghetto at the time of his death. (Guide to the Papers of
Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880–1945), 1899–1993,
http://findingaids.cjh.org/?pID=121512, accessed 27 July 2012).
31
Severin’s Road into Darkness, in Paul Leppin, The Road to Darkness, trans.
Mike Mitchell (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus/Ariadne, 1997), 67.
32
Severin, in Leppin, The Road to Darkness, 68.
33
Severin, in Leppin, The Road to Darkness, 78–80.
34
35
36
Severin, in Leppin, The Road to Darkness, 142.
37
“Lidé chodili mimo nČj, a on chodil mimo lidi” (JiĜí Karásek ze Lvovic, Gotická
duše, reprint, 1905 (Prague: Aventinum, 1921), 12).
38
“Byla noc. Stál na Hradþanech pĜed klášterem barnabitek. V aleji, jež byla
prochazištČm sesazených králĤ, temnČ šumČlo” (Karásek ze Lvovic, Gotická
duše, 29).
39
“Proþ tam chodíte? Co vás tam láká?” and “Chodím Prahou rád za nocí: tu jako
bych postĜehoval každý oddech její duše” (JiĜí Karásek ze Lvovic, Román Manfred
Macmillena (Prague: Aventinum, 1924), 22–3).
40
“Vycházeli jsme tak den co den. NejþastnČji jsme bloudili ulicemi za soumraku a
za noci, kdy v klamném mČsíþním svČtle rozmČry všech vČcí rostou do
grandiosnosti. S nábĜeží jsme se dívali na Ĝeku, protékající mČstem s truchlivou,
smuteþní vážností, a na pochmurnou siluetu hradu, z nČhož vanula melancholie
jako ze zĜíceniny” (Karásek ze Lvovic, Román Manfred Macmillena, 98).
41
Franz Kafka, Max Brod, ed., The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–1913, trans.
Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 46.
42
Kafka and Brod, The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–1913, 62, 68, 72.
43
Kafka and Brod, The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910–1913, 76.
44
45
46
Harold B. Segal, “Introduction,” in Egon Erwin Kisch, The Raging Reporter: A
Bio-Anthology (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1997), 11, 12, 14;
47
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Passant de Prague,” in Apollinaire, œuvres en prose,
ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 83–93; selection from “Zone”
translated in Derek Sayer, “Surrealities,” in Central European Avant-Gardes:
Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002), 92.
48
Thomas, Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City, 115.
296 Chapter Twelve
49
Ripellino, Magic Prague, 116. ýapek’s essays on the “humblest art” were
published as NejskromnČjší umČní in 1920. For a detailed study of his ideas on this
topic, see Alena Pomajzlová, Josef ýapek: NejskromnČjší umČní/The Humblest Art,
trans. Branislava Kuburoviü (Prague: Obecní dĤm v Praze, 2003).
50
For more on DevČtsil, see Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Avant-Garde and Center:
DevČtsil and Czech Culture, 1918–1938” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania,
History of Art, 2002); Esther Levinger, “Czech Avant-Garde Art: Poetry for the
Five Senses,” Art Bulletin, 81: 3 (September 1999): 513–32; Rostislav Švácha, et
al., DevČtsil: Czech Avant-Garde Art, Architecture and Design of the 1920s and
30s (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1990).
51
“Prayer on the Sidewalk,” in Jaroslav Seifert, The Early Poetry of Jaroslav
Seifert, trans. Dana Loewy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1997), 12–14.
52
“Electric Lyre,” in Seifert, The Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, 54.
53
“Paris,” in Seifert, The Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert, 58 (originally published
in Revoluþní sborník DevČtsil, 1922).
54
Thomas, Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City, 116–17; VitČzslav
Nezval, Antonín Bartušek, and Josef Hanzlík, Three Czech Poets, trans. Ewald
Osers and George Theiner (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), 28.
55
VítČzslav Nezval, Edison, trans. Ewald Osers (DvoĜák, 2003), 9.
56
VítČzslav Nezval, Prague with Fingers of Rain, trans. Ewald Osers (Highgreen,
Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2009), 17–18. A different translation,
entitled “City of Towers,” can be found in VítČzslav Nezval, Antilyrik & Other
Poems, trans. Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak (Copenhagen and Los Angeles:
Green Integer Books, 2001).
57
”Shirt” (1935), in Nezval, Antilyrik & Other Poems, 23–7.
58
Translated in JiĜí Všeteþka and VítČzslav Nezval, Pražský Chodec/A Prague
Flâneur/Le Passant de Prague/Der Prager Spaziergänger/ (Prague: Martin
Dostoupil, c. 2011), passim. This book offers selected passages in five languages;
no full English translation has yet been published.
59
“Ale mým oþím nutno stále házeti potravu” (quoted in Josef Vojvodík,
“Oralizace a olfaktorizace oka. K psychologii þichového vnímání v díle JindĜicha
Štyrského,” UmČní 48, no. 3 (2000): 137).
60
Štyrský in ýeské slovo, 30 January 1935, quoted in Karel Srp, et al., New
Formations: Czech Avant-Garde Art and Modern Glass from the Roy and Mary
Cullen Collection (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2011), 149.
Many of Štyrský’s photographs are reproduced in Karel Srp, JindĜich Štyrský,
trans. Derek Paton (Prague: Torst with The Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague,
2001).
61
“U alchymistĤ,” in VítČzslav Nezval, Zpáteþní lístek (Prague: Fr. Borovy,
1933), 25; translated in Ripellino, Magic Prague, 92.
62
Jan Grossman, “Horeþná bdČlost JiĜího KoláĜe” in JiĜí KoláĜ, Náhodný svČdek:
Výbor z díla: Verše z let 1937–1947 (Prague: Mladá fronta, 1964), 186–7; “Ráno,”
in JiĜí KoláĜ, Ódy a variace (Prague: Dílo pĜátel umČní a knihy, 1946), 47; also
“Litanie,” 15–16 and “SvČdek,” 31.
63
Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague, trans. David Newton Marinelli
(Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 58.
64
Marie Klimešová, VČci umČní, vČci doby: Skupina 42 (Pilsen: Arbor vitae and
Západoþeká galerie v Plzni, 2011), 49–51.
65
Vladimír Holan, První testament (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1940), 9–10.
66
Ripellino, Magic Prague, 58.
67
See František Gross, František Gross (Prague: Obelisk, 1969).
68
On Hák, see Klimešová, VČci umČní, vČci doby: Skupina 42, 72–7. See Ludvík
Souþek, JiĜí Sever (Prague: Odeon, 1968); Ripellino also suggests the following
poems by Ivan Blatný: “Tabulky,” Kytice, 6 (1947); “Den,” Blok, 1 (1947); “Hra,”
Kritický mČsíþník, 1947, 385–90; and “Podzimní den” in Tento veþer, Prague 1945,
28.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE FLÂNEUR IN THE FOG:

PHENOMENOLOGIES OF THE NORTHERN
PORT-TOWN LANDSCAPE IN THE PERIPATETIC
NARRATIVES OF FRENCH EXISTENTIALISM
ALEXANDER MCCABE
To speak of the flâneur without connoting Paris would probably require a

change in terminology. Equally quintessential is the association between
the French capital and existentialism, the Paris-based literary component
of which produced a curious generation of fictional flâneurs, casting
phenomenological gazes on urban landscapes between the nineteen thirties
and fifties. An inheritance of romantic and “modern” conceptions of
flânerie is evident in the representation of the existentialist flâneur;
however they differ in several significant regards, and crucially so in
setting. The Parisian protagonists of both Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée
(Nausea) and Albert Camus’ La Chute (The Fall) are in emphatically
self-imposed exile from Paris to wintery, northern port-towns: the former
to the fictional town of Bouville (Sartre’s pseudonym for Le Havre); the
latter to Amsterdam. Louis-René des Forêts’s parodic existentialist hero of
Le Bavard (The Chatterbox) similarly engages in flânerie along the
snow-covered canals and public gardens of a coastal town in adherence to
this curious tendency.1 With this paper I explore the aesthetics of flânerie
primarily in the former two novels, in relation at once to the Baudelairean
archetype and to existentialist thought with its phenomenological
underpinnings. I then consider the topographical and metaphorical
specificities of the northern port-town setting as the exiled existentialist
flâneur’s landscape of choice, and the ghostly presence of Paris that lurks
behind it. Finally, I consider how each narrative represents an attempt to
undermine, overcome or parody the radically subjectivist gaze.
The Flâneur in the Fog 299
Melancholic roaming and detached observation was essential to the

existentialist mode of being-in-a-city, as Sartre wrote: “it is the only means
of possessing a city in some sense: to have dragged one’s personal ennuis
around it.” 2 As such, flânerie was both structurally and thematically
integral to the French existentialist novel from its beginnings in La Nausée.
Informed by Sartre’s discovery of contemporary German writers and
thinkers, most consequentially of Heidegger, his protagonist-narrator
Roquentin roams the streets of Bouville, casting a phenomenological gaze
on the public life of the town. In the fragmented diary form of his
observations, Jameson saw a narratological manifestation of flânerie. 3
Roquentin’s gaze is radically subjectivist, and his descriptions are largely
restrained to pre-rational sensory perceptions. The resultant, peopled urban
landscape is thus primarily revealed in terms of materiality, of shifting
surfaces, colours, textures:
I stand a whole head above the two columns [of the moving crowd]. I see
hats, a sea of hats. Most of them are black and hard. Now and then you see
one fly off at the end of an arm, revealing the soft gleam of a skull. Then
after a few moments of clumsy flight, it settles again.4
Roquentin’s perception of the crowd is at once homogenising and

de-familiarising. His gaze is provocative primarily in its detachment from
the other, the hyper-objectivised object. He experiences social interactions
as compositional spectacles.5 His gaze is thus aestheticizing; however, it
cannot be equated to the Romantic “quasi-priestly activity … to restore
spirit to place” that has been associated with Baudelairean flânerie.6 In
Roquentin’s case, his meandering observations constitute rather what
Rubino referred to as “an anti-poetic of the city”;7 an attempt to strip
away layers of meaning and to unveil the empty contingency concealed
behind urbanity.
Roquentin’s own self-perceived “invisibility” during his flâneries
relates him to the Baudelairean conception of the flâneur. However, this
invisibility receives ironic treatment. Roquentin “transcends” the crowd by
a head: his physical immensity and red hair lend him an inescapable
spectacularity that his narration is blind to. As the novel reaches its
culmination, Roquentin lifts a librarian by the neck in the public library
with one arm, while the librarian tries and fails to reach and scratch
Roquentin’s face. This dramatically imposes – on a reading room full of
gaping readers – the comparative enormity and power of Roquentin’s body,
up to this point revealed as disjointed and made up of distastefully fleshy
components alienated from the narrating consciousness. Roquentin’s
narrative thus offers a rare glimpse of his body from the perspective of the
300 Chapter Thirteen
other, objectifying it finally as a spectacular, integrated entity.8 Roquentin

himself, however, remains conspicuously oblivious to this. Just an hour
later he wanders the streets and narrates: “I am so forgotten … No-one.
Antoine Roquentin exists for no-one. … And suddenly the I pales, pales
and is done for, it goes out.”9 The witnesses of the spectacle in the library,
and the assaulted librarian in particular, have certainly not forgotten him:
rather Roquentin’s own blindness to the reciprocal gazes of the objects of
his gaze is here brought to the fore. The Baudelairean flâneur had similar
pretensions (and presumably misconceptions) regarding his own
unseen-ness in public spaces, through which he aspired to a sensation of
self-effacement similar to Roquentin’s illusion of the fading ‘I’:
To be away from home and yet to feel at home everywhere; to see the
world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain unseen of the
world … the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though into an
immense reservoir of electricity … It is a self insatiably athirst for the
non-self, who, at each moment, renders and expresses it in more living
images than life itself, ever unstable and fleeting.10
The radical subjectivism of the Baudelairean flâneur (situating himself at the

centre of the world) resonates with Roquentin’s mode of perception; however,
they differ in intent. Roquentin’s people-watching is utterly detached,
ultimately egotistical and largely misanthropic; he refuses to admit himself as
the object of the gaze of the other and thus to engage in intersubjectivity.
Hence the character’s difficulty with handshakes: a mutual act of material
objectivisation of the hand by the hand of the other (intersubjective
intercorporeity).11 Unlike the Baudelairean model, Roquentin’s observations
of the crowd and of individuals within it are motivated by no affiliation
and by no will to understand or describe others per se: the object of his
enquiry is strictly the movement of his own consciousness. The perceptions
of peopled places that drift in and out of his gaze as he wanders the streets
are consequently represented, but any wonderment attached to these stems
purely from their sheer arbitrariness, resultant from his radical detachment.
In Camus’s La Chute, Clamence’s judgement of the Amsterdammers is
similarly distanced, homogenising, and patronising: “I like this people,
swarming on the pavements, cornered in a little space of houses and
waters, engulfed by fog, cold lands and the sea that smokes like a boiling
wash basin.”12 The population are presented as endearingly primitive in
comparison to Parisians, living in a habitual ignorance of the drudgery of
their damp and dreary version of urbanity.
It is highly curious that the potential significance of these northern
port-town landscapes to the representation of existential crisis has thus far
gone unanalysed. This seems to be because it struck commentators as

entirely intuitive on the level of imagery. Gianfranco Robino, for example,
notes the climactic appropriateness of the setting of Sartre’s novel with no
further question: “To be sure, this rainy and foggy port represents the
pertinent context conducive to Roquentin’s discovery of contingency.”13
It seems to have been taken as a given that existential revelations best
occur under damp conditions.14
While Rumbino’s assumption may be questioned, in Sartre’s fictional
Bouville, as in Camus’s vision of Amsterdam, humidity has significant
phenomenological bearing. The import of these landscapes does not,
however, end here. “Bouville” has two possible etymologies and
corresponding translations. By far the most commonly noted by critics is
bou(e) (mud or silt). ‘Mud-ville’ clearly emphasises this direct connection
between the dampness and sordidness of existence in the backwater
port-town it denotes. It should be observed, however, that most critics
overlook the phonetically identical bou(t) (end, in the specific sense of a
terminal point in space).15 The coastal town must thus be simultaneously
considered as “the end of the line” both geographically, as the terminus of
the train line from the Parisian centre to the continental periphery, as well
as the existential end of the line for the protagonist. Roquentin has exiled
himself from Paris, specifically, to no less than the brink of existence.
Clamence makes the same assumptions far more explicit in La Chute,
regularly describing Amsterdam as “l’extremité de l’Europe,” gazing at
the grey seascape and overtly comparing it to the abyss.16
Throughout both novels, images of the sea, water and moisture are
almost invariably associated with the existential void. The first of
Roquentin’s attacks of “the Nausea,” his acute existential angst, is
provoked by a pebble he picks up in order to cast it into the sea: “There
was something which I saw and which disgusted me, but I no longer know
if I was looking at the sea or the pebble. It was a flat pebble, completely
dry on one side, moist and muddy on the other.”17 Sartre would make this
connection explicit again in a later depiction of the canals of Venice as
“The gentle sliding of nothingness between the cliffs of Being.”18 La
Chute similarly associates Amsterdam’s concentric canals with the circles
of hell.19
In both novels, the humidity of the atmosphere and the constant
proximity to bodies of water takes on a phenomenological as well as
metaphorical significance. When Roquentin finally resolves to abandon
the northern port town and to return to Paris, his intent is to make an
attempt at cultural reintegration, which he envisions as the publication of
his phenomenological account of his consciousness, La Nausée: his
account of the effects of his flâneurial observations of Bouville on his state

