One of the images most closely associated with Charles Baudelaire is the flâneur: the idler, stroller, urban explorer and perambulator. The flâneur became a common theme in criticism with the early 20th century writings of Walter Benjamin, but Benjamin based his study on Baudelaire’s wanderings of and writings on Paris. We will look briefly at this connoisseur of the street and emblem of modern urban existence in order to supplement our understanding of Baudelaire and his poetry.
Baudelaire’s evocation of the flâneur, who he deemed as “gentleman stroller of city streets” and a “mirror as vast as the crowd itself,” is found in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In this work discussing Constantin Guys, an illustrator whom Baudelaire admired for his bohemian outsider status and intense curiosity, the poet states, “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—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.” Guys was not a dandy, a type of person whom Baudelaire considered too blasé, but instead a “passionate spectator” who is the “the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity it contains.” Baudelaire himself was a flâneur, traversing the streets of Paris and absorbing fodder for his verse.
The quintessential flâneur, like Guys and Baudelaire, is a well-dressed 19th century gentleman, well-to-do and educated. He has the leisure time to wander the Parisian arcades and blend into the masses to anonymously consume the spectacle before him. The sights, sounds, and people that wash over him are fodder for his intellect and imagination. He plays the roles of narrator and audience simultaneously, and inserts himself into his writing. His is an empathic eye, an intimate association. He meditates as he moves through space, inserting himself into the world when he sees fit. This is his cure for ennui, that most loathed condition of modern existence.
In his 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” German sociologist Georg Simmel articulated the changing urban landscape and what it meant for the individual, noting, “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.” While he does not mention the flâneur explicitly, his writings help to explain the rise of the figure; they also heavily influenced another German scholar, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, as mentioned above, brought the term flâneur into the critical discourse with his 1935 work The Arcades Project. In his two essays on Baudelaire and “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” he describes the flâneur as a literary creature that sees the cityscape as a landscape lying open before the fictional characters, a land at once alien and familiar, a space that is both interior and exterior. He believes the figure arose because of the architectural changes in Paris that created the arcades, or roofed passageways in neighborhoods. The end of the flâneur came, for Benjamin, with the development of department stores: "If in the beginning the street had become an intérieur for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed though the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed though the labyrinth of the city."
Oscar Wilde noted his dissatisfaction with his flâneur lifestyle, ruing that “I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds.” Benjamin actually considered the flâneur a parasite of sorts, writing, "Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes.” In her dissertation on the Arcades Project, Heather Marcelle Crickenberger sums up the flâneur thusly: “The physical placement of the traditional flâneur in a setting that is an interior-exterior or an exterior-interior is essential to its significance in literary analysis. The flâneur's dual interior-exterior nature, his ability to be both active and intellectual, to be reading the past of the city while existing entirely in the present, and his manner of coloring the landscape with a bit of his own psyche places the flâneur at the center point of a whirlwind of contradictions. The manner in which the flâneur resolves the opposing stimuli that pelt him from every which way, while maintaining an aloof, yet empathic perspective of his surroundings—always alone in the crowd—makes him a powerful literary device that is capable of outdoing the omniscient narrator in objectivity and the first-person narrator in intimacy.”
The conceit has also been applied to photography, with Susan Sontag famously stating in her 1977 collection of essays On Photography that “the photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’”
