2 Introduction
Chapter 1
Introduction1
Keith Tester
. . . my former ennui had returned and I felt its weight even more
heavily than before; I doubted whether further attempts at
sociability would ever relieve me of it. W hat I required was not
exactly solitude, but the opportunity to roam around freely,
meeting people when I wished and taking leave o f them when I
wished . . .
(Gerard de Nerval 1984)
Flanerie, the activity of strolling and looking which is carried out
by the flaneur , is a recurring m otif in the literature, sociology and
art o f urban, and most especially o f the m etropolitan, existence.
Originally, the figure of the flaneur was tied to a specific time and
place: Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century as it was conjured
by Walter Benjamin in his analysis of Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin
1983). But the flaneur has been allowed, or made, to take a number
o f walks away from the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century
Paris. Not least, the figure and the activity appear regularly in the
attem pts of social and cultural com m entators to get some grip on
the nature and implications of the conditions of modernity and
post-modernity. The flaneur has walked into the pages of the
commonplace. But despite this popularization, the precise meaning
and significance of flanerie remains more than a little elusive.
The flaneur o f nineteenth-century Paris receives his most famous
eulogy in the prose and poetry o f Charles Baudelaire.2 Certainly,
flanerie is one o f the main narrative devices o f the Paris Spleen
collection of 1869 and thus Baudelaire provides an insight into
exactly what it is that the flaneur does. Baudelaire achieves this in
part by calling forth a poetic - and a poet’s - vision of the public
places and spaces o f Paris. For Baudelaire, there is no doubt that
the poet is the ‘m an’ (and Baudelaire is quite explicit about the
gender identity o f the poet; much, if not indeed all, o f Baudelaire’s
w ork presupposes a masculine narrato r or observer) who can reap
aesthetic meaning and an individual kind o f existential security
from the spectacle of the teeming crowds —the visible public —o f
the m etropolitan environm ent o f the city o f Paris. As Baudelaire
said in his best known depiction o f the flaneur, the essay ‘The
Painter o f M odern Life’ (which was first published in 1863): ‘The
crowd is his dom ain, just as the air is the b ird ’s, and water th a t o f
the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crow d’
(Baudelaire 1972: 399).
The poet is the m an for whom m etropolitan spaces are the land­
scape of art and existence. For him , the private world of domestic
life is dull and possibly even a cause for the feelings of crisis which
Sartre was later to call nausea. W ithout entry into the spectacle o f
the public, existence can only be wanting in something of fu nd a­
m ental im portance. The private sphere is the hom e o f an existence
devoid of an alm ost orgiastic pleasure: ‘The m an who loves to lose
him self in a crowd enjoys feverish delights th a t the egoist locked up
in himself as in a box, and the slothful m an like a mollusk in his
shell, will be eternally deprived o f’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20). It might
well be w orth reading this passage alongside Emile D urkheim ’s
later, and allegedly more scientifically sociological, discussion of
the im portance o f men getting out o f the little boxes of their own
m inds and private worlds (Durkheim 1957, 1960).
Baudelaire’s poet is a m an who is driven out o f the private and
into the public by his own search for meaning. H e is the man w ho is
only at hom e existentially when he is not at hom e physically. To
quote ‘The P ainter o f M odern Life’ again (it m ight be speculated
th a t this essay is something like the m ethodological pream ble to
Paris Spleen ): ‘F or the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it
becomes an immense source o f enjoyment to establish his dwelling
in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the
infinite’ (Baudelaire 1972: 399). The passage continues to stress the
involvement o f the poet in the public dom ain (and therefore, by
implication Baudelaire hints at the challenges to the poet and to
poetry which a private existence would mean). Baudelaire reveals
the tense and fluctuating relationship between the poet and his
participation in the public life o f the city. The poet (and to be a
poet is the real tru th o f the idler and the observer; the poetry is the
reason and the justification o f the idling; the poet is possibly at his
 Keith Tester
busiest when he seems to be at his laziest) is possessed by a special
and defining ability. The poet is able ‘To be away from home and
yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the very centre o f the world,
and yet to be unseen o f the world’ (Baudelaire 1972: 400).