of being. Only having reached this resolve does Roquentin make the
journey to the top of the hill in Bouville. This represents a topographical
distancing of the self from the sea and from sea-level, but more
importantly it marks a dramatic end to his phenomenological mode of
perception, to his flâneur’s gaze, as he suddenly beholds a panorama of the
port-town landscape in its entirety. There seems to be a direct association
between accessing this panoramic view and escape; between transcending
the subjectivism of flânerie and resolving existential crisis.
Was it they, too, who brought me up this hill? I can’t remember how I
came here. Up the Dautry stairs, no doubt. Did I really climb the one
hundred and ten steps, one by one? What is perhaps even more difficult to
imagine, is that I am going to go down them again shortly. … I look at the
grey glimmering of Bouville at my feet. … Those little figures that I can
make out on Boulibet Street, in an hour I will be one of them. … they think
it is their town, “a nice respectable town.” They’re not afraid, they feel at
home. They have never seen anything but the tamed water that runs out of
their taps.20
The “tamed” water of the taps suggests the inhabitants’ blissful ignorance
of the abyss of the sea at their doorstep, while they go about their petty
lives, in contrast to Roquentin’s acute awareness of it from his hill-top
vantage point. Having decided to leave Bouville, he has been transported
unawares to the top of the hill, to a totalising panorama of the peripheral,
provincial urbanity he has now transcended, and with it, his existentialist
flânerie: hence his confusion on suddenly finding himself at the summit
unable to account for the process of climbing of the stairs that his previous
phenomenological mode would have prioritised. 21 The end of his
flâneur’s existence and his overcoming of the coastal landscape is thus
directly linked to his return to Paris and potential reintegration with the
collective.
In La Chute, Clamence has no such hope of return from the brink of
existence to the geographical centre.22 He reminisces about the beauty of
Paris, and, still more rapturously of a panorama observed from Mount
Etna. Significantly, he lyricizes about this in terms of high altitude,
panoramic vision and clarity of light, all antithetical to his experience
roving the streets of Amsterdam. In the middle of the Mediterranean, Etna
is also an image of centrality, of the epicentre of European civilisation and
a volcanic portal to the Earth’s core. However, Clamence opts for life in
exile to a cold, wet, city below sea-level, because in being closer to the
periphery one is seemingly closer to nothingness. Beholding the grey
abyss of sea and fog he comments: “You understand then why I can say
that the centre of things is here, although we are situated at the extremity
of the continent.”23
Like Roquentin’s, Clamence’s narrative also culminates in a
psychological transcendence of the peopled landscape he had roamed. In
his case this takes the form of feverish flight rather than up-hill
transportation. His psychological transcendence relates thus to a
physiological rise in body temperature rather than a topographical rise in
altitude. The increased temperature difference between his body and the
landscape is then further enhanced by the beginning of snowfall, at which
point the protagonist-narrator literally reaches euphoria, achieving the
same detached and homogenising view of the rest of the urban population
in opposition to the subject that Roquentin had achieved on the hilltop. In
semi-delirium he proclaims:
I have again found a summit, that I am alone to climb, and from whence I
can judge everyone … I am going out, I am going, swept away along the
canals by my stride, … On the Damark, the first tram rings its bell in the
humid air, ringing the awakening call to life at the extremity of Europe
where, at the same moment, hundreds of millions of men, my subjects,
wrench themselves from bed, with bitter mouths, to make their way to
joyless labour.24
The contrast between this image and that of the Baudelairean flâneur is
stark and emblematic. The feverish, bed-ridden nightwalker projects
himself between black canals in an empty city on the brink of existence,
observing a physically absent crowd of workers. His evoked crowd has
expanded exponentially to encompass the totality of humanity, now utterly
homogenised by a dominating gaze that has reached the extremity of
detachment from the collective insofar as it now literally no longer sees it.
The French existentialist novel thus represents a sinister extrapolation
of the nineteenth-century flâneur’s mode of being. His habitual subjectivist
wanderings through peopled urban landscapes is a direct inheritance, but
his radical estrangement from the collective, inherent to a
non-participatory gaze, has rendered the social interactions he witnesses
arbitrary to the point of the absurd. The poetics of the crowd and of the
city have given way to stark surface description of nauseating sensory
input in the case of Sartre’s text, detached, ironic judgement in the case of
Camus’s, and a shift in gaze from cityscape to seascape; from the social to
the abyss. A further inversion is inherent in that the nineteenth-century
flâneur’s self-conception as an invisible, dissolved subject in the crowd is
replaced by pretentions of transcendence on the part of the most fallen of
men. In Sartre’s text, an ultimate return to the capital and an attempt at

communion with the collective through participation in the arts is
suggested as a possible escape from the existential dead-end of Bouville
and, simultaneously, from the flâneurial mode of being. Neither Camus’s
nor des Forêts’ texts contain any such optimism. Clamence, like the
protagonist of Le Bavard, narrativises an imaginary flânerie: a flânerie that
in diegetic terms did not take place, narrativised emphatically to a
perpetually changing and barely tangible interlocutor in the case of
Clamence and to a potentially and indifferently absent interlocutor in the
case of Le Bavard. These flâneries in the fog of the continental and
existential brink, in all three cases, can thus be seen to serve parallel
narrative ends: unveiling the inherent impasse of subjectivism.
Notes
1
While neither Camus nor des Forêts would have willingly accepted the term
existentialist in qualification of their thought or fictional output, rejecting
association with Sartrian philosophy, I have opted for the term ‘existentialist’ in
relation to all three of these novels insofar as both Camus and des Forêts engage,
however parodically, in the literary tradition initiated, in the French context, with
Sartre’s La Nausée.
2
“C’est le seul moyen de posséder un peu une ville: y avoir traîné ses ennuis
personnels” (J.-P. Sartre, “La Reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste,” in
Fragments, ed. Arlette Elkaïm Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 66. Translations
provided throughout are my own.
3
Fredric Jameson, Sartre: the origins of a style (New York: Columbia Univ Press,
1984), 185.
4
“Je domine les deux colonnes de toute la tête et je vois des chapeaux, une mer de
chapeaux. La plupart sont noirs et durs. De temps à autre, on en voit un qui
s’envole au bout d’un bras et découvre le tendre miroitement d’un crâne; puis
après quelques instants, d’un vol lourd, il se pose” (J.-P. Sartre, Œuvres
romanesques (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 54.
5
Elizabeth Rechniewski, “When and why did the flâneur die? A modern detective
story,” Literature and Aesthetics, 17, no. 2 (2007): 100.
6
G. Hartmann, Criticism in the Wilderness cited in Sven Birkerts, “Walter
Benjamin, Flâneur: A Flânerie,” The Iowa Review 13, no. 3/4 (1982), 166.
7
“une anti-poétique de la ville” (Gianfranco Rubino, “De Roquentin au dernier
touriste: poétique(s) et anti-poétique(s) de la ville,” Cahiers de l'Association
internationale des études françaises, no. 50 (1998), 277).
8
Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 198. Roquentin’s blindness to his body-for-others
(“le corps-vu” as opposed to “le corps existé,” in Sartre’s technical writings) is at
the heart of his experience of Nausea: in Being and Nothingness, Nausea is the
term ascribed to the experience of the body (le corps existé) being revealed to
subjective consciousness. See J.-P. Sartre, L'Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard,

1943), 404.
9
“tellement je suis oublié. … Personne. Pour personne, Antoine Roquentin
n’existe. … Et soudain le Je pâlit, pâlit et c’en est fait, il s’éteint” (Sartre, Œuvres
romanesques, 200).
10
“Etre hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez soi; voir le monde, être
au centre du monde et rester caché au monde … l’amoureux de la vie universelle
entre dans la foule comme dans un immense réservoir d’électricité. … C’est un
moi insatiable du non-moi, qui, à chaque instant, le rend et l’exprime en images
plus vivantes que la vie elle-même, toujours instable et fugitive” (Charles
Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 2, 692).
11
Sartre would employ this handshake aversion again in his next work of fiction
Le Mur, with regard to Paul Hilbert. Hilbert represents a second, further
misanthropic perversion of the flâneur. For further discussion see Alexander
McCabe, “Dostoevsky’s French reception”, Ph.D., University of Glasgow, 2013. A
succinct analysis of Sartre’s technical phenomenology of the flesh, as exposed in
L’Être et le néant, can be found in Dermot Moran, “Husserl, Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty on Embodiment, Touch and the ‘Double Sensation’,” in Sartre on
the Body, ed. Katherine J. Morris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mamillan, 2010), 41-66.
12
“J’aime ce peuple, grouillant sur les trottoirs, coincé dans un petit espace de
maisons et d’eaux, cerné par des brumes, des terres froides, et la mer fumante
comme une lessive” (Albert Camus, Œuvres complètes, 4 vols (Paris, Gallimard,
2006-8), vol. 3, 702.
13
“Certes, ce port pluvieux et brumeux représente le contexte pertinent qui
favorise la découverte de la contingence de la part de Roquentin” (Rubino, “De
Roquentin au dernier touriste: poétique(s) et anti-poétique(s) de la ville,” 267).
14
This curious assumption warrants further exploration. From Munch’s The Scream
(1910) to Andrew Bain’s The Existentialist (2007), visual art has also associated
existential crisis with coastal brinks. This generates a potential field of discussion
that psychology, geography and ocean studies might fruitfully contribute to.
15
Rubino is an exception to this, as is Philippe Lançon: see Rubino, “De
Roquentin au dernier touriste: poétique(s) et anti-poétique(s) de la ville,” 269;
Philippe Lançon, “La Nausée au bord des lèvres,” in Libération, 11 March 2005:
(http://www.liberation.fr/cahier-special/0101521878-la-nausee-au-bord-des-levres,
accessed 1.9.2013).
16
Camus, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, 703.
17
“Il y’avait quelque chose que j’ai vu et qui m’a dégoûté, mais je ne sais plus si
je regarder la mer ou le galet. Le galet était plat, sec sur tout un côté, humide et
boueux sur l’autre” (Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 6).
18
“le doux glissement du néant entre les falaises de l’Être” (Sartre, “La Reine
Albemarle ou le dernier touriste,” 77).
19
Camus, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, 702. In des Forêts’s Le Bavard, the
protagonist’s parodic crise de bavardage likewise strikes on a cliff over the sea.
See Louis-René des Forêts, Le Bavard (Paris: Gallimard,1946), 13-15.
20
“Est-ce que ce sont elles, aussi, qui m’ont conduit sur cette colline? Je ne me
rappelle plus comment je suis venu. Par l’escalier Dautry, sans doute: est-ce que
j’ai gravi vraiment une à une ses cent dix marches? Ce qui est peut-être encore plus
difficile à imaginer, c’est que, tout à l’heure, je vais les redescendre. … Je regarde,
à mes pieds, les scintillements gris de Bouville. … Ces petits bonshommes que je
distingue dans la rue Boulibet, dans une heure je serai l’un d’eux. … ils pense que
c’est leur ville, une ‘belle cité bourgeoise.’ Ils n’ont pas peur, ils se sentent chez
eux. Ils n’ont jamais vu que l’eau apprivoisée qui coule des robinets …” (Sartre,
Œuvres romanesques, 186).
21
Des Forêts’s Le Bavard gives an ironic presentation of flâneurial aspects of the
narrative of existential crisis. The protagonist indulges in an extended narration of
the snow-covered streets and architecture of the provincial sea-side town landscape
he roams in order to analyse its influence over his psychology, only to confess
ultimately that this whole section of the narrative was a fabrication and that no
such influence was undergone. See des Forêts, Le Bavard, 74-9.
22
Clamence’s ironic nostalgia for a previous life as a successful humanitarian
“dandy” in Paris has significance beyond the diegetic, as does Roquentin’s parallel
exile to the North. These geographical northern brinks have cultural signification
beyond the convenient abundance of gloomy imagery: for many Parisian observers,
existential thought had arrived with an influx of innovative anguished literatures
and philosophies from the North (from Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Ibsen
to Chekhov, Kafka, Heidegger). Camus’s, Sartre’s and Des Forêts’s choice of
setting is part of a general situating of this particular aspect of their fictional
thought in an intellectual context in opposition to the centre of the philosophical
tradition: Athenian-Roman-Parisian humanism.
23
“vous comprenez alors pourquoi je puis dire que le centre des choses est ici,
bien que nous nous trouvions à l’extrémité du continent” (Camus, Œuvres
complètes, vol. 3, 703).
24
“J’ai encore trouvé un sommet, où je suis seul à grimper et d’où je peux juger
tout le monde … je sors, je vais, d’une marche emportée, le long des canaux …
Sur le Damark, le premier tramway fait tinter son timbre dans l’air humide et
sonne l’éveil de la vie à l’extrémité de l’Europe où, au même moment, des
centaines de millions d’hommes, mes sujets, se tirent péniblement du lit, la bouche
amère, pour aller vers un travail sans joie” (Camus, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3,
763).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE FLÂNEUR IN BRUSSELS:

FRENCH AND BELGIAN LITERARY
PERSPECTIVES IN COUNTERPOINT
DANIEL ACKE
The link between Brussels and literary flânerie (that is, flânerie enhanced
by the literary text) is not evident at all, for several reasons. First of all, we
have to take into account the historical conditions and the specific urban
development of the city. Unlike the capital of France, with its expansive
vistas, major waterway and winding backstreets through historically and
culturally diverse neighbourhoods, Brussels is rather a small city generally
more well-known for its individual monuments than for the walkways
between them. Voltaire had qualified Brussels as a “sad city.”1 Although,
at the end of the nineteenth century, Leopold II tried to give a
Haussmannian appearance to his kingdom’s capital, and the subsequent
development of art nouveau added to the city’s architectural repute, a
century later the co-ordinated large-scale destruction of old buildings,
which were replaced by unfortunate modern ones, turned Brussels more
and more into the antithesis of intelligent and charming urbanism. From
artists James Ensor to contemporary writers Pierre Mertens and Patrick
Roegiers,2 all lament the mutilation of an endlessly moribund city which is
undeniably ugly and chaotic, and where the word “architect” is an insult.3
The second reason that makes the presence of flânerie and its literary
image in Brussels problematic (and which is probably not unrelated to the
first reason mentioned) is that until now Brussels has not given birth to
great literary myths, expressed in memorable works. We lack great novels
about this city, as they exist for Paris, Dublin or Barcelona. Many stories
are set in Brussels, but most of the time the city is a mere background, and
these texts fail to convey its magic. 4 This lessens the likelihood of
encountering the theme of flânerie in the context of the city – it is seldom
308 Chapter Fourteen
treated extensively in literature, and, when it is the case, this is perhaps

most of all in essays, poetry and short poetic stories.
Therefore we have to ask if Brussels flânerie with its corresponding
literary expression can be conceived of at all. The extensive history of
Brussels in literature has still to be written, but we would like to select
some moments, which will lead us from French to Belgian writers and
from the impossible flânerie of the nineneenth century to the necessity of
wandering in the twentieth century. At the same time, these instances of
walking in Brussels as a subject show the need to move beyond an
historically and geographically limited model of Parisian flânerie.
In the nineteenth century, due to its geographical position and political

circumstances, Brussels became a city where many foreign writers passed
through or spent time, some as exiles, for example, Victor Hugo, Karl
Marx, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. 5 I would like to focus on
Nerval, Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans, all undoubtely great
flâneurs. Their writings allow us to identify the characteristically Parisian
bias which influenced their opinion of Brussels. Indeed, these writers
betray a certain cultural relativism on behalf of the Parisian flâneur.
Essentially, the constitutive demands of Parisian flânerie have been
superimposed by them upon other cities, thereby leading to the conclusion
of the impossibility of flânerie in Brussels, and ruling out in advance the
possibility of identifying and appreciating alternative aspects of the urban
promenade.
Gérard de Nerval made several stays in Brussels, firstly because the
city is on the road to Germany, a country whose literature he admired and
translated, but also because he was very fond of theatre and was in love
with an actress who happened to be playing in the Belgian capital. In
several short narratives, a genre he favoured, of which Lorely, souvenir
d’Allemagne is an example, he evokes Brussels. 6 Nerval likes the
monuments, he is impressed among other things by the new theatre, but
notes ironically: “This fine theatre has only one fault at the moment. It is
closed” (OC, 191).7 Some things seem strange to him, like the statue of the
“Mannekenpis”: “bizarre statue … symbolic character definable with
difficulty” (OC, 191).8 He stresses the strange, picturesque character of
the customs. Yet for our purposes it is interesting to find in his text an
implicit reference to the attitude of the flâneur but also to Paris as
paradigm, which is often the case in Nerval’s writings about foreign
cities.9 For example, he writes: “there is no great city without a river”; he
The Flâneur in Brussels 309
adds ironically: “What is a capital where one cannot drown oneself? Ghent
has the Escaut, Liege the Meuse; Brussels has only a feeble stream which
they call the Senne, a pathetic fake.” He notes the hilly landscape of the
city: “Then imagine at the centre of the flattest country in the world a city
which is all mountain” (Loreley, OC, 186). 10 This makes real flânerie
impossible: “any flâneur there becomes out of breath.” There are of course
also positive aspects, like the amazing view (the “trouées”) from the top of
the city; or the pleasure of the contrast between the web of small medieval
streets and the more noble and elegant area around the rue Royale. But
again Paris serves as reference point: “it is Parisian life in a narrow circle.”
If Nerval recognizes the risk that Brussels might lose its identity by
imitating Paris, the Belgian capital nevetheless remains a “satellite” of
Paris: “Brussels is a moon of Paris, a friendly satellite even so, which one
can reproach with having lost much of its Brabançon originality from
imitating us” (OC, 196-7). 11 Baudelaire too, criticises this spirit of
conformity, but in a much nastier way.
Indeed, his case is a slightly different one. No writer hated a country
more than Baudelaire hated Belgium and a city than he did Brussels. We
have to recall the circumstances which brought Baudelaire to Belgium.
Disapointed by his Parisian milieu, harassed by his creditors, affected by
the condemnation by the French court of his Fleurs du Mal, he hoped to
find better circumstances in Belgium and came to Brussels to give a series
of lectures and meet Belgian publishers. But his failure was cruel: the
public did not show up and the publishers were not interested. Moreover
Baudelaire was repelled by the materialistic spirit of the Belgian people.
His growing hatred led to the project of a book about the country, which
remained in note form.12 Reading his remarks on Belgium and Brussels
(often the distinction is difficult to make) one is of course struck by their
excessive character, due in part to the poet’s sombre mood; they are
nevertheless interesting from our point of view because through them we
sense the experienced gaze of the Parisian flâneur. The true signification
of Baudelaire’s judgements can best be grasped when we take into account
the passionate flâneur he had been all through his life. It is immediately
striking that he reserves a whole chapter to the “Physionomie de la rue.” In
Brussels, any vivid promenade is made impossible by the disgusting smell:
“Brussels smells of black soap.” No sights in the street can animate the
flânerie: “No life in the street.” The material circumstances are not
favourable: “No pavements, or disjointed ones (consequence of individual
freedom taken to extremes). Awful cobbles.” The urban landscape lacks
essential elements: “Bleakness of a town without a river” (OC, 823). 13
(Nerval had made the same remark). Sociability is not much developed
amongst the Belgians, zealous individualists who prefer to stay at home:
No shopwindow displays.
Flânerie past shops, this pleasure, this edification, an impossible thing!
Everyone stays home! (OC, 827).14
As we know, one of the joys of flânerie consisted in the observation of the

faces of the people in the street. In the Belgian capital this pleasure was
frustrated. Every face showed the signs of profound stupidity, which even
became aggressive: “Menacing stupidity of the faces. This universal
coarseness disturbs one like a permanent but undefined danger” (OC,
826).15 Baudelaire makes the comparison with animals:
The physiognomy is heavy, thickened,

Heads of great yellow rabbits, yellow eyelashes.
An air of sheep dreaming (OC, 824).16
The streets show the grotesque spectacle of people who collide with each
other as in a herd: “The manner in which the inhabitants bump into each
other and carry their walking sticks” (OC, 826).17 Some of Baudelaire’s
descriptions have a racist connotation aspect:
The Belgian face, or rather of Brussels.

