The Sensualization of Flânerie

Abstract

Flânerie changed over the nineteenth century. The distant, detached flâneur came alive to sensuality. The sensual flâneur explored street flowers and foods in a Paris altered by urbanization. In Le Ventre de Paris Zola fixes on les Halles to study the sensualization of the city. The painter Claude Lantier is a flâneur who cannot resist the offerings to the senses, especially the ‘lower’ senses of smell, touch, and taste. Entrapped in his sensual flâneries, Claude is unable to complete his painting of les Halles. Zola succeeds. The writer-flâneur uses sensuality rather than being used by it, keeping his distance even as he plunges his readers into the city of sensualized flânerie.

Keywords:

• flâneur
• flânerie
• sensualization
• urbanization
• restaurants
• fleuristes
• aesthetizisation
• Zola
• les Halles
• Le Ventre de Paris

Notes

1 For one of the few studies to consider a ‘minority’ flâneur, see Nesci (2007). On the sociologist as flâneur, see Frisby (1994). On the flâneur in the early part of the nineteenth century, see Ferguson (1994: 80–93).

2 Sociologists debate the limits and merits of participant observation as a method, which raises these same questions of the relationship of the observer to the observed. My emphasis is less on the method than on the personage/character, the observer who is also a subject and therefore implicated in the scene observed.

3 Zola, 1971: 70. All further references to Le Ventre de Paris will be to this edition cited by page number in the text.

4 Sensorium referred to the brain considered as the centre of sensations. See the Voltaire quotation in Littré, <http://littre.reverso.net/dictionnaire-francais/definition/sensorium/68132> [accessed 17 May 2011]. I extend the term metaphorically to the city as a central site of sensations.

5 The work of Alain Corbin on smells (1986) takes a long historical view and does not focus on the city.

6 The chapelières-bouquetières separated from the jardiniers-fleuristes by the sixteenth century, one of the very few female corporations. In the Ancien régime, bouquetières either sold from a fixed spot or carried their wares about on an étal (Cauchy, 2008). In charge of their own shop, nineteenth-century fleuristes did indeed belong to Waldor’s ‘espèce d’aristocratie’.

7 Balzac, 1976–81, 5: 574. All further references to Balzac’s works will be to this edition and cited in the text by volume and page number.

8 Alphonse Karr (1808–90) early on developed an interest in hybridizing, as evidenced by his piece in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. His writings on floriculture include Voyage autour de mon jardin (1845) and Promenade hors de mon jardin (1856). After the coup d’état of 1851 in opposition to Napoléon III, he withdrew to the south, where he set up selling cut flowers and fruit. Lamartine memorialized the floral exile in Lettre à Alphonse Karr, Jardinier (1857): ‘On dit que d’écrivain tu t’es fait jardinier;/Que ton âne au marché porte un double panier;/Qu’en un carré de fleurs ta vie a jeté l’ancre/Et que tu vis de thym au lieu de vivre d’encre?’.

9 Floral stratification is every bit in evidence on the streets of today’s metropolis — from the elegant shop windows with their exotic plants and complex arrangements to the corner grocery stores with flowers and fruit on the street. The biggest difference is the personnel. Women lost their monopoly as flower vendors.

10 The social situation of the dinner remains Balzac’s primary interest: ‘Quand un dîner arrive à ce moment de déclin, certaines gens tourmentent le pépin d’une poire; d’autres roulent une mie de pain entre le pouce et l’index; les amoureux tracent des lettres informes avec les débris des fruits; les avares comptent leurs noyaux et les rangent sur leur assiette comme un dramaturge dispose ses comparses au fond d’un théâtre.[…] Le dessert était comme une escadre après le combat, tout désemparé, pillé, flétri. Les plats erraient sur la table […]. Nous ne connaissons point d’homme qui se soit encore attristé pendant la digestion d’un bon dîner’ (11: 90–91, L’Auberge rouge).

11 From Saccard’s land speculations dramatized in La Curée (1872) to his stock market manipulations in L’Argent (1891), Zola insists upon the shaky, ever-shifting foundations of modern capitalism. Balzac’s archetypal financier, Nucingen, is exceptional and an exception. Aristide Saccard is neither. In contrast to Nucingen, who makes his own opportunities, Saccard takes advantage of the opportunities offered him by urban renewal and a generalized social acceptance of corruption.

12 At least when that writer is Zola. There is no ‘real’ writer in the Rougon-Macquart saga, and we remember that in L’Œuvre (1886) Claude hangs himself in front of the painting that he cannot complete.

13 As numerous critics have noted, Zola conceived of Le Ventre de Paris as something of a response to Notre-Dame de Paris. Both texts claim to see Paris whole. Marie-Sophie Armstrong’s close textual comparisons (1996) between Le Ventre de Paris and Les Misérables demonstrate the explicit connections between Zola’s Parisian belly and Hugo’s sewers as between Florent’s torment in les Halles and Jean Valjean’s ordeal in the sewers.

14 Zola compensates for the absence of strong smell with extravagant similes, themselves redolent with psychological or moral implications. The Brie took on ‘des mélancolies de lunes éteintes’ while the Roquefort (a strong but not exceptionally odoriferous cheese) ‘prenaient des mines princières, […] veinés de bleu et de jaune, comme attaqués d’une malade honteuse de gens riches qui ont trop mangé de truffes’ (301). Claude gives his description of the display window at the charcuterie a similarly moral import: ‘J’avais peint […] la gloutonnerie du réveillon, l’heure de minuit donnée à la mangeaille, la goinfrerie des estomacs vidés par les cantiques’. The truffled turkey resembled ‘un ventre aperçu dans une gloire, mais avec une cruauté de touche’ (268–69).

15 Because we cannot taste as previous generations tasted, we cannot know how these cheeses tasted. Even so, there is every indication that our modern tastes are far more delicate than those of previous generations (Boisard, 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson

Priscilla Ferguson received her PhD in French literature from Columbia University, where she now teaches in the Department of Sociology. Her work on French literary and culinary culture includes Literary France: The Making of a Culture (1987), Paris as Revolution: Reading the Nineteenth-Century City (1994), and Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (2004). After ‘Belly Talk’ in the inaugural issue of Dix-Neuf (2003), she is writing a book on ‘Food Talk’.

Correspondence to: Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Dept of Sociology, Columbia University, 606 W. 122nd St, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: [email protected]