Baudelaire’s poet is the man o f the crowd as opposed to the man
in the crowd. The poet is the centre o f an order of things of his own
making even though, to others, he appears to be just one constitu­
ent part o f the m etropolitan flux. It is this sense of being o f rather
than being in which makes the poet different from all the others in
the crowd. In the ‘C row ds’ item o f Paris Spleen , Baudelaire pro­
claims the (for him undoubted) truth that ‘It is not given to every
man to take a bath o f m ultitude’; only a poet can take such a bath
because it is only on the poet that ‘a fairy has bestowed the love of
masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for
roam ing’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20). Even more starkly, and even more
to emphasize the distance between the poet and the crowd in which
he mingles, Baudelaire says: ‘M ultitude, solitude: identical terms,
and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is
unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a
bustling crow d’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20).
Here, then, the poet is rather like a banal and everyday version of
Pascal’s thinking reed. Pascal called humans ‘thinking reeds’
because we are aware of the fragility of our lives; we are breakable
like reeds but, im portantly, we know ourselves to be like reeds in
the winds of circumstance. It is this knowing, this thinking, which
makes us what we are and which distinguishes us from all that
which is unable to contemplate its reed-like nature. Pascal explains
that, ‘even if the universe should crush him, man would still be
more noble than that which destroys him, because he knows that he
dies and he realises the advantage which the universe possesses over
him ’ (Pascal quoted in Hampshire 1956: 98).
Now, Baudelaire’s poet is like a thinking reed because he is a face
in the crowd along with all the other faces in the crowd. But
behind the face o f the poet lurks a great secret of nobility.
Baudelaire’s poet claims to possess a nobility in relation to all the
other members of the m etropolitan crowd because, even if the
crowd should crush him either physically or existentially, he knows
that the crowd might do this. The nobility of the poet is located
quite precisely in his thinking o f his mediocrity in the eyes of
others. Indeed, in many ways, it is exactly the danger of being in a
crowd which, for Baudelaire’s poet, inspires much of the pleasure
3 4 Introduction
and delight o f the spectacle o f the public. Crucially, for Baudelaire,
the poet is he who knows he is a face in the crowd. A nd, as such, by
virtue o f that very knowing, the poet is a m an ap art even though he
might well appear to be a man like any other. Indeed, if the poet
does appear to be like every one else, so much the better. The
anonym ity of the poet is merely a ruse; it is a play o f masks w ithout
which the poet could not transform into the beautiful the raw stuff
he witnesses. A fter all, ‘The observer is a prince enjoying his incog­
nito wherever he goes’ (Baudelaire 1972: 400). If the poet could be
seen he would be unable to observe.
Such a knowledge o f being in the crowd, such a princely incog­
nito (as Baudelaire might well have called the anonym ity o f the
poet), gives the Baudelairean poet an ability to m ake for himself
the meaning and the significance o f the m etropolitan spaces and the
spectacle of the public. The poet is the sovereign in control o f a
world o f his own definition (that is why he is a prince); he defines
the order of things for him self rather than allowing things or
appearances to be defining o f themselves (although there is o f
course a paradox to this kind o f control; the control over defining
meaning for one’s self is purchased at the expense o f accepting
things as they are, as pre-existing). The poet is the self-proclaimed
and self-believing m onarch o f the crowd. A nd because he can or
does look just like anyone else, nowhere is forbidden to him;
spatially, morally and culturally the public holds no mysteries for
the m an who is proud o f the mystery o f himself. The poet can put
on whatever m ask will gain him access to otherwise secret and mys­
terious places: ‘F o r him alone everything is vacant; and if certain
places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not
w orth visiting’ (Baudelaire 1970: 20).
This sovereignty based in anonym ity and observation means that
for the poet the meaning and the im portance o f everything is
m utable more or less at will. Baudelaire writes: ‘The poet enjoys
the incom parable privilege o f being able to be him self or someone
else, as he chooses. Like those w andering souls who go looking for
a body, he enters as he likes into each m an ’s personality (Baudelaire
1970: 20). This ability to be defining o f the m eaning and o f the
order o f things - which is, let it be noted, an event entirely in the
realm o f ideas an d thus quite independent o f m aterial factors (the
poet need not be rich in clothes to be rich in im agination) - implies
a connection between the intuited fluidity o f things in the environ­
m ent o f the city and the physical negotiations o f the space and
 Keith Tester
other bodies carried out by the poet during his walks in crowds.