Chaos. Unformed, deformed, coarse, heavy, hard, unfinished, carved with
a knife.
Angular teeth.
…
Sombre unseeing features, like those of a cyclops, a cyclops who is not
one-eyed but blind (OC, 829).18
According to Baudelaire all this becomes clear against the background of

the genre scenes of the Flemish painters of the past:
Overall, it is indeed the same race as in former times. Just as the people
who piss and vomit in the Kermesses by the Ostades and Teniers still
express precisely joy and Flemish antics, so we find in the present-day the
same gawky types of Northern primitive painters (OC, 830).19
It is clear that for Baudelaire the urban public space of Brussels does not
permit any form of flânerie.
What we read in Nerval and Baudelaire is partly confirmed by the
naturalistic and decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, another experienced
flâneur, who wrote extensively on Paris.20 His two short texts on Brussels,
the “Carnet d’un voyageur à Bruxelles” (1876)21 and “La grande place de
Bruxelles” (1876), 22 are in the form of traveller’s impressions, with
numerous descriptive remarks involving an extraordinarily rich
vocabulary. Both texts suppose the perspective of the walker in the street
who looks around. The first and also the longest of the two texts 23 is
conceived as a railwaytrip to Brussels: it begins with the arrival in the
station and ends with departure. But between these two moments, the
essay develops the narrative of a promenade, whose point of departure is
situated on the famous Grand-Place, where many people are gathered and
a brass band is playing. After a moment they leave the Place, and
Huysmans decides to follow the musicians through the narrow streets until
they enter a café. Then, obviously tired of all the noise and the people, he
escapes: “I fled, and crossing Brussels again from one side to the other, I
wandered about the Leopold quarter and arrived at the Musée Wiertz.” He
visits the museum of this bizarre painter as well as other places which
apparently are not even worth mentioning until, once again exasperated, he
looks for shelter in a café: “Shattered, exhausted, weary from having
looked these armies of monuments, these anonymous building in blue
stone, adorned with spies at their windows, I abandoned myself to the
Maison des Brasseurs.” In the evening he circulates in the centre of the
city, bored by the disappointing entertainment, finally reaching his
disagreeable hotel. The next morning it is raining, he has once again to
look for shelter, this time in the cathedral which he then has to leave
because there is a mass going on. Endless rain drives him to the art
museum. Finally, having exhausted all possible curiosities during a stay of
several weeks, he returns home.
We have to pay special attention to the fact that his moving around in
Brussels does not correspond at all to the pleasures of flânerie, but rather
to an exhausting walk, as his language illustrates. None of the conditions
of the Parisian promenade seems to be fulfilled. The streets are narrow: “a
maze of passages and streets which blur into each other and only become
distinct near the quays of wood and lime.” The pavement is awful, leaving
you having to negotiate puddles and mud: “Mud up to the ankles, sheets of
water on the pavements poorly protected by asphalt.” In the evening the
streets are badly lit and there is hardly anything to see and to do:
The square is black, the avenues deserted, all the life of Brussels retreats to
the place de la Monnaie and in the Galeries Saint-Hubert. … with the help
of what potions, what opiated balms, could one succeed in putting an end
to the interminable evening?
In so far as there is a social life in Brussels, it seems a pale imitation of

that found in Paris: Huysmans ought to have been impressed by the
Galeries Saint-Hubert, which are similar to the Parisian passages and as
such an unmissable destination for the experienced flâneur, but
surprisingly this major centre of Brussels social life is condemned by
Huysmans as a bigger but not at all a better Palais-Royal. Similar to
Baudelaire, Huysmans is harsh about the city’s river, which seems rather
to belong to the countryside: “no more than a stride’s width, it seems a
green ribbon thrown down into a ravine of pink bricks.” 24 Obviously,
during his walks in Brussels, Huysmans was looking around him, and we
do find detailed descriptions of his impressions and sensations. The
brutality of the impressions is striking: colours are garish: “quarters of
meat, a purple colour, relieved here and there by the pale gold of fat” and
the “bloody glow of a lamp”;25 people’s behaviour is excessive:
they screamed the Brabançonne at full blast, they guzzled couques de

Dinant [hard biscuits], they stuffed themselves with bread rolls, they pick
at biscuits, they sucked up the green stock from crab’s innards, they
devoured dry waffles, they boned smoked eels, and violinists scraped their
strings, barmen pumped beer, brats stuck along the walls, others wailed,
others suckled pink women, and here and there … soldiers laughed, their
paunches flopping.
People do not correspond at all to the basic canon of beauty, but are close
to the monstrous:
A full-bellied man, his fizzog crooked, teeth running the gauntlet of his
gums, his backside squashed on a table, legs beating the retreat on a chair’s
legs, singing, half-asleep, stupefied by Diest beer and Hasselt alcohol.
Women manifest obscenity and evoke old witches:
disappearing chins, noses like trumpets or arches, the whole tribunal of old
goddesses who were waiting for the end of twilight to ride in cavalcade in
the clouds, a broom between their thighs.
The manners are rough: “beer pumps continually on the go,” women
“downing … pints,” etc., 26 “Shadowy hideousnesses”: 27 this is how
Huysmans sums up all these awful creatures. As to the sensations, we are
struck by their roughness and intrusive character. People roar in the
streets, they blow their noses “like trumpets,”28 the music is deafening, bad
smells are all around. In the street, Huysmans did not see distinct
individuals, but a moving mass of people:
Skulls of shaven apes, snouts all over the place, noses deformed by warts
like stuffed animals and purple potatoes which stick out of thick
moustaches, mugs like drunken ducks, delirious boozy women, faded into
a burlesque jumble in the swirling clouds of smoke [our italics] 29
Like Baudelaire, Huysmans recognizes this contemporary street-life from

the Flemish painters of the past he had admired in the museum, or in the
neo-baroque work of Wiertz. But if, on canvas, these characteristics are
sublimated by aesthetics, in real life they impel Huysmans to a rapid walk
which ends in a stampede.
To summarize, Nerval’s, Baudelaire’s and Huysmans’ texts share (most
of the time) the implicit paradigm of the Parisian flâneur as this figure
appears through the canonical writings of the nineteenth century, for
example the anonymous description “Le flâneur à Paris” in Le Livre des
Cent-et-Un (1832), Auguste de Lacroix’s portrait of the flâneur in the
collective work Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, or Louis Huart’s
Physiologie du flâneur (1841), but we can also take account of the
writings of Nerval, Baudelaire and Huysmans themselves.30 One of the
conditions which needs to be fulfilled for the flâneur is complete freedom:
he does not work, not even with his body. This is why Huart excludes
from flânerie the disabled and the obese because for them walking implies
too big a physical effort.31 It is based on similar considerations that our
three writers judge flânerie impossible in Brussels: everywhere in this city
you have to climb hills, and watch your step for puddles and bad
pavement. We also know that one of the major pleasures of flânerie
consists in the observation of details of city life32 and their aesthetic
appreciation.33 This aesthetic experience presupposes first of all the
perception of forms. On the contrary, in Brussels, beside the fact that there
might be nothing to see at all, streetlife is a confrontation with the
formless, be this the faces observed by Baudelaire or the turbulent mass of
people in Huysmans. Furthermore, aesthetic experience demands a certain
distance towards the observed: we know the flâneur gazes at shopwindows
but without being a compulsive purchaser and that Baudelaire secretly
observed old women or blind people.34 According to Baudelaire and
Huysmans, this distance seems to be sacrified in Brussels where people on
the street come too close to each other and where strong smells and noise
assault the flâneur. In short, walking in Brussels appears to be a negative
image of Parisian flânerie.
*
If the model of the Parisian flâneur does not seem applicable to Brussels,
this does not mean that other forms of literary walking are not possible.
Two examples taken from Belgian twentieth-century literature, the
surrealist writer Marcel Lecomte and the contemporary poet William Cliff,
offer interesting examples of the poetic appropriation of walking through
the city.
Marcel Lecomte (1900-1966) is a writer linked to the Brussels
Surrealist movement, of which the painter René Magritte is of course the
most celebrated member. One of the particularities of the Brussels
Surrealists is that with restricted resources they aim to achieve the greatest
effect. This is how Magritte proceeds in most of his famous paintings: the
goal is not to depict strange creatures or appearances, as in the art of Dalì
or Max Ernst, but, taking advantage of a familiar context, to modify it by
small changes of size, colour or unusual connections which provoke a
surprise, and a departure from daily life. This operation was discussed by
Paul Nougé, the head of the group, who distinguished two orders of
surprise:35 one that arises from the appearance of unknown and
unexpected things (for example, a monster), and one that results from the
difference between what we expect and what really happens. It is this
second order of surprises that delighted the Surrealists and led to the
exploitation of all kinds of cliché. This way of proceeding can be applied
to painting, photography and literary texts (Nougé, for example,
manipulated stetereotypical sentences taken from a manual of grammar).
To this almost experimental procedure, Marcel Lecomte gives a rather
esoteric interpretation. He believed that we have to distinguish two stages
in artistic creation, first of all the object is “dépragmatisé,” this means
removed from its utilitarian context, then, by the way of meditative
attention, recreated in a new context, which gives us some insight in the
“secret of things.” 36
But our particular interest in Lecomte lies in the fact that walking in
the city, especially in Brussels, offers him the occasion to apply these
principles and to find inspiration for his literary texts. Besides some
travels, he stayed his whole life in Brussels, in rather poor conditions,
regularly leaving his attic room for the cafés of the Galeries Saint-Hubert,
or to walk across the city. Lecomte’s unpublished diary of the fifties37
offers interesting insights into a kind of walking which is no longer a form
of traditional flânerie. Indifferent to the aesthetic or unaesthetic aspects of
a rapidly changing city (whose transformation was mentioned earlier),
Lecomte creates his own conditions for the observation of the city by his
acute attention to every kind of sign around him which is at odds with
daily life. Let us take some examples:
A strange girl in the Passage

Quite a touching face of a young provincial. But what, very brutally,
surprises and disturbs, is her hair and the way she wore it. It was naturally
curly and she wore it down her back, which completely transformed her. If
one looked at her profile, one could ask what had made her do this, if there
was some formal or psychological motive. Or if it was her being which
made her do it. What can she think when she looks at herself in a mirror?
The square of the Museum

What is worrying here is the total absence of trees (one thinks of an
excellent cellar. The sand is all drawn). Nemon said one day to C. how
important for him was a tree he could see from his room, rue Breughel
[sic]. 38
In fact his journal constitutes the laboratory where the writer notes his
experiences from his promenades or his time in cafés. This material is
integrated into short urban narratives,39 which mostly have the same
structure and take the point of view of a walker in the city focused on a
disturbing event (“dépragmatisant”) that leads to a rupture with daily life.
Even if other cities are mentioned (London, Amsterdam, Paris) Brussels
has a key role in this narratives. The city is present several times in
“L’agression,” and in “Discrétion.” The references are precise: “Rue du
Midi,” “rue de Turin;” the “boulevard J.” could be boulevard Jacquemin.40
We sense Brussels behind the initial in the narrative “Denis”: “in the
outskirts of B.” The identity of the city is not revealed but a reader familiar
with Brussels will quickly recognize some locations, even if the described
city is not Brussels as such: in “The daily meeting,” we recognize “a
certain passage”; nevertheless this gallery belongs to a city close to the
sea.41 Even if Brussels is clearly signalled, Lecomte likes this kind of
mixture, which plays its part in calling into question the background of
daily life. In “L’agression,” the Belgian capital evokes Turin. And in
another Lecomte’s texts, Turin is itself seen through the paintings of
Chirico:
While I read Hebdomeros, it seemed to me that in Italy I would not find

with such precision and in the way Chirico had ordered them in his book,
the elements of spectacles that he presents to the reader and in which he
presents his poetic vision of the world. But, in Turin, the architectural
arrrangement of decorative elements immediately creates a Chiricoian
magic.42
It is therefore not surprising that the strange urban representations of the

Italian painter feed into Lecomte’s descriptions of Brussels: evening light
with its long shadows, factory chimneys, vacant land, suburbs, unremarkable
settings, silence, the absence of movement... These descriptions play a role
in the dynamics of the narratives: the city is the place where, for the lonely
walker, a mysterious revelation takes place through signs and coincidences.
In a way similar to Paris for the French surrealists, the imaginary Brussels
in Lecomte is part of a quest that leads to the other side of things (“l’autre
côté des choses”).
If we turn our attention to the work of the contemporary Brussels poet

William Cliff (b.1940),43 we see that walking through the Belgian capital
is again inspiring but in another way. Walking in the city is the common
point of a great part of Cliff’s poems. Unquestionably he is an urban poet,
but reading him leaves the impression of a man continuously on the move,
on foot, in numerous cities in Belgium and in the world. Yet the poet’s
major city is Brussels, where he lives. The title of one of his collections of
poems, Marcher au charbon (1978), gives at once an idea of the
importance of walking for Cliff and of the city of Brussels, the Marché-au-
Charbon being the name of the street where he lives. Historically, Cliff’s
Brussels has significantly changed since Lecomte’s time. Between 1955
and 1979 “Bruxellisation” had governed transformations in the city: this
urban politics was entirely subordinated to a savage liberalism, which
neglected real planning, despised the needs of the citizens, and made its
profit out of the laxity of the public authorities, allowing rampant
speculation. This politics led to the destruction of major architectural
works (that of the Maison du Peuple of the internationally known art
nouveau architect Horta is a worthy symbol) and even whole
neighbourhoods of the city. Unlike other Belgian poets who adopt a
nostalgic attitude towards the disappearance of the traditional city,44
William Cliff clearly confronts this “Bruxellisation”, as the phenomenon
can for example be observed from the top floor of the Brussels Royal
Library:
there is Brussels
ten centuries of constructions of demolitions
of couplings proliferations and cortèges
of men bloated with useless importance like these towers
these cathedrals and these clouds which disappear in a day
(“Bibliothèque royale,” MC, 77).45
The “Bruxellisation” literally makes him speechless: in the poem “Ma

grand-ville” he says of Brussels that
It is
The most the most the most
City
In the world
(MC, 91).46
In fact, this is a double city: masked by its bourgeois face, object of

criticism and contempt, there exists another, that of the poor and the drop-
outs, to whom Cliff feels close. Addressing the bourgeois he writes:
happily there are

all these forgotten corners
full of human filth
these corners too foul
to stick your nose into
this window where the laundress

places her irons
on a coal stove
these houses half decayed
where kids find a corner
to fight
hands off!
don’t touch our ugliness
V.D.B.47
take your hands
out of my knickers (MC, 92-3)48
Nevertheless, Cliff’s poetry is not essentially social or political. The

ugliness of Brussels is not a unique case nor is the walking in the city that
is evoked in several poems. In fact both have to be understood against the
background of a rather pessimistic thematics of existence. Cliff stresses
man’s loneliness and separation: lack of transcendence, imprisonment in
our own body, time experienced as a continual flow and at the same time
shortening life, these are the major characteristics of his vision. The
modern city is the poet’s preferred echo chamber of this attitude towards
life; walking through it is a means to come to terms with the difficulties of
existence. Of course, Brussels plays a large part from this point of view.
When Cliff has to evoke the “desert of the city” (FN, 21), a city which is
generally sad and ugly, he speaks of himself walking between squalid

houses in Brussels and looking for a place to eat: “I seek a restaurant
amongst the lepers of shacks / dirty children’s hiccups, black tiles covered
by rags” ( EL, 121).49 Misery exposes its dirt, “crusts of filth” (“croûtes de
crasse,” EL, 121). Cliff mentions also the area of prostitution close to the
Nord station: “you see these houses in shreds these reservoirs of filth /
these pavements gutted gnawed by tarts and misery” (EL, 216).50 Daily
life is mind-numbing in Brussels, “this horrible city where everyone is
needy and in a hurry” (“cette ville horrible où tout le monde court à sa
besogne,” EB, 18). For Cliff it is also the city where he experiences the
torments of the homosexual flirt on the street.
In opposition to the burden of everyday life and its contemporary and
urban expression, Cliff defines a utopia where the sacred, nature,
childhood and emancipated eroticism play a seminal role. It would take us
too long to develop all these aspects in detail. Above all we want to stress
the fact that this rather traditional Baudelairean thematics of “spleen” and
“idéal” finds an expression through walking. As Cliff experiences
imperfection above all, walking for him is in the first instance a
consequence of the latter: “marcher au charbon” means a melancholic
walk, going around with his dark thoughts, “dark thoughts which darken
me” (“pensées noires qui me charbonnent,” EB, 19), his problem being
himself, as is stressed by the use of the transitive use of the verb
“promener”: “I already see myself walking my body like a phantom” (“je
me vois déjà promenant mon corps comme un fan / tôme’, IE, 42; this
translation loses the play on “tome,” volume). This walk is necessarily a
lonely roving through the city:
we weep as we feel our flesh sick

like something thrown to dogs at the crossroads
and we are so alone! in this awful city
alone to walk on its tarmac alone to go
asking the night to open its ditch (IE, 117).51
This kind of walk also often acquires an erotic dimension when Cliff is
going around looking for a companion. In several poems Brussels is an
important place from this point of view. Similar to Baudelaire, Cliff
evokes the ephemeral encounter where the gaze of a possible lover has a
major importance. Beyond eroticism, in such encounters Cliff can find a
mirror of his own misery (see for example “Les ivrognes,” EB, 20).
Furthermore the movement of walking itself is for Cliff often a symbol
of time passing and never fails to suggest mortality:
I see a black shadow run before me / … this shadow of my black being

which ever advances before me / as if to warn me of time running out (FN,
80).
the city where my footsteps wander and lose themselves (FN, 59).
at each pace the meaning escapes you

at each pace a death opens before your steps (FN, 58).52
In a similar sense, the walk can be a form of remembering things lost:

