Flaneurs & Idlers (review)

As a figure defined by his mobility, the flâneur has recently found himself traveling in fast company. Once more or less confined to literary circles, the flâneur has emerged as the crossover darling of other disciplines: urban studies, visual studies, and media theory in particular have found new postmodern applications of flânerie, a term that has historically served as shorthand for modernist notions of leisure, spectacle, and privilege in western European cities of the 1800s. Margaret A. Rose's edited volume, Flaneurs & Idlers, reverses the trend of new contexts, and instead traces the figure of the flâneur back through the nineteenth century to its earliest days. In documenting all the ways in which the body and character of the city stroller have been transformed through the decades, Rose reveals much about class anxieties, national identity, and the modern urban experience.

One of Rose's most engaging contributions to this study is its transnational perspective, drawing correlations and comparisons among nineteenth-century writers throughout Europe. If the flâneur was in its earliest incarnations a comic, lighthearted figure, as in "Le flâneur parisien" (". . . le seul homme heureux qui existe sur la terre," wrote Louis Huart of the flâneur in 1841), then others saw qualities and aptitudes beyond the simple penchant for self-interested wanderings. Heinrich Heine, living in Paris during that same period, noted the flâneur's capacity to absorb both the comedy and the tragedy of city life. John Leech's frequent drawings in "Punch" parsed England's vast taxonomy of "idlers," distinct in their varying degrees of taste and favored locales, but absurdly cohesive in their uniforms of top hat, coat-tails, and walking cane (Leech's caricatures are especially cutting; he captures the indolent, self-indulgent bourgoisie in the top-heavy swagger of the English idler, at once heavy-jowled and narrow-chested).

By the 1860s, Baudelaire had further developed the solitary nature of the flâneur figure, and with the publication of "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," the flâneur became more fully articulated, a three-dimensional reckoning of one who strolls urban space with a keen eye to observe and critique the cityscape surrounding him – in short, flâneur as artist. It is from this point, argues Rose, that much of how we currently theorize the flâneur has taken shape. If the Baudelairean flâneur has in some ways concretized into an archetype, then Walter Benjamin's reading of that archetype has similarly come to be the predominant means by which we situate flânerie in an analytical framework. Some of the most circulated and oft-cited work on the topic of flânerie comes from Benjamin's studies of Baudelaire and the Arcades; Rose rightly argues that the lens through which Benjamin examines the flâneur is unduly colored by the ahistorical application of "theories of alienation and reification developed after the flâneur's appearance in the early nineteenth century, and [Benjamin's reading] may be said [. . .] to have failed to do justice to the satiric and ironic character of the essays and physiologies in which the flâneur had first featured" (4). Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire recast the flâneur as incapable of inspiring irony or self-reflection, ignoring the origins of the figure as social caricature.

In an effort to rectify that fact, Rose presents the full text of two of the earliest defining popular representations of the flâneur: Louis Huart's Physiologie du flâneur (1841) and Albert Smith's The Natural History of the Idler upon Town (1848). Each parodies the field guide, the former identifying subspecies of flâneurs, badauds, and musards in Paris, the latter noting London's distinct categories of idlers, mooners and loungers. Huart's social satire stays fairly light; the obese flâneur will find it is only comfortable to stroll in Paris "pendant les mois où l'on mange des huîtres" (84). The guidebook advises that the pleasures of flânerie will be lost on...