It is quite noticeable that Baudelaire’s interpretation of the poet
is built upon a kind of dialectic of control and incompletion. On
the one hand, Baudelaire makes the poet the sovereign of the
chance meetings o f the city stage which has no spaces forbidden to
him. The poet can be what he wills to be; he can put on masks and
m ake the faces o f strangers hide the sordid secrets of their souls. To
this extent, the poet is in complete control of the meaning of his
world. The poet is the maker of the order of things. Yet, and on the
other hand, the poet does not indulge in all of this definition
through choice or through wilful freedom. The poet does not
choose; he is compelled (thus, for the poet of Baudelaire, poetry is
a vocation as opposed to a simple profession). The ontological
basis of the Baudelairean poet resides in doing not being. For
Baudelaire, the m an who lives in a box, or the m an who lives like a
mollusc (the man who simply is) is actually incomplete; the struggle
for existential completion and satisfaction requires relentless
bathing in m ultitude (it requires doing over and over again).
Completion requires an escape from the private sphere. The hero of
m odern life is he who lives in the public spaces o f the city.
The dialectic o f the poet is, then, one o f the sovereignty of indi­
vidual self-hood in synthesis with a situation in which the practice
o f self-hood is dependent on the contingencies of spectacles such as
crowds. The dialectic of the poet is ‘this divine prostitution of the
soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unex­
pected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes’ (Baudelaire
1970: 20). In Baudelaire’s terms, this is also an intrinsically modern
existence since it represents a synthesis o f the permanence of the
soul o f the poet with the unexpected changes o f public meetings. It
is a quest for the Holy Grail o f being through a restless doing ; a
struggle for satisfaction through the rooting out and destruction of
dissatisfaction (dissatisfaction being due to the banality of coming
across the familiar or across passing friends; dissatisfaction being
the sense of finding a world rather than making a world). But
Baudelaire did not realize the abyss at the heart o f this equation. By
its very form ulation, the equation of Baudelaire’s poet means that
if it is hoped to discover the secret of the truth o f being , doing can
never cease; it is impossible to rest in the knowledge of being , since
even that resting is itself a doing . The secret o f being is then the
actuality of doing. Put another way, the search for self-hood
through the diagnosis of dissatisfaction does not at all lead in the
5 6 Introduction
end to satisfaction; it just leads to more dissatisfaction. Perhaps,
then, the poet can never be happy except in the m om ent o f death.
Baudelaire himself m ade the connection between the poet o f the
metropolis and the quest for satisfaction quite clear in his essay on
T h e Painter o f M odern Life’. There he emphasized both the
sovereign self-hood o f the poet (who in T h e Painter o f M odern
Life’ comes in the guise o f the painter C onstantin Guys) and yet the
relentless struggle to practise and know that sovereignty. (Baude­
laire spoke o f Guys. However, it is likely that he saw Edouard
M anet as the true painter o f m odern life; see Collins 1975, Pool
1967.) In this way, Baudelaire draws out the dialectic o f being and
doing . Also, here again, the poet is set apart from the mass of the
public: ‘this solitary m ortal endowed with an active im agination,
always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that
o f the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting
pleasure o f circumstance’ (Baudelaire 1972: 402). This poet, this
man who is in control and who is yet dissatisfied (for Baudelaire’s
poet there is more at stake than mere idle pleasure in the transient
meetings and truths of the city), ‘is looking for that indefinable
something we may be allowed to call “ m odernity” . . . . The aim
for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its
historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory’
(Baudelaire 1972: 402).
All of this is to provide some way o f grasping precisely who is the
flaneur , precisely what is flanerie. Baudelaire’s poet (or at least,
Baudelaire’s poet as he appears in Paris Spleen and T h e Painter o f
M odern Life’) is essentially identical with the flaneur. In the term s
established by Charles Baudelaire, the flaneur is basically the hero
o f modernity. The heroism consists in the fact that ‘All o f us are
attending some funeral or other’ (Baudelaire 1972: 104); the
funeral o f dissatisfaction in the quest for satisfaction. But ironic­
ally this means that all o f us are attending the funeral o f the Grail
o f being.
The flaneur is the man o f the public who knows him self to be o f
the public. The flaneur is the individual sovereign o f the order o f
things who, as the poet or as the artist, is able to transform faces
and things so that for him they have only th at meaning which he
attributes to them. He therefore treats the objects of the city with a
somewhat detached attitude (an attitude which is only a short step
away from isolation and alienation, a short step which ends with
N erval’s com plaint from Les Chimeres : ‘I am the shadowed - the
 Keith Tester 7 8
bereaved - the unconsoled’). The flaneur is the secret spectator of
the spectacle of the spaces and places of the city. Consequently,
flanerie can, after Baudelaire, be understood as the activity o f the
sovereign spectator going about the city in order to find the things
which will occupy his gaze and thus complete his otherwise incom­
plete identity; satisfy his otherwise dissatisfied existence; replace
the sense of bereavement with a sense of life.