“walk and regret the days that have passed” (“marche et regrette les
journées passées,” FN, 58). Finally, walking expresses an absurd cyclical
movement, from the poet’s miserable Brussels attic to the street, and from
the street again to his attic.
In all these cases, walking through the city is a way of coping with the
negativity of existence. But a reverse point of view is possible: urban
walking can contribute to restoring meaning to life. This can occur in
different ways. First of all, sometimes Cliff discovers in the city (for
example, Brussels) privileged places (neigbourhoods, parks, etc.) where he
feels good and where the destructive charge of time is suspended (as here
in poem n° 31 of Fête nationale):
rain stops the sky tears open

a bright sun raps at the windows
such that one believes that death must have fled
with the stained waters flowing into rivers
I would like to stop at this place

in the city where my paces wander and lose themselves
to sit and watch people going by
an endless film an endless movement.53
But the movement of walking in itself can bring salvation, as Cliff

expresses several times:
let us leave this place, departure is a dart / which can make us see the green
air of a new sky (FN, 96).
Stand up! we must master all valerian downcastness

the vibration of Being will
overcome your resistance
get up and walk! send the bic to be silent with people
who won’t have found the living place in their domain (MC, 31).54
Cliff is becoming aware of the fact that walking means creating new life,
this in opposition to his more frequent typical romantic belief that
moments lost in the past are worth more than the present we have (see
MC, 31).
Finally it appears that the real site of this profitable walking is the
poem itself. In Marcher au charbon, walking becomes a metaphor for
writing: the rhythm of walking is echoed in the rhythm of the typical
regular verses of Cliff’s poems. Similar to walking, poetic writing implies
steps and consists of “counting step by step / what one’s life makes of
banal experience” (“compter pas à pas / ce que sa vie lui rend de banale
expérience,” MC, 11). In addition writing is associated with travel. Similar
to productive walking in the city which can overcome the feeling of
dispossession by time passing, poetical writing is a way to compensate for
the emptiness of existence.
If Brussels, in comparison to Paris, is the city where canonical flânerie

turned out to be nearly impossible, as we saw in our reading of Nerval,
Baudelaire and Huysmans, nonetheless, the fact remains that in the
twentieth century the unattractive and damaged Belgian capital can be a
place where walking contributes to a poetic experience, be it in the
surrealist sense, in Marcel Lecomte, or rather in the sense of an existential
adventure, in William Cliff. Having been disfigured by a mercantile and
narrow spirit, Brussels is transfigured by literature.
Notes

1
Voltaire speaks about Brussels as a “triste ville” in a letter to M. Formont, dated
April 1st 1740 (Voltaire, Correspondance, 13 vols (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, 1964-1993), vol. 2 (1739-1748), 283).
2
See the items “Bruxelliser,” “Promoteurs” and “Urbanisme” in Patrick Roegiers’
personal dictionary about Belgium entitled Le Mal du pays. Autobiographie de la
Belgique (Paris: Seuil, 2003).
3
On this point, see Pierre Mertens, “Ce sont des villes,” in Robert Frickx and
David Gullentops (eds), Le paysage urbain dans les lettres françaises de Belgique
(Brussels: V.U.B. Press, 1994), 73-81. See “Architecte, Architeck, Architek” in
Roegiers, Le Mal du pays.
4
Jean-Baptiste Baronian, “Bruxelles, une ville de passage,” Cahiers Simenon, vol.
2, Les lieux de la mémoire (1988), 111.
5
On these authors see René Maurice, La Fugue à Bruxelles. Proscrits, exilés,
réfugiés et autres voyageurs (Paris: Éditions le Félin, 2003).

6
See the chapters Rhin et Flandre (IV. Bruxelles; V. Théâtres et Palais) and Les
Fêtes de Hollande (I. Retour à Bruxelles) in Nerval, Œuvres complètes, ed. J.
Guillaume and Claude Pichois (Gallimard: Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1993), 186-
98 (henceforward OC).
7
“Ce beau théâtre n’a en ce moment qu’un seul défaut. Il est fermé.”
8
“bizarre statue ... personnage symbolique et difficilement définissable.”
9
See for example in Voyages en Europe, ed. Michel Brix and Hisashi Mizuno
(Paris: Editions du Sandre, 2011), 62, 78, 96 and 315.
10
“il n’y a pas de grande ville sans fleuve.” “Qu’est-ce qu’une capitale où l’on n’a
pas la faculté de se noyer? Gand a l’Escaut, Liège a la Meuse; Bruxelles n’a qu’un
pauvre ruisseau qu’il intitule la Senne, triste contrefaçon.” “Imaginez ensuite au
centre du pays le plus plat de la terre une ville qui n’est que montagne.”
11
“tout flâneur y devient poussif.” “c’est la vie de Paris dans un cercle étroit”.
“Bruxelles est la lune de Paris, aimable satellite d’ailleurs, auquel on peut
reprocher que d’avoir perdu, en nous imitant, beaucoup de son originalité
brabançonne.”
12
“Sur la Belgique,” Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris:
Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1976), 817-976. Our references are to this
edition, henceforward OC.
13
“Bruxelles sent le savon noir.” “Pas de vie dans la rue.” “Peu de trottoirs, ou
trottoirs interrompus (conséquence de la liberté individuelle, poussée à l’extrême).
Affreux pavé.” “Tristesse d’une ville sans fleuve.”
14
“Pas d’étalage aux boutiques. / Les flâneries devant les boutiques, cette
jouissance, cette instruction, chose impossible! Chacun chez soi.”
15
“Stupidité menaçante des visages. Cette bêtise universelle inquiète comme un
danger indéfini et permanent.”
16
“La physionomie est lourde, empâtée. / Têtes de gros lapins jaunes, cils jaunes.
Air de moutons qui rêvent.”
17
“Manière dont les habitants se cognent et portent leurs cannes.”
18
“Le visage belge, ou plutôt bruxellois. / Chaos. / Informe, difforme, rêche, lourd,
dur, non fini, taillé au couteau. / Dentition angulaire. ... Visage obscur sans regard,
comme celui d’un cyclope, d’un cyclope non pas borgne, mais aveugle. ”
19
“En somme, c’est bien la même race qu’autrefois. De même que le pisseur et le
vomisseur des Kermesses des Ostades et des Teniers expriment encore exactement
la joie et le badinage flamand, de même nous retrouverons dans la vie actuelle des
types ankylosés des peintres primitifs du Nord.”
20
See the Croquis parisiens, 1880, with an extended edition in 1886.
21
Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Carnet d’un voyageur à Bruxelles,” Le musée des deux
mondes, 15 novembre 1876 [http:// www.huysmans.org/carnet.htm]
22
Joris-Karl Huysmans, “La grande place de Bruxelles,” La République des lettres,
23 octobre 1876 [http://www. huysmans .org/bruxelles.htm]
23
The quotations are from “Carnet d’un voyageur à Bruxelles” unless indicated
otherwise.
24
“J’ai fui, et retraversant Bruxelles, d’un bout à l’autre, j’ai déambulé au travers
du quartier Léopold et j’ai atteint le musée Wiertz.” “Ereinté, fourbu, las d’avoir

regardé ces armées de monuments, ces bâtisses en pierre bleue, agrémentées
d’espions aux fenêtres, je suis allé m’échouer à la maison des Brasseurs.” “un lacis
de sentes et de rues qui s’enchevêtrent et ne se débrouillent que près des quais au
bois et à la chaux.” “De la boue jusqu’à la cheville, des flaques d’eau sur les
trottoirs mal cuirassés d’asphalte.” “Les rues sont mal éclairées, le soir; la place est
noire, les avenues désertes, toute la vie de Bruxelles se réfugie sur la place de la
Monnaie et dans les galeries Saint-Hubert.” “à l’aide de quels philtres, à l’aide de
quels dictames opiacés, peut-on parvenir à tuer l’interminable soirée?” “large
d’une enjambée, semble un ruban vert jeté au bas d’un ravin de briques roses.”
25
This quotation and the five following are from “La grande place de Bruxelles.”
26
“on gueulait à tue-tête la Brabançonne, on s’empiffrait des couques de Dinant,
on se gavait de pistolets au beurre, on pignochait des biscottes, on suçait la bouillie
verte des entrailles des crabes, on bâfrait des gaufrettes sèches, on déchiquetait des
anguilles fumées, et des violoneux raclaient leurs cordes, des taverniers pompaient
la bière, des mioches se troussaient le long des murs, d’autres vagissaient, d’autres
encore tétaient des femmes roses et, çà et là”; “des soldats se rigolaient, la panse
débridée”; “un homme ventripotent, la margoulette en zigzag, les dents courant la
prétentaine dans les gencives, les fesses se tassant sur les bois d’une table, les
jambes battant le rappel sur les pieds d’une chaise, chantonnait, somnolent, abruti
par la bière de Diest et l’alcool de Hasselt.” “mentons à retroussis, des nez en
trompette ou en arceau, tout le sanhédrin des déesses vieillies qui attendent la fin
du crépuscule pour aller cavalcader, dans les nuages, un manche à balai entre les
deux cuisses.” “Bruxelles, cette terre promise des bières fortes et des filles, ce
Chanaan des priapées et des saouleries!”; “les pompes à bière manœuvrent sans
relâche”; “engloutissent” “pintes,” etc..
27
“Hideurs enténébrées” (“La grande place de Bruxelles”).
28
“en claironnant” (“La grande place de Bruxelles”).
29
“Des crânes de magots chauves, des groins en désarroi, des pifs bossués de
verrues à peluches et de vitelottes qui saillaient écarlates dans le taillis des
moustaches, des trognes de pochards en goguette, des caboches d’ivrognesses en
délire, s’estompaient en un fouillis burlesque dans la fumée tourbillonnante (italics
are ours; “La grande place de Bruxelles”).
30
We are perfectly aware of the fact that the Baudelairean flâneur is not absolutely
the same as the one of the first part of the nineteeth century, but these differences
are not relevant in our context.
31
Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (Paris: Aubert-Lavigne, 1841), see chapter
II.
32
“Nous ne reconnaissons pour flâneurs que ce petit nombre privilégié d’hommes
de loisir et d’esprit qui étudient le cœur humain sur la nature même, et la société
dans ce grand livre du monde toujours ouvert sous leurs yeux” (Auguste de
Lacroix, "Le Flâneur", Les Français peints par eux-mêmes [1840-1842], 2 vols
(Paris: Omnibus, 2004), vol. 2, 153).
33
“Un profond sentiment de tout ce qui est beau est la première condition de sa
nature” (Lacroix, ibid., 161).
34
See “Les Petites vieilles” and “Les Aveugles” in the Fleurs du Mal.

35
Des mots à la rumeur d’une oblique pensée (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1983),
99.
36
See our interpretation of Marcel Lecomte’s aesthetics: “Marcel Lecomte,
critique,” in David Gullentops (ed.), Le Sens à venir. Création poétique et
démarche critique. Hommage à Léon Somville (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995), 65-81.
37
Manuscript in the Archives et Musée de la littérature of the Bibliothèque royale
in Brussels.
38
“Une curieuse fille au Passage. / Assez touchant visage de jeune provinciale.
Mais ce qui, très violemment, surprend et inquiète, c’est sa chevelure et la
disposition qu’elle lui a donnée. Ils frisent naturellement et elle les rejette sur le
dos, ce qui la transforme totalement. Si on l’observe de profil, on peut se demander
ce qui la pousse à agir de la sorte, s’il y a là détermination formelle ou
psychologique. Ou si c’est son être qui la pousse ici. Que peut-il se passer en elle
lorsqu’elle se regarde dans une glace?” “La place du Musée / Ce qui est ici
angoissant, c’est l’absence complète d’arbres (on pense à un admirable caveau. Le
sable est tout en dessin). Nemon disait un jour à C. l’importance que prenait pour
lui un arbre qu’il apercevait de sa chambre, rue Breughel [sic].”
39
See Marcel Lecomte, Œuvres (Brussels: Jacques Antoine, 1980). This book
contains La Servante au miroir, first published in 1941.
40
“L’agression” (101), “Discrétion” (105), “Rue du Midi” (120), “rue de Turin”
(101),
41
“Denis … aux environs de B” (135), “La rencontre quotidienne” (59, 62).
42
“Lorsque je lisais Hebdomeros, il me paraissait que je ne retrouverais avec tant
de précision en Italie et tels qu’ils sont arrangés peu s’en faut par Chirico, dans son
livre, les éléments des spectacles qu’il présente au lecteur et où il donne sa vision
poétique du monde. Or, à Turin, l’arrangement architectural des éléments du décor
donne immédiatement un enchantement chiricien” (ibid., 91).
43
The following abbreviations are used: Ecrasez-le (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) EL;
Marcher au charbon (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), MC; Fête nationale (Paris:
Gallimard, 1992), FN; L’Etat belge (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), EB; Immense
existence (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), IE.
44
See for example the poems of Armand Bernier, Bruxelles la mal-aimée
(Bruxelles: Le Cahier des arts, 1959).
45
“voilà Bruxelles / dix siècles de constructions de démolitions / d’accouplements
de proliférations et de cortèges / d’hommes bouffis d’importance inutile comme
ces tours / ces cathédrales et ces nuages qui s’en vont dans le jour.”
46
“C’est la ville / La plus la plus la plus / Du monde.”
47
Paul Vanden Boeynants (1919-2001), Belgian prime minister in 1966-1968 and
1978-1979.
48
“heureusement qu’il y a / tous ces coins oubliés remplis de crasse humaine / ces
coins trop crapuleux pour y fourrer vot’ nez // cette vitrine où la repasseuse / pose
encore ses fers de fonte / sur une cuisinière à charbon ces maisons à moitié
écroulées / où les gamins trouvent un coin pour se tirer la queue // bas les pattes! /
touchez pas à nos laideurs // V.D.B. / pas tes mains / dans mon slip.”

49
“Je cherche un restaurant entre des lèpres de bicoques,/ des hoquets d’enfants
sales, des carreaux noirs couverts de loques.”
50
“Tu vois ces maisons en lambeaux ces réservoirs de crasse/ ces trottoirs
éventrés rongés de grues et de mélasse.”
51
“nous pleurons en sentant notre viande malade / comme un morceau jeté aux
chiens des carrefours / et nous sommes si seuls ! dans cette ville atroce / seuls pour
marcher sur son tarmac seuls pour aller / demander à la nuit de nous ouvrir sa
fosse.”
52
“je vis une ombre noire courir devant moi / [...] cette ombre de mon être noir
qui avançait toujours me précédant/ comme pour m’avertir de la chute du temps”
(FN, 80); “la ville où mon pas erre et se perd” (FN, 59); “le sens à chaque pas
t’échappe un mort / à chaque pas s’étend devant tes pas” (FN, 58).
53
“la pluie s’arrête le ciel se déchire / un soleil si brillant craque aux fenêtres /
qu’on croit que la mort a dû fuir avec / les eaux souillées coulées dans les rivières
// j’aimerais m’arrêter à cet endroit / de la ville où mon pas erre et se perd /
m’asseoir regarder les gens défiler / un film sans fin un mouvement sans être.”
54
“allons partons d’ici le départ est un dard / qui peut nous faire voir l’air vert
d’un nouveau ciel” (FN, 96); “debout! il faut briser tout valérien abattement / la
vibration de l’Être aura raison de tes contraintes / lève-toi et marche! envoie le bic
se taire avec les gens / qui n’auront pas pu trouver le lieu vivant de leur
domaine” (MC, 31).
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
UNDERGROUND, OVERGROUND,
WANDERING FREE:
FLÂNERIE REIMAGINED IN PRINT,
ON SCREEN AND ON RECORD
KEVIN MILBURN
Following the Flâneur: Representations of the Metropolis

This chapter provides a broad historical overview of how scholars and
artists have chosen to interact with and represent the city via a range of
creative expressive forms. It does this by examining the lasting impact and
continuing relevance of the flâneur, that figure so “associated with urban
wandering and observing.”1 An attempt is made to highlight how traits
associated with the flâneur have been co-opted by those working in
literature, film, visual art and music who both think and create
“urbanistically.”2 The output of these practitioners tries to convey the
amalgam of sensations and experiences encountered in urban
environments, a task that is rarely as straightforward as it appears. As
Howell reminds us, there are pronounced but often unacknowledged
epistemological difficulties tied to any attempt (artistic or otherwise) to
understand and describe the sense and meaning of a city: “we are forced to
note that the problem of ‘knowing’ the city is not restricted to fictional
treatments, but bleeds unconfined between scientific and literary
representations of the city.”3 Indeed, Howell argues that this wish “to
know” the city, or indeed any place, is essentially futile and reductive,
furthermore, it should be viewed with suspicion, and as being a by-product
of rationalist attempts to quell unease about the modern city through
seeking to give reassurance that “the city can, through description, be
known and, by knowledge, be controlled.”4
326 Chapter Fifteen
Engaging with the Flâneur. And the Flâneuse

