The Flâneur in Paris

Abstract

The following paper is an abstract from a soon to be published monograph, Parisians on themselves and their city: “Paris, or The Book of a Hundred and One (1831–1835). The book includes translations of 15 essays from this edition. One of those, “A fâneur in Paris”, laid down the basis for a new understanding of fâneur. While until the late 1820s this word would have been used to denote an ordinary rubbernecker, loitering around the town and looking around but never refecting on what he sees, in the early 1830s several texts emerged, which contrasted fâneur with to a rubbernecker (badaud, musard): a fâneur is portrayed as an interpreter of surrounding reality, “a semiologist avant la lettre”. True enough, the fâneur himself writes nothing; yet some authors present their works as transcripts of tales and observations by a fâneur. The introduction to these texts, and to the published essay from The Book of a Hundred and One in particular, enables us to specify the — rather negativistic — interpretation of fâneur put forward by Walter Benjamin.