Flanerie can be understood as the observation of the fleeting and
the transitory which is the other half o f modernity to the permanent
and central sense of self. Flanerie is the doing through and thanks
to which the flaneur hopes and believes he will be able to find the
truth of his being. Flanerie also, then, is the way of avoiding arrival
at the funeral pyre of being. It is a way of going on precisely
because it is ultimately so utterly futile.
Because the flaneur is fundamentally a figure who can only be
known through the activities o f flanerie , a certain mystery is
intrinsic to his identity. Baudelaire himself mentioned ‘those inde­
pendent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves
easily to linguistic definitions’ (Baudelaire 1972: 400). Here, once
and for all, definitions are at best difficult and, at worst, a contra­
diction of what the flaneur means. In himself, the flaneur is, in
fact, a very obscure thing. And, therefore, he cannot be defined in
him self as very much more than a tautology (the flaneur is the man
who indulges in flanerie ; flanerie is the activity of the flaneur).
Baudelaire makes this indefinability quite clear in his invention of
the daily routine and daily quests o f the artist Constantin Guys.
According to Baudelaire, this flaneur (called Guys) magnifies what
is already waiting to be discovered. This flaneur waits to be filled
because, in himself, he is utterly empty (and, just like the thinking
reed, he knows himself to be empty; the knowing o f the emptiness
is the pre-condition of the great control over the urban environ­
ment). It is likely that the emptiness o f the flaneur is the reason for
the fear of the night and of sleep which Baudelaire attributes to
Guys (see Baudelaire 1972: 4 0 0 -1 ). There is a kind of frenzied
rom antic love with the spectacle of the public. And just as (so we
are told) the high point of love is to lose one’s self in the beloved, so
Constantin Guys as invented by Baudelaire achieves his greatest
peaks of existence when he loses himself in what he observes. ‘It is
an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in
energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting’
(Baudelaire 1972: 400).3
Introduction
In these term s, the figure, and the activity, o f the flaneur is essen­
tially about freedom , the meaning of existence (or the lack of a
meaning of existence) and being-with-others in the m odern urban
spaces o f the city. Freedom because the figure revolves around the
dialectic o f self-definition and definition from outside (although
this freedom is perhaps something more by way o f a curse than a
promise); the meaning (or lack o f meaning) o f existence because the
figure is about the flux o f life and the requirement to m ake its
meaning for o n e’s self (a problem which is turned into a surreal
reverie in the flanerie of Louis A ragon’s Paris Peasant, A ragon
1971); being-with-others because the flaneur says im portant things
about how we know who we are, how we become who we are, and
how others become who we think they are, when all we can know
for sure is what we observe. (A sense of the opportunities, conceits
and finally utter emptiness o f this aspect o f the flaneur runs
through G erard de Nerval’s Journey to the Orient. Nerval dis­
covered that wherever he went to try to find answers, he had to take
himself. A nd so the questions remained; see Nerval 1984.) M ore­
over, with his fruitless if not actually futile search for satisfaction
through the deconstruction o f dissatisfaction, the flaneur indicates
why the problem s that rear their heads in the urban spaces tend to
be recurring rather than resolvable (and why Nerval could not
escape them even on a boat to Beirut). In a sentence, it might be
said that even though the flaneur does not choose his urbanity, he
senses himself to be responsible for it. It is his inescapable fate.
Perhaps for these reasons, the flaneur has been im portant to the
existentialist attem pts to discover the secrets of being in the m odern
(urban, m etropolitan, public) world. Certainly the figure is o f
central im portance in Sartre’s novel Nausea (Sartre 1965). (A sense
o f some of the connections Sartre identified between his existential­
ism and Baudelaire is contained in Sartre 1950.) It is perhaps not too
far fetched to identify the main character o f Nausea , A ntoine
Roquentin, as a kind o f flaneur. Existentially, R oquentin’s life is
nothing other than a series of individual and largely lonely strollings
which suggest an attem pt to escape from the private sphere (which
for Roquentin is utterly barren) and to find meaning instead from
the spectacle o f the public. In this way also, R oquentin’s observa­
tion of all that he sees is predicated on his incognito and detachm ent
from others (which is the other side of his alm ost complete social
isolation; an isolation which is, however, to some extent legitimated
by R oquentin’s struggle to write a book; consequently his evident