The flâneur, a figure commonly associated with ideas relating to
modernity has, over the last twenty years or so, become something of a
divining rod for sociologists, in particular, such as Jenks and Tester,5 and
cultural geographers, including Howell, Pinder, and Shields,6 who have
been interested in developing new ways of examining aspects of
contemporary urban life. Engagement with the flâneur has informed
research on mediated depictions of post-modernity,7 cyberflânerie8 and
gendered dimensions relating to urban strolling and observing.9
This relatively recent engagement by the academy with the flâneur
occurred after a lengthy hiatus, following Walter Benjamin’s pioneering
and celebrated studies on the subject in the 1930s. Benjamin’s work on the
flâneur focussed on Paris in the mid-nineteenth century and, more
specifically still, on the output and activities of the poet, Charles
Baudelaire. In this research, and in his writings on his home city of Berlin,
Benjamin was involved in a sustained search for the signs, metaphors and
illusions of modernity. Following Benjamin’s work there then followed a
lengthy period of abeyance in critical study of the flâneur. This occurred
despite the fact that, during this interregnum, a diverse range of visual,
literary and musical artists began to provide examples of urban
representation which owed a clear debt to aspects associated with the
flâneur, and which the remainder of this chapter will reflect upon.
Prone by its very nature to wandering, the flâneur is difficult to pin
down. There is no set definition for who, or even indeed what, the flâneur
is. It has however long been agreed that attached to this figure is
“something of the quality of oral tradition and bizarre urban myth,”10 and
that in an identity parade of urban archetypes one would have little
difficulty detecting him from the following description:
The spectator and depicter of modern life, most specifically in relation to

contemporary art and the sights of the city. The flâneur moves through
space and among the people with a viscosity that both enables and
privileges vision … The flâneur possesses a power, it walks at will, freely
and seemingly without purpose, but simultaneously with an inquisitive
wonder and an infinite capacity to absorb the activities of the collective –
often formulated as “the crowd.”11
This is a shadowy figure that acquires empirical data by strolling, looking,

hearing, smelling and feeling, sometimes writing up the consequent
findings in the form of poetry. The flâneur is more identifiable for what he
does – engaging in the activity of flânerie – than for whom he is or what
Underground, Overground, Wandering Free 327
he looks like. And, traditionally the flâneur has been assumed to be male,
in part because the flâneur’s natural domain, the public spaces of the city,
have been historically viewed as being inviolably masculine and shaped,
in part, by the direction and desire of the male gaze. Janet Wolff contends
there was no role as flâneuse available to women: “they could be
prostitutes, widows, lesbians or murder victims but the ‘respectable’
woman could not stroll alone in the city.”12 It is a view that has provoked
considerable debate. For example, concerning the era in which the concept
of the flâneur emerged (the term being first referenced in 1806,13 Elizabeth
Wilson argues that contrary to Wolff’s assertion, many lone women were
present in the public spaces of the cities, and that, like men, they were
often out “promenading.”14 However, a key difference was that women
nearly always undertook such activities whilst wearing some sort of
disguise. Given the faceless persona often associated with the flâneur, this
stance could be deemed appropriate, particularly when one considers that a
key desire of Baudelaire’s was to be “away from home, and yet to find
oneself at home everywhere; to see the world, to be at the centre of the
world; and yet, to remain hidden from the world.”15
Over time the flâneur’s gendered role has become even less stable and
attention has increasingly begun to be paid to aspects of female flânerie,
particularly with regard to its representation in works of popular culture,
including literature í particularly historical literary fiction16 and
contemporary fiction17– and film. With regard to the latter, Amy Murphy
puts forward the notion of the flâneuse in her study of Roman Holiday
(1953) and Lost In Translation (2003):
in tracing the references to the flâneur / flâneuse as found in these two

films, one can begin to map a certain trajectory of contemporary gender
relations in respect to urban space from the post-World War II era to the
present … [and] understand the context in which the “city” itself is seen as
a site for such transformations.18
A consequence of the flâneur being co-opted into so many locations,

scenarios and guises is an increase in the confusion and intrigue that now
surrounds the figure. This is compounded by the fact that the flâneur,
whether in male or female mode, can be variously presented as a person, a
metaphor, or a fictional character. Increasingly, the flâneur is also
portrayed as a conduit through which writers or researchers can addresses
issues of being, including psychological impacts perceived as resulting
from the effects of modernity. As Tester puts it: “Flânerie is the
observation of the fleeting and the transitory which is the other half of
modernity to the permanent and central sense of self. Flânerie is the doing
328 Chapter Fifteen
... thanks to which the flâneur hopes and believes he will be able to find
the truth of his being.”19
Along with Tester, a growing number of other social scientists,
including Jenks, Featherstone, and Pinder,20 contend that flânerie is not a
time or place specific activity. They argue that this oxymoronic mode of
detached engagement is a malleable concept as highlighted by its re-
emergence at regular intervals and in different guises. Perhaps one useful
way for us to regard the notion of flânerie is, in Featherstone’s words, as
“a way of reading urban texts, a methodology for uncovering the traces of
social meaning that are embedded in the layered fabric of the city.”21 Mike
Savage adopts a similar stance when arguing for the utility of flânerie as
an investigative tool. Continuing this theme, he contends one possible
reason for flânerie having been out of fashion for so long may have been a
misinterpretation of the intentions of the author most associated with it:
“Walter Benjamin’s interest in the flâneur… is not primarily concerned
with delineating it as an actual social type which existed in specific urban
historical settings, but as a theoretical, critical, counter to the idea of the
mass.”22
Providing strident opposing views to those presented by the likes of
Jenks and Savage, Michael Bull23 and Janet Wolff24 contend that any
engagement with flânerie serves little purpose besides perpetuating a
generalized aestheticization of urban experience and the individual’s
engagement with urban space. But it could equally be argued that to wish
away a tendency for such romanticization is futile, and that the main task
of researchers and artists should instead be to examine how this desire has
been adapted and expressed across different time periods and locations, as
well as in diverse artistic representations. If this latter view is adopted,
then a fuller understanding of this elliptical notion of the flâneur presents a
possible platform from which to examine the impetus behind and the
resilience of the urban gaze, and also offers a useful starting point for any
interrogation of its “taken-for-grantedness.”
As has already been alluded to, Charles Baudelaire í the bourgeois,
well-connected Parisian poet who also engaged with those on the fringes
of society í is widely recognized as having been an instrumental figure in
representing and embodying the position of the flâneur in relation to the
wider urban environment. His actions and work articulated its liminal role
both in society and in space, as sociologist David Frisby was later to allude
to, when commenting on “the marginality of the flâneur’s location within
the city (seeking asylum in the crowd) ... The flâneur’s gaze upon the city
is veiled… It is the metropolis at a distance.”25
In mid-nineteenth-century Paris this distance was partly facilitated by

the construction of pedestrian shopping arcades, created by erecting glass
roofs across inner city streets or passages. The significance of their
construction was that, prior to this, it had been
impossible to stroll about everywhere in the city. Before Haussmann, wide

pavements were rare; the narrow ones afforded little protection from
vehicles. Flânerie could hardly have assumed the importance it did without
the arcades… It is in this world that the flâneur is at home; he provides the
arcade … with its chronicler and philosopher.26
These arcades (passages) can be interpreted as being “the first international

style of modern architecture [and] hence part of the lived experience of a
worldwide, metropolitan generation.”27 Walter Benjamin believed these
particular material circumstances were of such crucial importance that the
flâneur was a figure that was historically specific to the arcades of mid-
nineteenth-century Paris. But in much of their writing Benjamin and
Baudelaire fail to distinguish between Paris and modernity, and indeed
imply the French capital was the sole site of modernity during this time.
Not only do they suggest that flânerie began with the building of the
arcades, Benjamin also insists it ended with the construction of the
department stores at the end of the same century, a development that
Parkhurst Ferguson similarly claims, “alters flânerie almost beyond
recognition. If, as contemporaries reiterate, the arcades offer the flâneur a
privileged site, they do so because the space they offer is at once public
and private.”28
With regard to the origins of flânerie, Shields, expanding on earlier
work by Benjamin,29 observes that: “The flâneur, or street prowler and
wanderer, is glorified in the work of Balzac and Alexandre Dumas and
later in a different tone in the work of the modernists such as Aragon and
Baudelaire.”30 Meanwhile, if a family tree of flânerie is extended beyond
the confines of Gallic literature one encounters what looks to be a close
relative in Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical Confessions of an
English Opium Eater, a book set in London and published in 1821, the
year of Baudelaire’s birth.31 The narrative conceit of Confessions is of a
life lived amongst, but separate from, the crowd, whilst the perspective De
Quincey’s offers – downwardly mobile, leisured, drugged and male – is
remarkably similar to that later adopted by Baudelaire, who wrote a
French translation of the work. Another tale set in the British capital, the
short story The Man of the Crowd, written by an American, Edgar Allen
Poe,32 was also an acknowledged major influence on Baudelaire and, later,
on Benjamin,33 a fact which could call in to question the latter’s insistence
330 Chapter Fifteen
on the exclusivity of the French metropolis in the formulation of the

flâneur.
Meanwhile, moving forward rather than back, Alain de Botton, in his
meditation on travelling, landscapes and art, The Art of Travel, identifies
pronounced thematic similarities between the work of Baudelaire and the
American artist, Edward Hopper. The painter first discovered Baudelaire’s
poetry on a visit to Paris in 1906 and was supposedly instantly drawn to it,
reading and reciting it throughout his life. As de Botton states “the
attraction is not hard to understand: there was a shared interest in solitude,
in city life, in modernity, in the solace of the night and in the places of
travel.”34
Postwar Transmogrifications of the Flâneur

The idea of the flâneur has proven to be both historically resilient and
geographically restless, as reflected in the wide range of cultural works
where its trace or influence has continued to be detectable. In literature, in
song, and on canvas, on the big screen, the small screen and, more
recently, the CCTV screen,35 the imprint of the flâneur has been repeatedly
invoked, often providing “an emblematic representative of modernity and
the personification of contemporary urbanity.”36 For much of the first four
decades of the twentieth century, the popular image of the city was one of
expansion: upwards, outwards, and onwards. It was an impression
reflected in the Futurist art movement, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
one whose momentum was stalled by the onset of the Great War. Futurism
extolled industrialisation, speed, modernity and automation, “virtues”
ironically associated with the Great War and later questioned in filmmaker
Fritz Lang’s visionary critique of the future, Metropolis, released in 1927.
By contrast with the Futurists’ optimism, in the post-World War II
period, an image of the city as a site for artful melancholia began to
appear, and with it came a new manifestation of the flâneur. By this time,
this Zelig-like37 character had long since left the Parisian arcades. He was
now more likely to be found in a shabby office with a broken Venetian
blind covering its door, or behind the wheel of a battered Buick. His
language had changed too, though this was hard to tell, since he remained
taciturn. He criss-crossed the city in the pages of pulp fiction and through
the medium of film, gaining, in the process, a sheen of sophistication via
the epithet noir. As with the flâneur, there is no one agreed definition for
noir; Simpson suggest the following: “a look, a feeling (of uncertainty,
cynicism and of being trapped) which often turns into paranoia, a theme
(usually crime or corruption) and a tone far removed from the corporate
optimism which typified most Hollywood films in the war years.”38
In this sombre, after-hours urban setting a new variant of the flâneur
thus emerges. The guise he most commonly adopted was that of private
detective, as investigated by cultural geographers including Schmid,39
Howell40 and Farish.41 However, moral ambiguity was central to noir and
the anti-hero was just as frequently a gangster or racketeer, as demonstrated
by Harry Lime, a character in Graham Greene’s novella, The Third Man.
But regardless of profession, these adrift-in-the-city men all possessed
traits associated with the flâneur, most notably there is a sense that they
can see us but we cannot see them. In true flâneur fashion, the character of
Lime is invisible for much of Carol Reed’s film adaptation, before finally,
and briefly, emerging from the expressionistic shadows, camouflaged in
black.
Many noir films relied to a considerable extent on their soundtracks for
their creative potency and on the influence of photography and art for the
impact generated by their striking cinematography and production
design.42 Thus films from the post-war period need to be understood within
a broader artistic mediation on urban representation, but nonetheless it is
difficult to underestimate the considerable degree to which films have
“contributed to the image, legibility and branding of our cities. Controlled
narratives … primarily male-authored and metropolitan, have shaped the
way we see ourselves in relation to the spaces we inhabit.”43 And this is
particularly true of noir films, a genre in which the city becomes “a realm
of dark spaces through which the sense of danger is visually constructed
… The social divisions of urban life are mapped out in these light and dark
spaces … The city is as much an actor in the accounts as the characters.”44
In many noir works the central character í usually a private
investigator operating from a detached, socially marginal vantage point –
often appears to be in possession of almost otherworldly abilities. In
looking at the special qualities possessed by stereotypical noir anti-heroes
such as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip
Marlowe, Christophe Den Tandt has observed the ways in which the city:
though fragmented, can nevertheless be reconstituted by the efforts of a

protagonist who serves as a retotalizing device … Chandler or Hammett’s
protagonists are white male fantasies of empowerment endowed with a
quasi-miraculous license to exercise their skills wherever they please …
eccentricity and alienation informs the canonical figure of the private
investigator.45
332 Chapter Fifteen
This sense of the private detective possessing an all-seeing eye / ‘I’ is also
taken up in Paul Auster’s influential The New York Trilogy, particularly in
the first part of the novel, City of Glass. This story examines the nature of
identity in, and of, the city: how one constructs and inhabits identity,
projects it, and interprets the identity of others. The narrative plays on and
with the conventions of the pursuit thriller, with the central character,
Quinn, drawn into a voyeuristic relationship with Manhattan and with the
individual he is pursuing:
Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the
letter ‘I,’ standing for ‘investigator,’ it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny
life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was
also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from
himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him.46
Here a dialectic connecting the private detective, the flâneur and the urban
voyeur is revealed: although the apparent interest of all three is in the
crowd invariably there is a fundamentally more solipsistic and narcissistic
agenda at work, one principally concerned with matters of selfhood and
the feasibility of forging connections to the urban environment and to
other people within it; a feeling perhaps most succinctly summarised by
E.M. Forster in Howards End: “Only Connect! ... Live in fragments no
longer.”47
Frank Sinatra and the Nocturnal American City

Thus far, my focus has been principally on the visual dimension to debates
concerning flânerie and forms of urban representation, but for the
remainder of this essay I wish to reflect on the rather less commonly
encountered part played in such discussions by popular music, starting
first with a case study of Frank Sinatra’s output in the late 1950s, before
moving on to consider more contemporary works which in different ways
can plausibly be said to evoke evolving notions of the flâneur.
In the mid-to-late 1950s, some years after the late 1940s highpoint in
popularity for noir films, Frank Sinatra recorded a series of concept
albums (Figs 15-1, 15-2, 15-3, 15-4). Among these were In The Wee Small
Hours and Only The Lonely, which similarly revealed a discernible tension
between stasis and restless movement in unnamed urban spaces. These
records also drew on the angst and heightened sense of observation
associated with noir and on a mood of post-war social and cultural
uncertainty, and, most consistently of all, they dwelt upon the theme of
Fig. 15-1. Frank Sinatra album, No One Cares, Capitol Records, 1959.
Fig. 15-2. Frank Sinatra album, In The Wee Small Hours, Capitol Records, 1955.
334 Chapter Fifteen
Fig. 15-3. Frank Sinatra album, Point of No Return, Capitol Records, 1962.
Fig. 15-4. Frank Sinatra album, Songs For Young Lovers, Capitol Records, 1954.
loneliness. Two of the best known examples of this type of material were
“One For My Baby (And One More for the Road),” included on Only The
Lonely, and also that album’s title track. The latter song was composed by
the celebrated songwriters, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, who
also wrote the sleeve notes for the album which expanded on its central
theme:
Loneliness is many things to many people. For the keeper of the lighthouse
it is the loneliness that attends endless days and nights of watching the
angry sea. For the New York policeman on the dawn patrol it is the
measured loneliness of his beat to the accompaniment of the nocturnal
noises of the city.
The dejected urban persona Sinatra inhabited on this album and others
produced in the period was also reflected in the artwork that accompanied
them. These sleeves, owe a debt to stylistic conventions associated with
film noir and with the artist, Edward Hopper, who produced etchings and
paintings that attempted to reflect “modern urban anomie, exploring the
meditative mood of his subjects through the ... space he portray[ed],”48 as
demonstrated in works such as Night Shadows and Nighthawks. The sleeve
of the No One Cares album, in particular, echoes a trait discernible in
many Hopper paintings in that the subjects frequently seem to be
“anonymous and withdrawn, as if Hopper wanted to stress their
separateness from each other, rather than what brought them together.”49
The sense of despair on Sinatra’s downbeat saloon-song albums, which
alternated with his upbeat, swing albums, was pronounced, and at times
unremitting. Indeed, ahead of the release of In The Wee Small Hours
album, Capitol executives expressed concern that a “work so relentlessly
dark might be received as oppressive and alienating.”50 Meanwhile, it has
been said of Where Are You? (1957), a record dominated by Gordon
Jenkins’ mournful string arrangements, that, “the tempos are crawling ...
the mood is doggedly downbeat ... the anguish unfettered.”51 The
atmosphere on the album is perhaps best reflected by Sinatra’s rendition of
the Leonard Bernstein song, “Lonely Town”:
New York, New York

