people watching and street photography VI.

The Flâneur and the Aesthetic Appropriation of Urban Culture in Mid-19th-century Paris, Mary Gluck

Visual representations of the 1840s presented the flâneur in black frock coat and top hat, with a cigar and a walking cane or umbrella in hand, which signified the correct public apparel of the urban bourgeoisie. He was always located on the boulevards, arcades, parks and cafes of the city and that emphasized how unthinkable the flâneur was in interior spaces such as salons and even theaters, unless it was the foyer where he could observe the audience.

The essence of the flâneur as a cultural type lay in the fact that his ‘publicness’ was not a neutral empirical fact but a heroic aspiration, conceived in opposition to the pragmatic and moralistic spirit of the age. In Baudelaire’s words, the flâneur was a visionary, in search of ‘poetic and marvelous subjects’ and the ‘epic side of modern life’, not apparent to ordinary mortals. The quintessential flâneur in Baudelaire’s eyes was Honoré de Balzac, whom he characterized as ‘the most heroic, the most extraordinary’ of all the fictional types he had given birth to.

The flâneur’s heroism took shape within the conventions of bourgeois culture. His black frock coat mirrored the new austerity of male attire characteristic of the modern age. As Philippe Perrot and John Harvey have pointed out, the disappearance of color and fantasy from the public clothing of bourgeois men in the early 19th century was culturally over-determined. According to Perrot, it served to symbolize a new way of life, based on ‘modesty, effort, propriety and “self-control”, which were the basis of bourgeois “respectability”.

The flâneur succeeded in being both fully modern and yet unquestionably heroic. But the flâneur’s heroism was not identified with military valor or any overt public gestures. What he accomplished was to render legible and transparent the bewildering heterogeneity of urban life and to create a viable model for an epic imagination in modernity.



next

The Crimes of the Flaneur by Tom McDonough

Flânerie and the globalizing city by Kathryn Kramer & John Rennie Short

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