The Flâneur, the Tourist, the Global Flâneur, and Magazine Reading as Flânerie

Abstract

The flâneur and the tourist were both characterized foremost by movement and curiosity. A range of meanings and resonances were associated with both figures, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility. While the sense of vision was emphasized, literary representations often evoked the idea that vacuous and passive seeing, stimulated by trivial goings-on and merchandise, lets the flâneur neglect the other senses, whereas an inner preparation and discernment lead to a more balanced way of flânerie. The projection of flânerie onto world travel paralleled the mode of reading illustrated magazines, which elicited imaginary flânerie. The re-reading of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ in this light provides some new insights regarding the concept of the artist as the ‘man of the world’.

Keywords:

• flâneur
• tourist
• travel
• Paris
• illustrated magazines
• popular literature
• vision
• modernity

Thanks to Aimée Boutin for her comments and suggestions. All translations are mine.

Notes

1 In a French etymological dictionary of the Walloon language, published in 1845, the word cotieû stood for both tourist and flâneur, based on cotî, meaning walking or promenading (Grandgagnage, 1845: 130).

2 The title of one of the first guidebooks on Paris, Voyage pittoresque de Paris; ou, Indication de tout ce qu’il y a de plus beau dans cette ville, en peinture, sculpture & architecture (1778) by Antoine-Nicolas Dézallier d’Argenville underlined the idea of travel within Paris, and also the notion of a survey of all that was worthy of seeing in the city.

3 Regretting some unfruitful experiments, he was promenading one day along the boulevards on his way back from supper, as the Parisian flâneur is as often a man of despair as much as laziness.

4 Emphasis is Lacroix’s.

5 Richard Sieburth has shown that Nerval’s travelogue, one of a set of travelogues about the Rhine published in the period, is about a romanticized rendition of a foreign region (Sieburth, 1983: 199–239).

6 Mary Gluck has captured this interest in the insideroutsider tension when she theorizes the flâneur as akin to cultural bohemians, not as alienated outsiders but rather as people partaking as agents and consumers of the emerging consumer culture (Gluck, 2005: ch. 3).

7 I would like to acknowledge Cheryl Krueger for coining the term ‘global flâneur’. See Krueger’s piece in the current number of Dix-Neuf.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

H Hazel Hahn

H. Hazel Hahn is Associate Professor of History and the 2010–12 Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair in Humanities at Seattle University. Her book Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (2009) integrates the history of Paris with the history of consumption, the press, publicity, advertising, and spectacle. She is working on two monographs — Cultures of Travel: Envisioning the World, 1800–1930 on travel imaginaries in France and Britain; and on urban planning, urban history, and the planning of tourism in French Indochina — and is also co-editing Architecturalized Asia: Mapping a Continent through History.

Correspondence to: H. Hazel Hahn, History Department, Seattle University, Seattle, WA 98122, USA. Email: [email protected]