Or a village in Iowa
The only difference is the name
If you're alone
Whether on Main Street
Or on Broadway
They are both the same
A town's a lonely town
When you pass through
And there is no one waiting there for you.
T.H. Adamowski contends that on such lachrymose urban reveries the

singer was projecting a distinct pop-existentialist persona,52 one in keeping
with what Keith Tester states were “existentialist attempts to discover the
secrets of being in the modern (namely urban, metropolitan, public),
336 Chapter Fifteen
world.”53 Such questions were in vogue in the mid-1950s, as demonstrated

by philosophical essays such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and
Human Emotions54 but also by forms of musical practice in America, from
Sinatra’s forlorn urban wanderings to Miles Davis’ melancholy jazz
reflections, articulated on Kind of Blue, released in 1959.
In the artwork and music associated with Sinatra’s concept albums,
street life, particularly as experienced in the early hours, is presented as a
site for contemplation, as demonstrated by songs such as “I Cover the
Waterfront” and “I’ve Been to Town.” But in addition to lyrics, titles and
artwork, attention should be also paid to the impact of the melismatic
swoops and mannered sighs of Sinatra’s vocals.55 As David Toop
observes, it is principally the voice that “maps the limitations and extent of
the human body, connecting and separating inside from outside, self and
other… the voice articulates the body and its orientation in space.”56 By
thinking in such ways, perhaps flânerie can be reconsidered as not just a
visual activity but as something that can also be reflected on from an
orallly/aurally framed standpoint.
Conclusion
Frank Sinatra through his music, wittingly or otherwise, supplemented
scopic and literary manifestations of cities that owed much to the flâneur’s
poetic gaze in nineteenth-century Paris and strands of mid-twentieth-
century American painting and noir influenced fiction and cinema. These
artistic representations reflected Georg Simmel’s view of the modern city
as being “simultaneously the site of freedom and of isolation,”57 a
statement alluding to a central contradiction associated with the city,
namely that the pull of liberation it is seen to afford is a freedom
implicated in a resultant sense of drift and ennui.
The late 1950s work of Frank Sinatra can be viewed as part of a long
continuum of urban creative expression. Such art, as Stuart Allen states,
can vividly evoke ways in which people’s everyday experiences of city
life can be:
deeply contradictory, being, simultaneously, sources of exhilaration, fear

and apprehension…. The articulation of these experiences in the cultural
representation of cities – from the norms and values embedded in urban
landscapes [and] buildings ... to their inscription in art, literature and film,
among other types of texts…are pivotal in shaping the ways in which we
know and imagine the city, framing its past but also the prospects for its
future renewal. The city of tangible surfaces … is inseparable from the city
of popular culture, and memory.58
Moving on from Sinatra, this theme of movement through after-hours

city spaces, and the accompanying romantic mythology of nocturnal urban
meandering, has recently begun again to infuse several genres of
contemporary popular music. Firstly, an aestheticized atmosphere of late-
night urbanism in which the city is presented as “an ambivalent object of
love and fear, of hope and despair,”59 was discernible in the plaintive,
urban-themed work of The Blue Nile, a cult 1980s Glaswegian band who
stylistically owed as much to Sinatra. Meanwhile, in this decade such a
preoccupation has also been observable in the place-based nostalgic
ruminations of Sheffield singer and guitarist, Richard Hawley, the
atmospheric minimalism of London band, the xx, and the glistening beats
created by Detroit techno-musician Carl Craig. The motif of movement
through the darkened city also informs work by the young, contemporary
British soul singer, Jamie Woon. On tracks such as “Night Air” and
“Street,” he “drifts alone through the city at night ... despondent sensuality,
haunted lust ... Jamie Woon is one for the lonely ... wondering what the
night will bring.”60 Similar preoccupations also concern an occasional
Woon collaborator, Burial.
A Croydon-based, critically acclaimed producer, Burial is best known
for popularizing a genre known as dubstep (this principally electronic form
of music combined the bass heavy, brooding atmospheres of dub with the
shuffling rhythms of the 2-step branch of UK garage). His self-titled debut
album explored “a sustained mood: it’s dark, dense and sorrowful. It feels
somehow wet… like a bus window pressed flat against your cheek, in
mid-winter, as you leave an ex-lover's city for the last time. Track titles
like ‘Night Bus’ and ‘Broken Home’ don’t exactly dissuade one from such
slightly maudlin flights of fancy.”61 It was an impression that Burial’s
follow-up, Untrue, which featured unsettling instrumental tracks with titles
such as “Near Dark” and “Shell of Light” did little to assuage. The main
difference between the two records is that “if his debut was the sound of
wandering around London on foot at night. Untrue is the same journey
undertaken in a car, with rain spattering on the windscreen.”62
The architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas has stated “the flâneur has
become an anachronism in this world: The street is dead ...
Pedestrianization – intended to preserve – merely channels the flow of
those doomed to destroy the object of their intended reverence with their
feet.”63 However, in terms of flânerie’s current applicability, one could
contend that contemporary shopping arcades comprised of brightly lit
chain-stores have had the reverse effect to that envisaged by Koolhaas.
Their existence has arguably strengthened the desire of artists, and their
followers, for a return to a more involving engagement with urban space.
338 Chapter Fifteen
Perhaps the decentred, subject-less soundscapes constructed by Burial,

which update the urban “outsider” rhapsodizing associated with Sinatra in
the 1950s and The Blue Nile in the 1980s, provide just such a response,
conveying, as they do, the experience of moving through cities after dark
when “the streets lie largely empty – little traffic, few buses, just the
occasional pedestrian along the way. Lit only by the moon or the odd
street light, the landscape acquires a kind of hyperrealism.”64
Further research which updated ideas of flânerie by drawing on the
sensory impact of car travel,65 interrogated effects relating to the growing
prevalence of listening to music on the move,66 and attempted to respond
to new forms of electronic music frequently heralded as being soundtracks
to movement through urban (and suburban) spaces, could potentially offer
fresh possibilities to those wishing to push work on links between the city,
flânerie and recorded music in new directions.
Such an undertaking could be enhanced further if focussed on city-
orientated musical works that reflect on the passing through of time, as
well as of space. Certain forms of contemporary urban music, notably
dubstep, lend themselves to this, with Burial’s work having frequently
been cited in ongoing debates concerning “hauntology,” a term first used
by Derrida.67 Proponents of this idea, including Edensor,68 Reynolds69 and
Fisher,70 persuasively argue that the current age is, in large part,
characterized by a collapse in cultural innovation and that shades or
spectres of the past are now invariably more vivid than anything being
turned up by the present. Frisby,71 echoing sentiments expressed by
Benjamin,72 chose to highlight the flâneur’s centrality in participating in
“an ‘archaeological’ process of unearthing the myths and ‘collective
dreams’ of modernity.” Similarly, I contend that through an engagement
with hauntology, current artists and researchers can potentially better
understand the contemporary urban realm, thus suggesting that the figure
of the flâneur, so often assumed to be specific to the changing landscape of
Paris, can in fact provide a useful model for explaining contemporary
forms of inhabiting (or failing to inhabit) and representing urban life.
Notes
1
D. Pinder, “flâneur/flânerie,” in D. Gregory et al. (eds), The Dictionary of Human
Geography (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 256.
2
M. Savage, review of “Myth and metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the city,”
Environment D: Society and Space, 14: 6 (1996): 776.
3
P.M.R. Howell, “Crime and the City Solution: crime fiction, urban knowledge,
and radical geography,” Antipode 30 (4) (1998): 360.
4
Ibid.
5
C. Jenks, Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1995); K. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
6
Howell, “Crime and the City Solution,” 357-78; Pinder, “flâneur/flânerie”; R.
Shields, “Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie,” in Tester, The
Flâneur, 61-80.
7
G. Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and ‘Bladerunner’,” October, 41
(1987): 61-74.
8
D. Stevenson, Cities and Urban Cultures (Maidenhead: Open University Press,
2003).
9
D.L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); E. Wilson, “The invisible flâneur,” S.
Watson and K. Gibson (eds), Postmodern Cities and Spaces (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1995); J. Wolff, “The invisible flâneuse: women and the literature of
modernity,” Theory, Culture and Society, 2: 3 (1985): 37-46.
10
Shields, “Fancy footwork,” 63.
11
Jenks, Visual Culture; Tester, The Flâneur, 146.
12
J. Wolff, “The invisible flâneuse,” 41.
13
Pinder, “flâneur/flânerie,” 256.
14
Wilson, “The invisible flâneur.”
15
C. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in J. Mayne (ed. & trans.), The
Painter of Modern Life & Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1995), 1-41 (9).
16
Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis.
17
D. Chisholm, “A Queer Return to Walter Benjamin,” Journal of Urban History,
29 (2002): 25-38; J. Susina, “The Rebirth of the Postmodern flâneur: Notes on the
Postmodern Landscape of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat,” Marvels and Tales,
16: 2 (2002): 188-200.
18
A. Murphy, “Traces of the Flâneuse: from Roman Holiday to Lost In
Translation,” Journal of Architectural Education, 60: 1 (2006): 32-42 (33).
19
Tester, Introduction in The Flâneur.
20
Jenks, Visual Culture; M. Featherstone, “The flâneur, the city and virtual public
life,” Urban Studies, 35: 5-6 (1998): 909-25; Pinder, “flâneur/flânerie.”
21
Featherstone, “The flâneur, the city and virtual public life,” 910.
22
M. Savage, “Walter Benjamin’s Urban Thought: A critical analysis,” in M.
Crang and N. Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000), 38 (33-53).
23
M. Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of
Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000).
24
Wolff, “The invisible flâneuse.”
25
D. Frisby, Cityscape of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 33.
26
W. Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [1938 2003), 19.
27
S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 39.
28
P. Parkhurst Ferguson, “The flâneur on and off the streets of Paris,” in Tester,
The Flâneur, 34 (22-42).
340 Chapter Fifteen
29
W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.1935] 1999).
30
Shields, “Fancy footwork,” 62.
31
T. De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (London: Penguin
Classics, 2003).
32
G. Kennedy (ed.), The Portable Edgar Allen Poe (London: Penguin Classics,
2006).
33
W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1983).
34
A. De Botton, The Art of Travel (London: Penguin, 2002), 49.
35
M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York:
Vintage, 1992).
36
Parkhurst Ferguson, “The flâneur on and off the streets of Paris,” 22.
37
Zelig was a 1983 Woody Allen comedy film, based on the premise that the
central character had a chameleon-like ability to blend effortlessly into an array of
historically important moments from different eras and places.
38
P. Simpson, Film Noir. The Rough Guide to Cult Movies (London: Rough
Guides, 2001), 180.
39
D. Schmid, “Imagining safe urban space: the contribution of detective fiction to
radical geography,” Antipode, 27 (1995): 242-69.
40
Howell, “Crime and the City Solution.”
41
M. Farish, “Cities in shade: urban geography and the uses of noir,” Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 23: 1 (2005): 95-118.
42
Ahead of the making of the thriller Force of Evil in 1948, it has been reported
that its director, Abraham Polonsky, gave the film’s cinematographer, George
Barnes, a book of Edward Hopper paintings so as to illustrate how he wanted the
film to look (Simpson (2001), 183).
43
A. Marcus and D. Neumann (eds), Visualizing the City (London: Routledge,
2007), 2.
44
M. Crang, Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1998), 82.
45
C. Den Tandt, “Down These (Gender-Divided and Ethnically Fractured) Mean
Streets: The Urban Thriller in the Age of Multiculturalism and Minority Writing,”
in GUST (written and edited by the Ghent Urban Studies Team), The Urban
Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis (010
Publishers: Rotterdam, 1999), 396.
46
P. Auster, The New York Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 8.
47
E.M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin [1910] 1979), 188.
48
J.A. Barter, ”Nighthawks: Transcending Reality,” in C. Troyen et al. (eds),
Edward Hopper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 196 (195-210).
49
A. Butler, C. Van Cleave, and S. Stirling, The Art Book (London: Phaidon,
1994), 230.
50
J. Schwartz, “Sinatra: In the Wee Small Hours,” in S. Petkov and L. Mustazza
(eds), The Frank Sinatra Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 249
(245-52).
51
C. Ingham, The Rough Guide to Frank Sinatra: the songs, the films, the style
(London: Penguin, 2005), 172.
52
T.H. Adamowski, “Love in the Western World: Sinatra and the Conflict of
Generations,” in L. Mustazza (ed.), Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture: Essays on
an American Icon (Westport: Praeger, 1998), 26-38.
53
Tester, The Flâneur, 8.
54
Also in Paris at this time, Guy Debord and fellow Situationists were encouraging
the idea of the dérive: the drift, both in, and through, urban space.
55
Melisma is a style of singing Sinatra helped popularize in which one syllable is
extended over several notes.
56
D. Toop, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (London: Serpent’s
Tail, 2004), 29.
57
D. Stevenson, Cities and Urban Cultures (Maidenhead: Open University Press,
2003), 24.
58
Stuart Allen, Foreword, in D. Stevenson, Cities and Urban Cultures
(Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), xii.
59
M. Savage, review of “Myth and metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the city,”
Environment D: Society and Space, 14: 6 (1996), 776.
60
D. Lynskey, “Children of the Night,” The Word, April, 2011: 98.
61
P. Sherburne, Dubstep. Magazine, published 31.1.2007; accessed 28.2.09.
http://www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/281_200701.html.
62
P. Connolly, review of Burial Untrue.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/review-23420236-cds-of-the-week.do –
published 12.11.2007; accessed 8.2.2009.
63
R. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in R. Koolaas and B. Mau (eds), S,M,L,XL
(Rotterdam: 010 publishers, 1995), 1253.
64
L. Barton, “The joys of driving at night,” published and accessed on 1.11.2009.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/01/driving-at-night
65
E. Laurier, H. Lorimer et al., “Driving and passengering: notes on the ordinary
organization of car travel,” Mobilities, 3 (2008), 1-23; N. Thrift, “Driving in the
City,” Theory Culture Society, 21 (2004): 41-59.
66
M. Bull, Sound Moves: ipod culture and urban experience (London: Routledge,
2007).
67
J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the
new international (London: Routledge, 1994).
68
T. Edensor, “Mundane haunting: commuting through the phantasmagoric
working-class landscapes of Manchester, England,” Cultural Geographies, 15
(2008); 313-33.
69
S. Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Own Addiction to its Own Past
(London: Faber and Faber, 2011).
70
M. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost
Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014)
71
D. Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of
Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 224.
72
Benjamin, The Arcades Project.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE SUBJECT OF CHANTAL AKERMAN’S

NEWS FROM HOME (1977):
ON THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL
OF THE CINEMATIC FLÂNEUR
JAMES HARVEY-DAVITT
Poetic explorations of the city abound from the silent masters of cinema to
the present day. The critical insights of these films often merge the
political and the personal. From Chaplin’s tramp, to the experimental
works of Walter Ruttmann in Germany and Dziga Vertov’s Kino-eye in the
Soviet Union, these films seem to have something of Baudelaire’s “painter
of modern life” about them. The trend continues today in Woody Allen’s
existential musings and his travels through Europe. However, despite the
multitude of filmmakers and characters that wander these urban
environments, locating revelatory findings in its spatial-imaginary as they
do, the flâneur remains a surprisingly underdeveloped concept in film
theory. Yet a uniquely cinematic version of flânerie may at once work to
reinvent Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur, create innovative perceptions of
the cityscape, and the capabilities of cinema in general. It is with these
several reconstitutive possibilities in mind, that this essay questions
whether the flâneur might be a concept that intervenes in conventional
representations (of cities, of the wandering spectator) to political effect.
Certain aesthetic qualities (through which the cinematic flâneur is
produced) might themselves be indispensible to the production of politics.
In order to explore this idea, I consider the relationship between aesthetics
and politics in light of the writing of Jacques Rancière. Following
Rancière, I argue that the activity of the flâneur is absolutely political, with
the proviso that the politics of works of art should be understood as being
played out “in the reconfiguration of worlds of experience ... [and] in the
The Subject of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) 343
way in which modes of narration and new forms of visibility established

by artistic practices enter into politics’ own field of aesthetic
possibilities.”1
In order to elaborate upon how a cinematic flâneur performs this
“reconfiguration of worlds of experience,” I analyze News from Home,2 a
particularly effective example of what I am calling the cinematic flâneur. I
will consider some moments in News from Home in order to explain how a
flâneur is capable of reconfiguring existing environments – both through
Akerman’s use of her own everyday, and the everyday activity of the
urban population and landscape. In so doing, I wish to promote the
possibility of the flâneur as something more akin to what Rancière calls
“missionaries of utopia,” rather than Walter Benjamin’s bygone figure, or
contemporary panoptical readings.3 This is the term he uses to refer to
certain artists whose aim is to focus on unaccounted-for populations. Their
work is political because it casts light on an anonymous element, thus
furthering the scope of those who warrant a voice: what Rancière terms a
recasting of the “distribution of the sensible.”4
To begin with, I will discuss some existing understandings of the
flâneur, in order to question the assumption that it has no political
purchase in the modern world. I ground this argument in Akerman’s film,
analysing how she employs the strategies of a flâneur so as to give it a
political sense. In order to explain how this works, I refer to what Ivone
Margulies has called Akerman’s “aesthetic of homogeneity,”5 and consider
News from Home’s regular disruptions of this aesthetic. I view these
disruptions as political, since they are instances of what Rancière’s defines
as politics: the occurrence of a “wrong” (intervening in the hegemonic
right).6 I then turn to how this political aesthetic approach works to
produce two new subjectivities. First, in her portrayal of the New Yorker
(an intervention into the collective policing of the conventional scene of
Manhattan, in order to highlight ignored landscapes and peoples), which I
call the filmed-subject. Second, Akerman herself (the rare foregrounding
of the filmmaker’s own everyday life, and the everyday life and events of
small-town Belgium, voiced over New York City), which I call the
filming-subject.
What Might a Political Flâneur Entail?

