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Abstract
The physiologies and mass-circulation literature of the July Monarchy launched the emergence of the flâneur in the French popular imaginary, and famously celebrated his acute, flexible, and discerning gaze. Yet, these texts sometimes represent imperilled flâneurs who inadvertently collide with the city; the cause of these accidents lies in their hyperopia and subsequent failure to perceive the closest and most pedestrian details of the Parisian street. This farsightedness itself results from distraction in the French senses of the term: as both absentmindedness (la distraction) and social entertainment (les distractions), the flâneur’s distraction belongs to him as much as to Paris itself. The accidents that it causes question the stability of the flâneur as a social type, and eventually of social taxonomies themselves.
Notes
1 In her article about the flâneur and the urban culture of nineteenth-century Paris, Mary Gluck remarks that two narratives about flânerie have successively emerged. She dissociates the first popular typologies about the flâneur from what she calls the ‘avant-garde flâneur’ as it is portrayed by Baudelaire in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ in 1863 and later interpreted by Benjamin. This last account of the flâneur gives him a heroic status, and affranchises him from the city itself, engrossed as he is in his imagination and aesthetic creation.
2 I borrow this term from Benjamin, for whom panoramic texts are a counterpart to visual panoramas in so far as they seek to give an overview of contemporary everyday life while simultaneously describing its components in detail (Benjamin, 2002: 531). This genre flourished in France during the July Monarchy, and involved the most famous authors of the time, among them Balzac, Sand, Lamartine, and Janin.
3 Martina Lauster rightly insists on the differences between panoramic literature, a genre that is usually constituted of collections of sketches about social types or customs, and the physiologies, a ‘parodistic genre’ (Lauster, 2007: 150) that satirizes them.
4 Nineteenth-century anthropology indeed associated taste, touch, and smell, to animality and so-called ‘primitive’ culture (Howes, 2003: 4–5).
5 In that sense he seems affected by the same bias as Howes’s textual anthropologist, who after Geertz considers that ‘the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong’ (Geertz, 1973: 452). Howes insists on the verbal and visual bias of such a methodology, all the more since it reduces culture to a spectacle that the anthropologist then speculates upon from above (Howes 19–20).
6 Even though according to both the Grand Robert and the Trésor de la langue française, the words ‘flâner’ and ‘flâneur’ appear as early as the seventeenth century, it is not until the nineteenth that their usage becomes common. Rousseau, who was often associated with the term throughout the nineteenth century (Lacroix, 1841: 69), never used the word himself. The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie do not mention the word either until 1878, although by that year the term is already deeply rooted in everyday language. For more on the lexical and literary genealogy of the flâneur, see Paris as Revolution (Ferguson, 1994: 82–96).
7 On the panoramic quality of the flâneur’s gaze and its similarity to the classificatory approaches of the physiologies and panoramic literature, see Benjamin, 1997: 36–37, and Prendergast, 1992: 134–35.
8 The relationship of the flâneur to the city is in fact one of shared interdependence, for Paris itself could not be conceived without the flâneur: ‘représenter Paris sans lui, ce serait peindre une chambre des députés sans le général D…, un bal sans la princesse B…’ (Lacroix, 1841: 99).
9 ‘Le flâneur à Paris’ is peculiar among the sketch collections of the period, because it does not make of the nineteenth-century flâneur a figure of creation or a literary genius; without that artistic aura and putative goal in sight, the flâneur here is an interstitial figure, both absorbing and absorbed, with a bare exteriority by way of definition.
10 The roles will be reversed in the episodes of clumsiness, where more often than once it is the city itself which collides with and pierces the flâneur’s body.
11 Lacroix is alluding to Henri de Latouche (1785–1851), a poet and a journalist who had close ties to George Sand and Balzac, and who regularly wrote in Le Constitutionnel and Le Mercure du XIXe siècle. The narrator here later cites the poète’s works, Fragoletta and La Vallée aux loups, which were written by Latouche in the late 1820s and early 1830s.
12 Bergson himself remarks on that fact at the beginning of Le Rire. The first example of the book is that of a falling man: ‘Un homme, qui courait dans la rue, trébuche et tombe: les passants rient. […] Ce n’est […] pas son changement brusque d’attitude qui fait rire, c’est ce qu’il y a d’involontaire dans le changement, c’est la maladresse’ (2007: 7). His ‘maladresse’ (7) is the result of ‘a circonstance extérieure qui a déterminé l’effet’. Bergson adds that ‘le comique est donc accidentel; il reste, pour ainsi dire, à la surface de la personne’ (8). Bergson here understands la maladresse in its second meaning, as an accident contingent on everyday life and almost exterior to the subject.
13 See Deleuze’s discussion of Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up in Logic of Sense (1969: 180–89).
14 Jules Janin, in the introduction of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, described the panoramic project as one of historical preservation for generations to come, implicitly comparing the period’s upheavals and unstable political regimes to a series of natural catastrophes, a concept that Cuvier had popularized in his discipline in the 1810s (Janin, 1841: vii).
15 Although the novels of the same period do sometimes acknowledge the flâneur’s artistic potential, one can still safely argue that the plot-based literary genres are less systematic than the panoramic texts in praising the flâneur. In Balzac’s novels, for instance, the narrative voice of Les Employés labels Dutocq ‘incapable et flâneur’ (Balzac, 1976–81, 7: 961), while Clapart’s flânerie in Un Début dans la vie is also associated with a chronic lethargy which, eventually, costs him his life: ‘l’inoccupé, le flâneur Clapart’ is killed during the Fieschi attack as he idly watches the revue on ‘son boulevard du Temple’ (1976–81, 1: 879). Just as he can be an artist en devenir or an anonymous man of genius, then, the flâneur of the Balzacian novel can also be a useless and lazy bon-à-rien.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Pauline de Tholozany
Pauline de Tholozany received a PhD in French Studies at Brown University in the spring of 2011, and is now a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Her dissertation, L’École de la maladresse: de J.J. Rousseau à J.J. Grandville, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles, traces a history of clumsiness from the Ancien Régime to the nineteenth century. She has also presented and published papers on nineteenth-century panoramic literature and mass-circulation sketches (‘Revolutionizing the Fossilized’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, forthcoming).
Correspondence to: Pauline de Tholozany, Department of French and Francophone Studies, Bryn Mawr College, 101 North Merion Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899. Email: [email protected], [email protected]