Susan Buck-Morss's reading of Walter Benjamin does a lot of work
towards setting up a political position for the flâneur. She summarizes
Benjamin's view of flânerie as something like an unravelled dream: going
from habitation of public streets, to an ideological co-option and
344 Chapter Sixteen
reprivatization of social spaces. She claims that “it was traffic that did him
in,”7 referring to the impossibility (in The Arcades Project)8 of the flâneur
manifesting any political agency amidst the vibrant modern city. For
Buck-Morss, as the male gender is privileged (and since female flânerie is
more like prostitution and support for capitalist society), a hierarchy exists
restricting who can and cannot be a flâneur: this she calls “the politics of
loitering.” Any political potential for the flâneur would need to
acknowledge women’s participation and potential for dissent. I develop
this further by taking into account the social movements that followed
feminism. In short, I suggest that the political potential of the flâneur
resides in the concept’s being taken-up and performed by a marginalized
body.
Unlike those scholars who have assumed the flâneur to represent a
highly-charged site of sexual politics, I follow Buck-Morss in rejecting the
flâneuse as a female alternative. An outright departure from patriarchy, in
the form of a replacement-term for it, is not the aim here – and indeed, to
occupy new, uncontested ground is not the work of politics at all. It is
rather a question of reconfiguring who is counted in that original term, and
that original order. To politicize the flâneur is, at the same time, to recast
what the flâneur itself constitutes. Redressing the position of the feminine
in these gender debates about flânerie, this approach contests the original
territory which the flâneur occupies, rather than seeking new ground for
the habitation of a flâneuse. As I will show, Akerman’s own intentions
seem to demand as much.
A second vital element in Buck-Morss’s piece regards the significance
of the self-reflexive relationship between Benjamin's Paris, and the Berlin
of his childhood:
The fusion of childhood history and collective history is the most puzzling
aspect of Benjamin's theory, one that was never analytically clarified. More
than a theory, it was an insight that the power of historical remembering, its
political strength as a motivation for present action, is the same, whether
one is remembering one's own life or a collective life never experienced
directly. He conceived of the past on both levels as a “dream-state” and
historical recollection which allowed its interpretation as “awakening.”9
This involves a complex interaction between the individual and collective

experience, as well as between past and present experience. The “dream-
state” induced by capitalism mirrors one's dream-like remembering of
childhood. This fusion between individual and collective experience is
very relevant to News from Home, and will be pursued in my reading of
the film.
Before outlining how Rancière’s ideas elaborate upon Buck-Morss’s

concerns for furthering political agency, I wish to address a contemporary,
Foucauldian version of the flâneur as panoptical figure. In his essay “The
flâneur from spectator to representation,” Bruce Mazlish applies Jeremy
Bentham's panopticon model, via Michel Foucault's theory of “discipline”
and “the biopolitical.”10 However, his attempt to emphasise individual
subjectivity might in fact be said to restrict it. In Mazlish's account, the
flâneur's political potential is minimal. His argument might be summarized
as follows: firstly, the flâneur is epitomized by Baudelaire; secondly,
Baudelaire takes up a panoptical position, whereby he can infer a “true”
image of society; finally, in modern biopolitical society, the flâneur is
limited to challenging representations, albeit minor ones. Mazlish
describes a postmodern flâneur, whose agency is today restricted by
biopower. Individuals are subjugated by immanent constraints, which
determine their limitations in the contemporary world. Like Buck-Morss,
Mazlish notes the insufficiency of the early twentieth-century idea of the
flâneur in contemporary times. Unlike Buck-Morss, however, he misses
the potential for a more progressive model to be found within flânerie. I
have two problems with Mazlish’s use of Foucault in order to claim a loss
of the potential for agency today. The first regards the idea of flânerie
itself; the second regards who is – and who was – a flâneur.
Firstly, to be a flâneur might indeed be re-imagined today, by
exploiting the activities of this Romantic figure in order to challenge the
constraints of the biopolitical. If this escape is not an outright escape from
the proliferation of power (which Gilles Deleuze described as a “society of
control”11), it is at least an escape from the constraints of society’s
hegemony of thought – i.e. it imagines new ways of thinking, and new
ways of perceiving. Moreover, to think differently and to perceive
differently is to imply the potential (at least) of an alternative: a possibility
beyond that of the biopolitical panopticon of perception, which entraps
everyone into its all-seeing, all-interpellating gaze. This is the first shift I
aim to capitalize upon: away from the idea of the flâneur as merely a
spectator, towards what Rancière has referred to as “the activity peculiar to
the spectator”:
Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform

into activity. It is our normal situation... We do not have to transform
spectators into actors, and ignoramuses into schoolmasters. We have to
recognize the knowledge at work in the ignoramus and the activity peculiar
to the spectator. Every spectator is already an actor in her own story; every
12
actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story.
346 Chapter Sixteen
The idea that innate and particular “knowledge” (as Rancière terms it)
reconfigures the languidly spectatorial into a spectatorial-act, also
reconfigures the activity of the flâneur: from passive stroller whose
function would be unimaginable today, to engaged perceiver whose
exponents can be found everywhere and anywhere. This leads to my
second problem with Mazlish’s argument. Like Buck-Morss, who assumes
equality between the sexes, I too would claim that the contemporary
existence of the flâneur is contingent upon a critical intervention, affecting
who can spectate nowadays, and who is the object of the spectator’s gaze.
Buck-Morss views the flâneur as a figure with creative agency, which
enables a productive ability to cast light upon the unseen. This is, I
believe, what is happening in News from Home. By using film as a way of
establishing a horizontal relationship with unseen spaces and populations,
Akerman makes flânerie a political activity. Yes, the flâneur has the
potential to re-present the domination of late capitalism. However, as
Akerman demonstrates, unseen margins (that are generally unaccounted
for), outside the dominant logic, do exist. This coming-into-vision of the
subjects on these margins is, for Rancière, what politics entails. His
interrogation of the meaning of politics reworks individual agency in
aesthetic terms, provoking consideration of what actually constitutes a
political act. Politics is:
whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts
or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no
place in that configuration – that of the part of those who have no part.
This break is manifest in a series of actions that reconfigure the space
where parties, parts, or lack of parts have been defined. Political activity is
whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it, or changes a place’s
destination.13
The actions that result in the coming-into-vision of those excluded into

the margins of an environment are political actions, resulting in political
subjects. As I explain, by disrupting the hierarchical relationship between a
distanced author and a represented subject, Akerman works within flâneur-
like confines in order to create a space for the anonymous. This comes in
two forms. The first is the often-ignored spaces (which include the
backstreets and ordinary people) of New York City. The second is her own
biographical position, which implicates the personal-life of the film's
author, producing a relationship of equality between the two subjects. In
setting up these two distinct differences to what might be expected in a
flânerie of New York City (backstreets as opposed to the tourist sites; her
diary as opposed to a narrative which clearly homes-in on the image),
Akerman creates two instances of what Rancière terms “wrong”: the

opposite of whatever the hegemonic “right” excludes.
Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking

beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by
placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very
confrontation, the contradiction of two worlds in a single world: the world
where they are and the world where they are not.14
That the idea of “wrong” constitutes politics makes clear something

significant about this approach. “Wrong” is an entirely relational concept,
established through normative procedures. It is essentially whatever the
socialized “right” is not. Rancière is stating that the process of building a
system of “rights” is necessarily an exclusive one. “Wrong” – or politics –
is therefore the self-voicing of the excluded bodies. This in turn becomes
an aesthetic idea, in as much as the intervention made by “wrong” is
“manifest in a series of actions.” As I will attempt to explain, this “series
of actions”15 is perceivable in examples of political art, at a formal level as
well as in its content.
“Wronging” Homogeneity
Chantal Akerman wholeheartedly refused to be grouped amongst
“women” filmmakers. “You wouldn't call Fellini a male filmmaker,” Ivone
Margulies quotes her as arguing in her important contextual study of the
filmmaker’s œuvre.16 Akerman has no interest in being identified in
gendered terms: “I am making Chantal Akerman's films,” she declares.
This is quite literally the case: her self-reflexivity (whereby her own story
is developed alongside, rather than subordinated to or foregrounded ahead
of the people of Manhattan) in News from Home, is itself a “wrong”: it
challenges ideas of the flâneur which suppose a re-presentation of the city.
She thereby makes visible what the realist mode makes invisible: an
iconoclastic approach to narrative hierarchies. I maintain Akerman is a
political artist by virtue of her rejection of gendering and of traditional
poetics: it is a “wronging” of given aesthetic categories.
Along with the part she plays within her own film, her own
relationship outside the film’s diegetic New York to the “real” New York is
a further reflexive dimension. Akerman’s awareness of the experimental
film scene in the seventies (an influence extending to Andy Warhol, Jonas
Mekas, and Michael Snow), with which she came into contact during a
lengthy stay between 1971 and 1972,17 is an important reference point.
Kenneth White has followed up this line of inquiry to suggest that
348 Chapter Sixteen
Akerman's personal, contingent experience of the city shows itself in her

work, with the effect of negating totalizing representations of the cityscape.
For White, in contrast to classic images of the city, Akerman privileges the
limitations of our perception.18 This is an extension of what Margulies
describes as an “aesthetic of homogeneity,”19 whereby Renaissance
perspective is employed to a self-conscious extreme, working to underline
the representational tendency of cinema. This aesthetic is an exemplary
version of what Rancière believes art's political potential entails; that it
must be more mechanical, more inhuman, causing the stain of the
repressed to appear.20 The bland interiors of Jeanne Dielman21 or La
Chambre,22 and the static camera in News from Home, are recurring
elements of this homogeneous aesthetic.
However, the extreme homogeneity of this aesthetic is perhaps
contradicted in relation to Akerman's removal of the hierarchy between
author and subject. When she recasts this hierarchy by self-consciously
locating herself within the scene, she is recasting the strict limitations
imposed by the “aesthetic of homogeneity,” by frequently putting herself
at the centre of the action. This is certainly the case in a film like Je, Tu, Il,
Elle,23 whereby Akerman plays, at different times, actor, narrator, director,
foregrounding the individual elements of the film's whole. This
undermining of Margulies’ persuasively characterised “aesthetic of
homogeneity” is vital. Akerman employs a particular, discernible style in
order to then disrupt it, so that this disruption becomes noticeable. This, I
claim, is the aesthetic performance of “wrong.” In this sense, rather than
employing intense homogeneity in some repressed or uncanny sense,
“wronging” of this homogeneity rather takes an alternative critical stance.
Distinct from the self-conscious extremity of estrangement, this disruption
of her aesthetic works to “wrong” the formerly homogeneous domain.
Akerman therefore sets-up a recognizable aesthetic – the “aesthetic of
homogeneity” – in order to then contradict it. This is the first stage (the
form) which flânerie can then confront, in order to become a political act.
The film's opening sequence illustrates this. A static camera places the
spectator at a low-level, in the centre of a road, which appears to be in the
backstreet of a city. Cars are heard in the distance, and seen between
buildings. Then a cut to a similar shot. The opening minutes show the
spectator a city, but contain no definitive evidence that we are in New
York City. The voicetrack (a letter from a mother to her daughter)
mentions New York, but it is not until we cut from one of these
anonymous streets, to the hardly more familiar front of a shop called The
New York Egg Auction, that the spectator can be clear of their
surroundings. “What is The New York Egg Auction?” one might ask. When
the next letter eventually appears on the voicetrack, the same sort of
(emotionally charged, albeit blandly quotidian) sentiments are read. It is
not at all clear why she makes the spectator hear this. What I would
suggest here is that Akerman's flâneur is offering an image of minority (the
comparative nothingness in a place of supposed frenzy), together with a
sound of minority (the sound of an intimate, personal discourse). However,
it is precisely by virtue of the difficulty with which we ascertain a
definable logic here that I believe another subject is implicated: the
spectator. In Akerman’s aesthetic approach (her formal foundation as a
political, cinematic flâneur), the spectator is anticipated. In other words,
there is no “logical” meaning handed down from Akerman to us: the
snippets of banality necessitate the involvement of a third party’s intellect.
As with the title of her earlier film, this is about “I [Akerman], you [the
mother], he, and she [the spectators].”
Then come the required contradictions – the “wrongs” – to this
“aesthetic of homogeneity.” For instance, the sudden disregard for the
constantly employed static camera, in order to turn the viewer –
inexplicably – three-hundred and sixty degrees, when stationary at a
pedestrian crossing. Also of interest is a long tracking sequence, taken
across the length of one whole street, uptown to downtown, in an abrupt
shift from the immobile camera. In this moment of “wrong,” one might
presume a sociological purpose to this tracking shot: a journey from the
poverty-stricken Harlem down to Wall Street’s fat cats. Instead, this is just
a road: yellow taxis, the odd stop for lights, and endless grey buildings
(perhaps Buck-Morss's statement - “it was the traffic that did him in” - has
some resonance here!). It does indeed seem clear that the dream of a
distanced poetic critique of the city is too romantic – perhaps too logical or
predetermined – for Akerman. However, to consider this perspective is to
attempt to apply the kind of exterior framework which Akerman herself
rejects. News from Home's nestling in the murky corners of Manhattan
confronts its spectator with both the unfamiliar and the mundane. Unlike
the poetic representations of Baudelaire, or the ideological elements of
Benjamin, Akerman has no framework to which the city must conform. By
consistently refusing tension or a moment of climax, by travelling to the
hidden depths, Akerman's flâneur allows the subject to speak on its own
everyday terms. It shares Benjamin’s fragmentary method in the Arcades
Project: the collation of unattached ideas, which reject the possibility of a
singular “truth” in their being observed. A recurring rejection of a
concrete, homogeneous style, and a refusal of definitive interpretation: this
amounts to the setting-up of a new model for flânerie.
350 Chapter Sixteen
The Filmed-Subject
As Buck-Morss explains of Benjamin's flâneur, there are serious discrepancies
preventing the relevance of the early-modern model today. The flâneur
must develop with contemporary Manhattan in order to exist. Their
activity remains the same, but in post-industrial society, the landscapes –
human and artificial – are different. This is made clear in News from Home
by the way transport is represented. In line with the “aesthetic of
homogeneity”, a static frame is employed throughout. In turn, the
protrusion of this frame (and of the voiceover) by cars and trains enacts
the “wronging” of this aesthetic. The sights and sounds of transport are
foregrounded throughout (with particular attention to the metro), and
produce a shift from Benjamin’s flâneur (concerned with the rituals of the
consumer), to a contemporary model based on modern loitering habits.
The metro – as familiar to New Yorkers as it is to Londoners, Parisians,
and Berliners – brings not just thousands of workers dedicated to their
city-based employment each day. It also anticipates potential flâneurs-to
come. In order to capture her filmed-subject, Akerman goes underground.
My second point considers the subway sequence as an example of what I
believe to be an exemplary illustration of the flâneur’s political potential.
This sequence goes right to the heart of the existence of the flâneur in
contemporary times, and makes clear Akerman’s avoidance of
representation which allows her subjects to represent themselves. By
affording excessive screen-time to people and places of little – or rather,
indiscriminate – regard, the flâneur is able to reconfigure the sensible, and
show the unseen.
The subway scene (Fig. 16-1) is an example of Akerman blurring the
inside/outside, public/private binary: a further dismantling of hierarchies.
As well as incorporating the modern-day commuter-vessel into her
flânerie, this long-take onboard the carriage confronts the people shown
with the spectacle of a camera. The passengers’ reactions say something
quite profound about the contemporary existence of the flâneur. Some are
apparently ignorant of the camera's presence. These are the same sorts of
people who disregard the camera when Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat
terrorizes the passengers on the Tube:24 a sign that to be recorded, even to
be held prisoner in the makeshift studio of a subway carriage, is itself, part
of the everyday. Some smirk, and turn sharply away, acknowledging
Akerman's existence, and furthermore, the possibility of being captured in
the frame when they do not want to be seen. These two responses tell us
very little about the contemporary, political, cinematic existence of the
flâneur. Perhaps it is the panoptical version of a biopolitical society, as
Fig. 16-1. Chantal Akerman, News from Home (1977): Akerman stands in the
centre of the carriage, her camera obstructing the boarding and alighting
passengers.
others have suggested: we are all flâneurs, aware of the existence of the
popular practice of cultural observation, and accepting or rejecting the
other's look accordingly. However, this view is complicated when one
elderly man steps on to the carriage and stares directly down Akerman's
lens. Something else is suggested: these are not all flâneurs, but are all
individuals, each with their own unique response to the existence of this
camera on their train. What does this moment imply about the possibility
of a cinematic flâneur?
This incident illustrates an individual capacity of Akerman’s subjects,
to accept or reject the camera’s subjection. Akerman, the political flâneur,
attempting to cast light on the unseen, is therefore forced to accept the
possibility that the people of her perceptions may “break the fourth wall.”
The removal of the hierarchies which previously determined particular
roles for observer and observed, creates an obstacle for this sort of
politicized, subjectivating approach by a flâneur: one may simply leave the
frame. What better way to illustrate the absolute refutation of this idea of
immanent representation in the panopticon of modernity: we are not in the
Foucaultian biopolitical, whereby “everything is political.” Rather, as
Rancière indicates, politics is more than the mere organization of power. It
352 Chapter Sixteen
is instead the intervening into that power by a “wrong”: politics occurs

when a normative logic is antagonized and altered through the illustration
of the actions of that antagonism. As I explained through the concept of
“wrong,” the political subjectivization performed by the flâneur is
contingent upon the existence of an order, which prohibits the coming-
into-vision of the new subjects she films. By including the intrusion and
departure of the recorded subject, Akerman captures a moment of human
contingency that illustrates the filmed-subject’s autonomy, and suggests
the shared autonomy of all filmed-subjects. In other words, by attempting
to locate the flâneur in front of the camera, the attempt to hand-down this
conceptual label is undermined. The autonomy of a general public in this
anthropological exploration is captured in this moment of confrontation,
and Akerman finds that if we are all flâneurs, then nobody is a flâneur.
The possibility of a flâneur as filmed-subject is perhaps confined to a
subject who can be seen to be practicing flânerie in the diegesis: a
character. I do not believe this is identifiable in News from Home, as I
think such a character would negate what is clearly Akerman’s own self-
conscious presence. How the character of a film would become a political
flâneur, is, I think, imaginable; but it is not the subject of this film. If the
“wronging” of urban explorations results only in the filmmaker’s creation
of a space for politics to happen for the filmed-subject (a representational
space), how does Akerman herself become the political subject here: the
filming-subject? If my earlier claim is that the political flâneur configures
a space for new subjects, my final point is that, by attaching her own
private life to the foreign exterior of New York City, Akerman configures
another new subject, neither individual nor communal. It is a ghostly
figure: the sum of an absent mother's words, spoken from her addressee’s
mouth, over the tenuously related images of the city in which this absent
daughter resides. How, and perhaps why, does Akerman produce this
transient version of herself, in the form of a flâneur? And, importantly,
how is this flâneur political?
The Filming-Subject
This final element requires a return to Buck-Morss’s observations on
Benjamin, and in particular his fusion of individual and collective history.
This goes some way towards explaining the coexistence of these images of
Manhattan and the old letters Akerman reads. Benjamin's insight into the
potential for social “awakening” when an individual remembers is
recognizable in Akerman's revisitings. She is both revisiting the notes of
her mother (warning, as she did, about the dangers of this city) and
revisiting the city itself (its hidden depths, back alleys, hoods and vacant
streets). What is the “awakening” one experiences when a letter is read
which says “be careful when you go out at night, New York is dangerous,”
only for this moment of inevitable horror never to appear? Perhaps the
“awakening” is that people from small-towns need to manage their own
domestic issues, before speculating about the fantastical happenings in the
city. If this is the case, it infers that the city is far from dangerous, whereas
there is something poisonous inherent in the insular nature of small,
localized communities. Paradoxically, that the only narrative “action” that
occurs is from the country-folk’s familial and domestic relationships,
challenges a more widely-held assumption about whose story counts as
noteworthy. Viewed this way, the focus on small-town Belgium in contrast
to “The Big Apple” recasts perceptions as to where would be an exciting
locale to capture on film. Whether it is the first or second inference that is
intended here, the “awakening” provided in the fusion of these individual
and social portraits reinforces the motives of Akerman’s flânerie in
general: both carry the intention of challenging and recasting dominant
perceptions.
The final sequence (Fig. 16-2) of the boat departing from Manhattan
leaves open the question, where is Akerman going after she leaves the
island? One can find out that the Akerman did return to Belgium after
shooting, so, perhaps, she is leaving for home in urgent response to her
mother's pleas. Does she simply miss her family too much to stay? As the
letters continue, the mother's letters reach a level of emotional blackmail:
“Father will have no-one to look after him,” she says. In the journey that
leads up to her arrival at the boat and the departure from Manhattan, the
voicetrack of this particular letter is drowned out by the transport. The
sound of gulls then clouds it further. This sequence and the moments
leading up to it guide me towards some final thoughts on her familial
relationship with her mother, her social relationship with Manhattan, and
the motivation behind Akerman’s film.
By juxtaposing mundane-city and dramatic-country, Akerman is able to
interpret the warm sentiments of home as constricting of her own personal
freedom – akin to the wives and mothers of the Sirkean melodramas to
which Jeanne Dielman alludes.25 Akerman's flânerie – her filming-subject
– is testament to the emancipation she experiences as a filmmaker,
ethnographizing at free-rein. As her mother is inaudible beneath these city-
sounds, one can surmise that when the screen goes black, she simply
continues her flânerie: be it in New York (A Couch in New York),26 Paris
(Le Captive),27 Cologne (Les rendez-vouz d’Anna)28 or returning home to
Belgium (Golden Eighties,29 Women from Antwerp in November).30 The
354 Chapter Sixteen
Fig. 16-2. Chantal Akerman, News from Home (1977): The final image: a long-
take, departing the island, the famous skyline shrinking and fading amidst the
clouds.
flânerie of the filming-subject – the sum of Akerman's voice and ideas, her
mother’s words, the city’s landscape – is a transient being. It creates the
kind of space of confusion that Benjamin referred to as a “dream-state.”
Akerman's retreading of the old ground she visited between 1971 and
1972, combined with the letters she received, forcefully argues that cinema
– with its interplay of the visual and audible senses – enables a possibility
for “awakening.” Therefore, the cinematic flâneur – in its multimedial and
multidimensional capacity to combine, contrast, compare and critique
differing geographical and social perspectives – carries the potential to
reconfigure worlds of experience. The politics of Akerman’s filming-
subject stems from her performance of the contradiction between two worlds
in a single world: the pitting of the minor-rural-individual consciousness
against and within the major-urban-collective consciousness.
The Cinematic Flâneur as a Political Subject

Throughout this essay, I have used the term subject to refer specifically to
a political subject; and political to stand for the name of an intervention (a
“wrong”) into an established order – be that order social or aesthetic. In
other words, to attempt to locate the activity of the flâneur in the filmed-
subject is to seek out a “wrong” performed by those in the frame. To
discuss a filming-subject is to argue that Akerman herself embodies the
function of the apparatus, in order to reconfigure worlds of experience.
Akerman’s filming-subject performs a “wrong.” It is in this way that we
can understand Akerman herself as doing something political. As Rancière
states, for art to be political, one must reconfigure “the given perceptual
forms.”31 The flâneur – itself a given perceptual, perceiving form - can too
be reconfigured, rather than renounced altogether, in order to exist
politically. The political potential Akerman therefore encapsulates with
News from Home is an exemplary illustration of how the cinematic flâneur
can be political. In the creation of a new world of experience - in the
socially and geographically disparate sonic and visual tapestry that News
from Home is – Akerman exemplifies what Rancière calls “the politics of
works of art.” The cinematic flâneur of News from Home presents an idea
of cinema as a space which resituates bodies, interrogating politics’ own
field of aesthetic possibilities.
Notes
1
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London, New York: Continuum,
2006), 65.
2
Directed by Chantal Akerman, 1977.
3
Jacques Rancière, Short voyages to the land of the people (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 4.
4
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London, New York: Continuum,
2006)
5
Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 11.
6
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 21-42.
7
Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics
of Loitering,” New German Critique, 39 (Autumn 1986): 102.
8
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
9
Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” 133.
10
Bruce Mazlish, “The flâneur: from spectator to representation,” in Keith Tester
(ed.), The Flâneur (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43-60.
11
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59 (Winter
1992): 3-7.
12
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London, New York: Verso,
2009), 17.
13
Rancière, Disagreement, 29-30.
356 Chapter Sixteen
14
Ibid., 27.
15
Ibid., 30.
16
Margulies, Nothing Happens, 12.
17
Ibid., 6.
18
Kenneth White, “Urban unknown: Chantal Akerman in New York City,” Screen,
51:4 (Winter 2010): 378.
19
Margulies, Nothing Happens, 11.
20
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Malden, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2009), 41.
21
22
23
24
Directed by Larry Charles, 2006.
25
Margulies, Nothing Happens, 85
26
27
28
29
30
31
Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 63.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Daniel Acke is Professor of French Culture and Literature at the Vrije

University of Brussels (VUB). The general topic of his research is the
relation between writers of various centuries (classical French moralists,
contemporay poets and essayists) and Modernity. Among other courses he
teaches about literature and the city, and has published contributions on
several French writers and urban culture, more particularly Restif de la
Bretonne, the Prince de Ligne and Yves Bonnefoy. With colleagues, he
started a project about the image of Brussels in literature.
Jo Briggs is Assistant Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art

at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. She has published articles on
British, French, and German visual culture, and is currently working on a
book project provisionally titled Novelty Fair: British Visual Culture
between Chartism and the Great Exhibition.
Jonathan Conlin teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British

history at the University of Southampton. His books include an edited
volume on pleasure gardens; Civilisation; and Tales of Two Cities: Paris,
London and the Making of the Modern City (2013). He is currently
working on a biography of the Anglo-Armenian oil magnate Calouste
Gulbenkian.
Christian Deuling graduated from the Friedrich-Schiller-University of

Jena before receiving an EU Excellence Research Scholarship in 2011
from the University of Nottingham, where he is working on his Ph.D.
thesis on the German journal London und Paris, supervised by Dr Maike
Oergel and Professor Dr Dirk Goettsche in the Department of German. In
addition, he is preparing his second Master of Higher Education at the
Pädagogische Hochschule Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.
Claire Gheerardyn, a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of

Paris and agrégée de Lettres modernes, is Teaching Fellow (AMN) of
Comparative Literature at the University of Strasbourg. Her ongoing
doctoral thesis, entitled “La Statue dans la ville, à la rencontre de
l’intensité” (“Statues in Cities: Encountering Intensity”) explores Russian,
European and North American fiction and poetry from the nineteenth
century to the present. In her thesis, she examines how the experience of
meeting monuments and statues extends beyond the esthetical realm,
entangling political and existential threads. She is the author of several
essays where she investigates the occidental imaginary of urban statues
and she is co-editor, with Francesco-Paolo de Sanctis, of the collective
volume Writing the Intensity of Art (in press).
James Harvey-Davitt is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English,

Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University. His
research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary cinema,
via the theories of French philosopher Jacques Rancière.
Karla Huebner is currently Assistant Professor of Art History and

Women’s Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. She
received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the
University of Pittsburgh, PA, and her M.A. from American University,
Washington, DC. Her research areas include surrealism, Czech modernism
1890-1950, women artists, and the history of gender and sexuality. Recent
publications include “First Republic Czech and Slovak Representations of
Women” in Competing Eyes. Visual Encounters with Alterity in Central
and Eastern Europe (Hungarian Academy of Sciences & Polish Academy
of Sciences, Budapest, 2013), “In Pursuit of Toyen: Feminist Biography in
an Art-historical Context,” in Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 1
(Spring 2013); “Girl, Trampka, or Žába? The Czechoslovak New
Woman,” in The New Woman International (University of Michigan
Press, 2011); “Fire Smoulders in the Veins: Toyen’s Queer Desire and its
Roots in Prague Surrealism,” Papers of Surrealism issue 8 (Spring 2010);
and “The Whole World Revolves around It: Sex Education and Sex
Reform in First Republic Czech Print Media,” Aspasia 4 (Spring 2010).
She is also a contributor to Grove Art Online. She is working on a
monograph about the Czech surrealist Toyen.
Simon Lee is Associate Professor in the History of Art in the Department

of History at the University of Reading. He published “A newly
discovered portrait of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David” in the October
2013 Burlington Magazine is also author of David (Phaidon Art & Ideas,
1999). His Delacroix monograph will be published by Phaidon in 2015.
He is presently working on the public reception of Goya’s 2 and 3 May,
1808 and on Horace Vernet’s images of war widows.
386 Contributors
Alexander McCabe obtained his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of

Glasgow. His project examined Dostoevsky’s French reception and was
supported by the Carnegie Scholarship and Carnegie Grant, permitting two
years of archival research in France and Russia. Since 2010, Alexander
has taught both French and Russian language, literature and translation at
Glasgow. He has published on existential and existentialist philosophies,
philosophical irrationalism and Dostoevsky’s reception, with further active
research interests in perception, space and the moving body. Alex is a
performing artist and winner of Scotland’s Dancer Emerging Bursary in
2013. Current studio based research projects examine the historical
engendering of the leg and the embodiment of phonetics.
Kevin Milburn is a Teaching Fellow in Human Geography at the

University of Hull. He has also taught at the University of Nottingham and
been a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He was awarded his
Ph.D. in 2012 by the University of Nottingham for the thesis, ‘Songs of
the City: Geographies of Metropolitanism and Mobility in the Music of
Frank Sinatra and The Blue Nile’. Prior to this, he gained an M.Litt. in
Media Culture from the University of Strathclyde and an M.A. in Japanese
Cultural Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. He was a director
of the Mercury Music Prize from 1998 to 2008.
Oliver O’Hanlon is a Ph.D. student in the Department of French and the

School of History in University College Cork, Ireland. His supervisors are
Professor Grace Neville and Dr Donal Ó Drisceoil. Oliver is studying the
links between France and Ireland through the work of French journalists
who travelled to and wrote about Ireland in the French press during the
20th century. The working title of his thesis is: “As Others See Us: The
French Grand Reporter on the Island of Ireland in the 20th Century.”
Oliver is currently the Postgraduate representative for the Association des
Études Françaises et Francophones d’Irlande (ADEFFI).
Kevin C. Robbins is currently Associate Professor, Department of History,

Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). M.A.
(History) University of Pennsylvania (1985), M.A. and Ph.D. (History)
The Johns Hopkins University (1991). Formerly, Senior Lecturer in Art
History, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Docent Education Program and
Department of Education. North American correspondent for the
International Research Group on the Satirical Image (EIRIS), Université
de Bretagne Ouest (Brest). Currently a member of the Editorial Review
Committee for Ridiculosa, the international scholarly journal devoted to
comparative and interdisciplinary investigation of satirical texts and

images in cultural contexts world-wide. He has recently published peer-
reviewed articles in Ridiculosa (on French satirical images of the British
governing elite circa 1901-1914 and on the evolution of radical North
American illustrated satirical publications 1850-1920). A new book
chapter is forthcoming on totemic images of French state violence as
critiqued and amplified in the Assiette au beurre. He has a book
manuscript in preparation on the Assiette au beurre, its editors and
contributing artists.
Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Art

History, UNED, Madrid. Her dissertation examines print culture and
perceptions of urban modernization and street life in late nineteenth-
century Madrid. She received her MA from the University of London and
was Junior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Westminster. She
has been a research assistant at The National Archives of England and the
Musée d’Orsay. In addition to her academic research, she works as an art
consultant and translator. Her translations have appeared in museum and
exhibition catalogues published by Fundación Juan March, Madrid.
Tatiana Senkevitch received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University
of Michigan. She specializes in Baroque Art and Architecture, in various
forms of the Neo-Baroque, and in Russian art and architecture. She has
also written on perspective theory in early 20th century theory, the
Bologna school of painting, commemoration of the Poltava Battle, and
allegories of power. She was a recipient of a Getty Research Institute
Fellowship. She has taught as a Lecturer at the University of Southern
California, Cornell University, and University of Toronto. Currently, she
is at work on the book examining the formation of academic theory in
relation to public art institutions in France.
Laurent Turcot, a Professor of History at l’Université du Québec à Trois-

Rivières (Canada), is the author of Le promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle
(Gallimard, 2007), L’ordinaire parisien des Lumières (PUL, 2010) and, in
collaboration with Christophe Loir (Université Libre de Bruxelles) La
promenade au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Belgique – France –
Angleterre), Bruxelles, Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 2011. He is
the editor, with Arlette Farge, of Flagrant délit à la promenade des
Champs-Élysées, les dossiers Federici 1777-1791 (Paris, Gallimard,
2008). He specializes in cultural history, the history of leisure, and the
history of everyday life in eighteenth-century Paris and London. Jonathan
388 Contributors
Conlin (University of Southampton) and Laurent Turcot are currently

preparing an English edition of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1780 Parallel
of Paris and London, a manifesto for a mutually beneficial, cross-Channel
dialogue, one Mercier believed would foster a liveable city and a free yet
stable society.
Kathrin Yacavone is Lecturer in the Department of French and

Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published
articles on Benjamin, Barthes and Proust, with a focus on photography,
and is the author of Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography
(Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012 and 2013) and the editor of a special
number of Nottingham French Studies on “Photography in Contemporary
French and Francophone Cultures” (2014). She is currently preparing a
monograph on portraits of the writer in French photography, literature and
criticism from the 1840s to the present.

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The Flâneur Abroad

The Flâneur Abroad:

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2014 by Richard Wrigley and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-6016-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6016-1

List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiv

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 14

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 40

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 66

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 94

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 117

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 142

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 166

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 205

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 223

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 256

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 269

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 281

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 298

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 307

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 325

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 342

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 357

Contributors ............................................................................................. 384

* Colour plates are all used for chapter 9 Robbins

Fig. 3-4. Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, Plano Topographico de la Villa y

Fig. 9-11. Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), Alimentation, L’Assiette au beurre,

I am grateful to Elizabeth Jennings for taking responsibiity for the

The flâneur – the leisurely but vigilant urban stroller - is well-known as a

perspective, by means of which to approach the flâneur in a new light -

legacies of the conference will be two further conferences on the global

locations, and behaviour. Henri Béraud inherited the flâneurial journalistic

fed Benjamin’s own motivation for excavating modernity’s sources and

result of an almost accidental state of viewing. More generally, it is

but the illustrated press, a medium in which eclectic forms of journalism

various personal and national symptoms of malaise. The pedestrian is

Conlin, Deuling, Robbins, Rodriguez-Galindo, Senkevitch) address aspects

is almost nonexistent, while chodec is frequently used in contexts where

“THIS PUBLICK SORT OF OBSCURITY”:

thanks to a piece of Salon criticism addressing a minor artist, Constantin

Just as Baudelaire’s “man of the crowd”12 so Mr Spectator revels in his

collaborator, Richard Steele): “It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a

Going Nowhere: Boulevards and Pleasure Gardens

savour the pleasure of “seeing and being seen,” at the Cours-la-Reine in

Allées in gardens are like streets in a town. They allow communication

Tuileries, both guarded by Swiss troops. In 1678 another important

of middling and upper-class visitors as a spectacle of national cohesion.

The boulevards were conceived as gardens, with sanded walks.

Children of a New Hour: Geographies of Time

I walked at random, letting my glances stray where they would, and

That air of superiority common to flâneurs derives in part from the

Mr Spectator floats downriver with boatmen delivering fruit from the

Signs of the “Old City”: