Page 1 of 20 | The Invisible Flâneur Elizabeth Wilson The Invisible Flâneur The relationship of women to cities has long preoccupied reformers and philanthropists. 1 In recent years the preoccupation has been inverted: the Victorian determination to control working-class women has been replaced by a feminist concern for women's safety and comfort in city streets. But whether women are seen as a problem of cities, or cities as a problem for women, the relationship remains fraught with difficulty. With the intensification of the public/private divide in the industrial period, the presence of women on the streets and in public places of entertainment caused enormous anxiety, and was the occasion for any number of moralizing and regulatory discourses. In fact, the fate and position of women in the city was a special case of a more general alarm and ambivalence which stretched across the political spectrum. It is true that some-predominantly liberals expressed an optimistic and excited response to the urban spectacle. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who stood to gain most from industrial urbanization were the ones that praised it most strongly: the new entrepreneurs, the rising bourgeois class. For them the cities—above all the great city, the metropolis—offered an unprecedented and astonishing variety of possibilities, stimuli and wealth. The development of a consumer and spectacular society on a scale not previously known represented opportunities for progress, plenty and a more educated and civilized populace. 2 Hostility to urbanization was more likely to come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, Engels was deeply critical not only of the slum and factory conditions in which the majority had to survive, but equally of the 1 The theme of this article is touched on in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, London 1991. The immediate stimulus for it was the 'Cracks in the Pavement' (Women and City Spaces) conference organized by Lynne Walker and the Design Museum in April 1991. I am much indebted to all those who participated in the lively discussions that took place on that occasion, and my especial thanks to Lynne Walker for inviting me. 2 See, for example, Robert Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities, London 1843, Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940, Manchester '985, discusses at length attitudes towards urbanization in Europe and the United States.
The Invisible Flâneur
Mar 30, 2023
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Elizabeth Wilson
The Invisible Flâneur
The relationship of women to cities has long preoccupied reformers and philanthropists.1 In recent years the preoccupation has been inverted: the Victorian determination to control working-class women has been replaced by a feminist concern for women's safety and comfort in city streets. But whether women are seen as a problem of cities, or cities as a problem for women, the relationship remains fraught with difficulty. With the intensification of the public/private divide in the industrial period, the presence of women on the streets and in public places of entertainment caused enormous anxiety, and was the occasion for any number of moralizing and regulatory discourses. In fact, the fate and position of women in the city was a special case of a more general alarm and ambivalence which stretched across the political spectrum. It is true that some-predominantly liberals expressed an optimistic and excited response to the urban spectacle. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who stood to gain most from industrial urbanization were the ones that praised it most strongly: the new entrepreneurs, the rising bourgeois class. For them the cities—above all the great city, the metropolis—offered an unprecedented and astonishing variety of possibilities, stimuli and wealth. The development of a consumer and spectacular society on a scale not previously known represented opportunities for progress, plenty and a more educated and civilized populace.2
Hostility to urbanization was more likely to come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, Engels was deeply critical not only of the slum and factory conditions in which the majority had to survive, but equally of the
1 The theme of this article is touched on in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, London 1991. The immediate stimulus for it was the 'Cracks in the Pavement' (Women and City Spaces) conference organized by Lynne Walker and the Design Museum in April 1991. I am much indebted to all those who participated in the lively discussions that took place on that occasion, and my especial thanks to Lynne Walker for inviting me. 2 See, for example, Robert Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities, London 1843, Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940, Manchester '985, discusses at length attitudes towards urbanization in Europe and the United States.
Page 2 of 20 | The Invisible Flâneur
indifference and selfishness with which people behaved in crowds where no- one knew anyone else. By contrast with an implied natural order of things, the new urban forms of human interaction had about them 'something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels'. Urban life encouraged 'the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest'.3 The utopian socialist William Morris hated the dirt and poverty of the industrialized town, and advocated a return to medieval village architecture and ways of life—a life in which women would be once more safely ensconced in the domestic sphere.4 That Morris is still so popular on the Left (especially with men), and received so uncritically, is an index of the strength of left-wing romantic anti-urbanism.
Right-wing critics of urban life equally harked back to an organic rural community. They feared the way in which the break-up of tradition in cities led to the undermining of authority, hierarchy and dignity. The menace of the cities was not only disease and poverty; even more threatening were the spectres of sensuality, democracy and revolution. One particular cause for alarm was the way in which urban life undermined patriarchal authority. Young, unattached men and women flocked to the towns to find more remunerative work. There, freed from the bonds of social control, they were in danger of succumbing to temptations of every kind; immorality, illegitimacy, the breakdown of family life and bestial excess appeared to threaten from all sides. Perhaps worse was that, in the rough and tumble of the city street and urban crowd, distinctions of rank of every kind were blurred.
Public Women
In particular, female virtue and respectability were hard to preserve in this promiscuous environment. 'Who are these somebodies whom nobody knows?' famously enquired William Acton in his survey of prostitution, published in 1857; and prostitution was the great fear of the age. Evangelical reformers in the Britain of the 1830s and 1840s wrote impassioned tracts in which they described this, the 'great social evil', as a plague that was rotting the very basis of society, and they campaigned for its eradication. Significantly, they often linked prostitution to the ideals of the French Revolution. Prostitution, then, was not only a real and ever present threat; it was also a metaphor for disorder and the overturning of the natural hierarchies and institutions of society. Rescue, reform and legislation were to rid the cities of this frightful evil.5
The pioneer of investigations into prostitution was the French bureaucrat, Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, whose survey of the problem appeared in 1836. He favoured a regulatory regime of the kind Foucault has documented, arguing that each prostitute must have her dossier, and that the more information that could be gathered about each individual—the better she was known by the
3 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Moscow 1962, p.56. 4 William Morris, News From Nowhere, and Selected Writings and Designs (1890), Harmondsworth 1986, pp. 234-5. 5 See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge 1980.
Page 3 of 20 | The Invisible Flâneur
state—the easier would become the task of surveillance.6 Alain Corbin has studied Parent-Duchâtelet's work in other areas of hygiene, his investigations of slaughter houses, for example, and has drawn out the way in which his writings articulate a contradictory ideology of prostitution. In this ideology the prostitute's body is putrefying, and infects the social body with corruption and death; yet at the same time it is a drain which siphons off that which would otherwise corrupt the whole of society. In order to effect this, bourgeois surveillance and regulation were to bring the brothel within a utilitarian regime of control.7
Parent-Duchâtelet's perspective was distinct from that of the British evangelical clergymen and philanthropists, and his stance closer to that of the physician William Acton. By the 1850s Acton was arguing for the regulation of prostitution from a worldly and cynical perspective far different in tone from that of the evangelicals.8
In Britain an intense struggle developed between those who favoured more stringent regulation and those who objected to it. The regulation of prostitutes could all too easily shade over into the regulation of all—or at least all working-class—women. Josephine Butler undertook her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts (from 1864) on civil-liberties grounds, and partly because women who were not prostitutes could so easily fall foul of the new ordinances and find themselves subject to arrest and humiliating examination.9
Judith Walkowitz has argued that the very existence of these Acts served to separate prostitutes more clearly from other women—and that therefore the regulation of prostitutes in a sense almost created and certainly exacerbated the evil it was intended to contain.10
The prostitute was a 'public woman', but the problem in nineteenth-century urban life was whether every woman in the new, disordered world of the city—the public sphere of pavements, cafés and theatres—was not a public woman and thus a prostitute. The very presence of unattended—unowned—women constituted a threat both to male power and to male frailty. Yet although the male ruling class did all it could to restrict the movement of women in cities, it proved impossible to banish them from public spaces. Women continued to crowd into the city centres and the factory districts.
6 Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, De La Prostitution Dans La Ville de Paris, Paris 1836. He writes: 'Public women, left to their own devices and free of surveillance during the anarchy of the first years of the first revolution, abandoned themselves to all the disorders which, during this disastrous period, were favoured by the state of the society; soon the evil became so great that it excited universal outrage, and...in 1796 the municipal authorities ordered a new census...registration was always considered the most important means of arresting the inevitable disorder of prostitution. Is it not in fact necessary to get to know the individuality of all those who come to the attention of the police?' (pp. 366-7, 370). 7 Alain Corbin, 'Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth Century France: A System of Images and Regulations', Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986, special issue on the body, edited by Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Lacquer. 8 H William Acton, Prostitution (1857), edited by Peter Fryer, London 1968. 9 Josephine Butler, Memories of a Great Crusade, London 1896. 10 Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society.
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The movements of middle-class women were more successfully restricted. The development of the bourgeois suburb as a haven of privacy was particularly marked in Britain, serving to 'protect' middle-class women from the rough- and-tumble of the urban street. And these women, even in a city such as Paris, where the exodus to the suburbs did not occur in the same way, were closely guarded. In British society it was the young marriageable woman under thirty years of age who was most rigorously chaperoned; married women, governesses and old maids had a little more—if hardly flattering—freedom.11
Ambivalence and Marginality: Experiencing the Urban Spectacle
Bourgeois men, by contrast, were free to explore urban zones of pleasure such as—in Paris especially—the Folies Bergères, the restaurant, the theatre, the café and the brothel, where they met working-class women. (In London they were perhaps as likely to visit the masculine haunt of the Pall Mall clubs.) The proliferation of public places of pleasure and interest created a new kind of public person with the leisure to wander, watch and browse: the flâneur, a key figure in the critical literature of modernity and urbanization. In literature, the flâneur was represented as an archetypal occupant and observer of the public sphere in the rapidly changing and growing great cities of nineteenth-century Europe. He might be seen as a mythological or allegorical figure who represented what was perhaps the most characteristic response of all to the wholly new forms of life that seemed to be developing: ambivalence.
The origins of the word flâneur are uncertain; the nineteenth-century Encyclopaedia Larousse suggests that the term may be derived from an Irish word for 'libertine'. The writers of this edition of Larousse devoted a long article to the flâneur, whom they defined as a loiterer, a fritterer away of time. They associated him with the new urban pastimes of shopping and crowd watching. The flâneur, Larousse pointed out, could exist only in the great city, the metropolis, since provincial towns would afford too restricted a stage for his strolling and too narrow a field for his observations. Larousse also commented that although the majority of flâneurs were idlers, there were among them artists, and that the multifarious sights of the astonishing new urban spectacle constituted their raw material.12
The earliest citation given by Larousse comes from Balzac, and the flâneur is normally discussed in the context of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. However, at least one discussion of this form of urban individual dates from 1806. An anonymous pamphlet published in that year describes a day in the life of M. Bonhomme, a typical flâneur of the Bonaparte era; and clearly set out there are all the characteristics later to be found in the writings of Baudelaire and Benjamin.13 No-one knows, states the anonymous author of this description,
11 Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season, London 1973. 12 Larousse heads the entry flâneur/flâneuse, but refers to the flâneur as masculine throughout. The entry also notes a second meaning for flâneuse, as the name of a kind of reclining chair. of which there is a line illustration. It looks like an extended deck chair, and welcomes its occupant with womanly passivity. 13 Anon., Le Flâneur au Salon, ou M. Bonhomme, Examen Joyeux des Tableaux, Mêlé de Vaudevilles, Paris, n.d. (but published in 1806). I am very grateful to Tony Halliday for his generosity in giving me this reference, and for sharing his knowledge of the period with me.
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how M. Bonhomme supports himself, but he is said to be a rentier, seemingly set free from familial, landowning or mercantile responsibilities to roam Paris at will. The flâneur spends most of his day simply looking at the urban spectacle; he observes in particular new inventions, for example he stops in the Place Louis XV 'to examine the signals of the marine telegraph, although he understands nothing about them', and he is fascinated by the many new building works then under way. Public clocks and barometers serve to regulate his day—an indication of the growing importance of precise time keeping, even for one who was under no regimen of paid labour—and he passes the hours by shopping or window-shopping, looking at books, new fashions, hats, combs, jewellery and novelties of all kinds.
A second feature of M. Bonhomme's day is the amount of time he spends in cafés and restaurants; and, significantly, he chooses establishments frequented by actors, writers, journalists and painters—that is, his interests are predominantly aesthetic. During the course of the day, he picks up gossip about new plays, rivalries in the art world, and projected publications, and several times he mentions his eager anticipation of the salon exhibitions of painting. Thirdly, a significant part of the urban spectacle is the behaviour of the lower ranks of society—for example, he watches soldiers, workers and 'grisettes' at an open-air dance. Fourthly, he is interested in dress as a vital component of the urban scene. Fifthly, women play but a minor role in his life. He notices an attractive street vendor, and implies that she may be engaged in prostitution on the side, but there is no indication that he enjoys an active sexual life of his own. On the other hand, a woman painter is mentioned, and the shouts of the manageress of the restaurant he frequents is an indicator of her role as overseer. (Women painters were still quite numerous at this period, while women played an important role in the catering trade, possibly partly because of the conscription of male cooks, bakers and waiters.)
Particularly striking is M. Bonhomme's marginality. He is essentially a solitary onlooker, activated, like Edgar Allen Poe's Man of the Crowd, by his fleeting, but continuous and necessary, contact with the anonymous crowd. In his resolution 'to keep a little diary recording all the most curious things he had seen or heard during the course of his wanderings, to fill the void of his nocturnal hours of insomnia', is the germ of the flâneur's future role as writer; it also hints at the boredom and ennui which seem inescapably linked to the curiosity and voyeurism that are so characteristic.
Here, then, is the mid-nineteenth-century flâneur rising fully formed in the much earlier context of post-Revolutionary Parisian society, and this first appearance indicates his class location. He is a gentleman; at this period he has retained at least some private wealth, yet he is subtly déclassé, and above all he stands wholly outside production.
Commodified Spaces
Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin—both, of course, Marxist writers associated with the Frankfurt School—wrote of the emergence of the flâneur in terms very similar to each other. Kracauer, however, emphasized more strongly the economic determinants of the role. He argued that the 1830s and early 1840s saw the age of the 'classic bohemia' in Paris. The bohemian was a
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student, living in his garret while planning to become a great writer or artist. Many of these students formed relationships and lived with young women from a humbler background—the grisettes. Kracauer argues that the bohemians came from the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie of artisans and clerks. Bohemia went into decline, he tells us, with the development of industrial capitalism, when this class was squeezed out as factories replaced workshops and the world of Louis-Philippe was replaced by the Second Empire of Napoleon III, the ultimate society of the spectacle.14
For Kracauer, the student bohemian was to be distinguished from the flâneur of a later date. Also distinct were the dandies, who in the 1830s and 1840s took possession of the Maison D'Or and the Café Tortoni in the Boulevard des ltaliens. This street was the centre of fashionable public life, and along it loitered the dandies, the bohemians and the courtesans—but also the population at large. 'Innumerable curious sightseers strolled through these streets on Sundays', writes Siegfried Kracauer: 'All classes of the population received a common and uniform education in the streets...their real education. Workers, laughing grisettes, soldiers, the petty bourgeoisie, who have few opportunities for strolling and gazing at shop windows during the week...all took the opportunity of gazing their fill on Sundays.'15
This special form of public life was played out in a zone that was neither quite public nor quite private, yet which partook of both; the cafés, the terrasses and the boulevards, likewise Benjamin's arcades, and, later, the department store and the hotel,16—these were commodified spaces in which everything was for sale, and to which anyone was free to come, yet they endeavoured to create the atmosphere of the salon or the private house. Here, the glamorous section of society was at home; the crowds came to stare at but also to mingle with them. The society which thus constituted itself as a spectacle was a society of outsiders, and the boulevards and cafés offered, as Kracauer puts it, a homeland for these individuals without a home.
Like Benjamin, Kracauer emphasizes the commercialization and commodification of two areas: writing and sexuality. Urban industrial life generated a demand for new forms of writing—the feuilleton, the magazine article. It gave birth to a new kind of literature, a journalistic record of the myriad sights, sounds and spectacles to be found on every corner, in every cranny of urban life. This was every bit as much the case in Britain as in France. It was a literature that was inquisitive, anecdotal, ironic, melancholy; but above all voyeuristic.17 As George Augustus Sala wrote in the London context: 'The things I have seen from the top of an omnibus! ... Unroofing London in a ride...varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, chameleon
14 Siegfried Kracauer, Offenbach and the Paris of his Time, trans. G. David and E. Mosbacher, London 1937. 15 Ibid., p. 23. 16 There exists an extensive literature on the department store. See, for example, Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920, London 1981; Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France, Berkeley, Ca. 1982; and Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, London 1985. 17 See Michael Wolff and Celina Fox, 'Pictures from the Magazines', in H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian City, Volume II, London 1973.
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life...Little do you reck that an [observer] is above you taking notes, and, faith, that he'll print them!'18
Kracauer tells us that in Paris, 'newspapers had hitherto been purely political organs, with circulations restricted to small groups of readers sharing the same views. Small circulations meant high subscription rates, and newspapers had to charge their readers 80 francs a month in order to be able to exist at all.' In the 1830s, however, came the commercialization of the press. Kracauer credits Emile de Girardin, publisher of La Presse, with initiating this revolution. Girardin charged only forty francs,…
The Invisible Flâneur
The relationship of women to cities has long preoccupied reformers and philanthropists.1 In recent years the preoccupation has been inverted: the Victorian determination to control working-class women has been replaced by a feminist concern for women's safety and comfort in city streets. But whether women are seen as a problem of cities, or cities as a problem for women, the relationship remains fraught with difficulty. With the intensification of the public/private divide in the industrial period, the presence of women on the streets and in public places of entertainment caused enormous anxiety, and was the occasion for any number of moralizing and regulatory discourses. In fact, the fate and position of women in the city was a special case of a more general alarm and ambivalence which stretched across the political spectrum. It is true that some-predominantly liberals expressed an optimistic and excited response to the urban spectacle. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who stood to gain most from industrial urbanization were the ones that praised it most strongly: the new entrepreneurs, the rising bourgeois class. For them the cities—above all the great city, the metropolis—offered an unprecedented and astonishing variety of possibilities, stimuli and wealth. The development of a consumer and spectacular society on a scale not previously known represented opportunities for progress, plenty and a more educated and civilized populace.2
Hostility to urbanization was more likely to come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, Engels was deeply critical not only of the slum and factory conditions in which the majority had to survive, but equally of the
1 The theme of this article is touched on in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, London 1991. The immediate stimulus for it was the 'Cracks in the Pavement' (Women and City Spaces) conference organized by Lynne Walker and the Design Museum in April 1991. I am much indebted to all those who participated in the lively discussions that took place on that occasion, and my especial thanks to Lynne Walker for inviting me. 2 See, for example, Robert Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities, London 1843, Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940, Manchester '985, discusses at length attitudes towards urbanization in Europe and the United States.
Page 2 of 20 | The Invisible Flâneur
indifference and selfishness with which people behaved in crowds where no- one knew anyone else. By contrast with an implied natural order of things, the new urban forms of human interaction had about them 'something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels'. Urban life encouraged 'the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest'.3 The utopian socialist William Morris hated the dirt and poverty of the industrialized town, and advocated a return to medieval village architecture and ways of life—a life in which women would be once more safely ensconced in the domestic sphere.4 That Morris is still so popular on the Left (especially with men), and received so uncritically, is an index of the strength of left-wing romantic anti-urbanism.
Right-wing critics of urban life equally harked back to an organic rural community. They feared the way in which the break-up of tradition in cities led to the undermining of authority, hierarchy and dignity. The menace of the cities was not only disease and poverty; even more threatening were the spectres of sensuality, democracy and revolution. One particular cause for alarm was the way in which urban life undermined patriarchal authority. Young, unattached men and women flocked to the towns to find more remunerative work. There, freed from the bonds of social control, they were in danger of succumbing to temptations of every kind; immorality, illegitimacy, the breakdown of family life and bestial excess appeared to threaten from all sides. Perhaps worse was that, in the rough and tumble of the city street and urban crowd, distinctions of rank of every kind were blurred.
Public Women
In particular, female virtue and respectability were hard to preserve in this promiscuous environment. 'Who are these somebodies whom nobody knows?' famously enquired William Acton in his survey of prostitution, published in 1857; and prostitution was the great fear of the age. Evangelical reformers in the Britain of the 1830s and 1840s wrote impassioned tracts in which they described this, the 'great social evil', as a plague that was rotting the very basis of society, and they campaigned for its eradication. Significantly, they often linked prostitution to the ideals of the French Revolution. Prostitution, then, was not only a real and ever present threat; it was also a metaphor for disorder and the overturning of the natural hierarchies and institutions of society. Rescue, reform and legislation were to rid the cities of this frightful evil.5
The pioneer of investigations into prostitution was the French bureaucrat, Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, whose survey of the problem appeared in 1836. He favoured a regulatory regime of the kind Foucault has documented, arguing that each prostitute must have her dossier, and that the more information that could be gathered about each individual—the better she was known by the
3 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Moscow 1962, p.56. 4 William Morris, News From Nowhere, and Selected Writings and Designs (1890), Harmondsworth 1986, pp. 234-5. 5 See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge 1980.
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state—the easier would become the task of surveillance.6 Alain Corbin has studied Parent-Duchâtelet's work in other areas of hygiene, his investigations of slaughter houses, for example, and has drawn out the way in which his writings articulate a contradictory ideology of prostitution. In this ideology the prostitute's body is putrefying, and infects the social body with corruption and death; yet at the same time it is a drain which siphons off that which would otherwise corrupt the whole of society. In order to effect this, bourgeois surveillance and regulation were to bring the brothel within a utilitarian regime of control.7
Parent-Duchâtelet's perspective was distinct from that of the British evangelical clergymen and philanthropists, and his stance closer to that of the physician William Acton. By the 1850s Acton was arguing for the regulation of prostitution from a worldly and cynical perspective far different in tone from that of the evangelicals.8
In Britain an intense struggle developed between those who favoured more stringent regulation and those who objected to it. The regulation of prostitutes could all too easily shade over into the regulation of all—or at least all working-class—women. Josephine Butler undertook her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts (from 1864) on civil-liberties grounds, and partly because women who were not prostitutes could so easily fall foul of the new ordinances and find themselves subject to arrest and humiliating examination.9
Judith Walkowitz has argued that the very existence of these Acts served to separate prostitutes more clearly from other women—and that therefore the regulation of prostitutes in a sense almost created and certainly exacerbated the evil it was intended to contain.10
The prostitute was a 'public woman', but the problem in nineteenth-century urban life was whether every woman in the new, disordered world of the city—the public sphere of pavements, cafés and theatres—was not a public woman and thus a prostitute. The very presence of unattended—unowned—women constituted a threat both to male power and to male frailty. Yet although the male ruling class did all it could to restrict the movement of women in cities, it proved impossible to banish them from public spaces. Women continued to crowd into the city centres and the factory districts.
6 Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, De La Prostitution Dans La Ville de Paris, Paris 1836. He writes: 'Public women, left to their own devices and free of surveillance during the anarchy of the first years of the first revolution, abandoned themselves to all the disorders which, during this disastrous period, were favoured by the state of the society; soon the evil became so great that it excited universal outrage, and...in 1796 the municipal authorities ordered a new census...registration was always considered the most important means of arresting the inevitable disorder of prostitution. Is it not in fact necessary to get to know the individuality of all those who come to the attention of the police?' (pp. 366-7, 370). 7 Alain Corbin, 'Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth Century France: A System of Images and Regulations', Representations, no. 14, Spring 1986, special issue on the body, edited by Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Lacquer. 8 H William Acton, Prostitution (1857), edited by Peter Fryer, London 1968. 9 Josephine Butler, Memories of a Great Crusade, London 1896. 10 Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society.
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The movements of middle-class women were more successfully restricted. The development of the bourgeois suburb as a haven of privacy was particularly marked in Britain, serving to 'protect' middle-class women from the rough- and-tumble of the urban street. And these women, even in a city such as Paris, where the exodus to the suburbs did not occur in the same way, were closely guarded. In British society it was the young marriageable woman under thirty years of age who was most rigorously chaperoned; married women, governesses and old maids had a little more—if hardly flattering—freedom.11
Ambivalence and Marginality: Experiencing the Urban Spectacle
Bourgeois men, by contrast, were free to explore urban zones of pleasure such as—in Paris especially—the Folies Bergères, the restaurant, the theatre, the café and the brothel, where they met working-class women. (In London they were perhaps as likely to visit the masculine haunt of the Pall Mall clubs.) The proliferation of public places of pleasure and interest created a new kind of public person with the leisure to wander, watch and browse: the flâneur, a key figure in the critical literature of modernity and urbanization. In literature, the flâneur was represented as an archetypal occupant and observer of the public sphere in the rapidly changing and growing great cities of nineteenth-century Europe. He might be seen as a mythological or allegorical figure who represented what was perhaps the most characteristic response of all to the wholly new forms of life that seemed to be developing: ambivalence.
The origins of the word flâneur are uncertain; the nineteenth-century Encyclopaedia Larousse suggests that the term may be derived from an Irish word for 'libertine'. The writers of this edition of Larousse devoted a long article to the flâneur, whom they defined as a loiterer, a fritterer away of time. They associated him with the new urban pastimes of shopping and crowd watching. The flâneur, Larousse pointed out, could exist only in the great city, the metropolis, since provincial towns would afford too restricted a stage for his strolling and too narrow a field for his observations. Larousse also commented that although the majority of flâneurs were idlers, there were among them artists, and that the multifarious sights of the astonishing new urban spectacle constituted their raw material.12
The earliest citation given by Larousse comes from Balzac, and the flâneur is normally discussed in the context of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. However, at least one discussion of this form of urban individual dates from 1806. An anonymous pamphlet published in that year describes a day in the life of M. Bonhomme, a typical flâneur of the Bonaparte era; and clearly set out there are all the characteristics later to be found in the writings of Baudelaire and Benjamin.13 No-one knows, states the anonymous author of this description,
11 Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season, London 1973. 12 Larousse heads the entry flâneur/flâneuse, but refers to the flâneur as masculine throughout. The entry also notes a second meaning for flâneuse, as the name of a kind of reclining chair. of which there is a line illustration. It looks like an extended deck chair, and welcomes its occupant with womanly passivity. 13 Anon., Le Flâneur au Salon, ou M. Bonhomme, Examen Joyeux des Tableaux, Mêlé de Vaudevilles, Paris, n.d. (but published in 1806). I am very grateful to Tony Halliday for his generosity in giving me this reference, and for sharing his knowledge of the period with me.
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how M. Bonhomme supports himself, but he is said to be a rentier, seemingly set free from familial, landowning or mercantile responsibilities to roam Paris at will. The flâneur spends most of his day simply looking at the urban spectacle; he observes in particular new inventions, for example he stops in the Place Louis XV 'to examine the signals of the marine telegraph, although he understands nothing about them', and he is fascinated by the many new building works then under way. Public clocks and barometers serve to regulate his day—an indication of the growing importance of precise time keeping, even for one who was under no regimen of paid labour—and he passes the hours by shopping or window-shopping, looking at books, new fashions, hats, combs, jewellery and novelties of all kinds.
A second feature of M. Bonhomme's day is the amount of time he spends in cafés and restaurants; and, significantly, he chooses establishments frequented by actors, writers, journalists and painters—that is, his interests are predominantly aesthetic. During the course of the day, he picks up gossip about new plays, rivalries in the art world, and projected publications, and several times he mentions his eager anticipation of the salon exhibitions of painting. Thirdly, a significant part of the urban spectacle is the behaviour of the lower ranks of society—for example, he watches soldiers, workers and 'grisettes' at an open-air dance. Fourthly, he is interested in dress as a vital component of the urban scene. Fifthly, women play but a minor role in his life. He notices an attractive street vendor, and implies that she may be engaged in prostitution on the side, but there is no indication that he enjoys an active sexual life of his own. On the other hand, a woman painter is mentioned, and the shouts of the manageress of the restaurant he frequents is an indicator of her role as overseer. (Women painters were still quite numerous at this period, while women played an important role in the catering trade, possibly partly because of the conscription of male cooks, bakers and waiters.)
Particularly striking is M. Bonhomme's marginality. He is essentially a solitary onlooker, activated, like Edgar Allen Poe's Man of the Crowd, by his fleeting, but continuous and necessary, contact with the anonymous crowd. In his resolution 'to keep a little diary recording all the most curious things he had seen or heard during the course of his wanderings, to fill the void of his nocturnal hours of insomnia', is the germ of the flâneur's future role as writer; it also hints at the boredom and ennui which seem inescapably linked to the curiosity and voyeurism that are so characteristic.
Here, then, is the mid-nineteenth-century flâneur rising fully formed in the much earlier context of post-Revolutionary Parisian society, and this first appearance indicates his class location. He is a gentleman; at this period he has retained at least some private wealth, yet he is subtly déclassé, and above all he stands wholly outside production.
Commodified Spaces
Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin—both, of course, Marxist writers associated with the Frankfurt School—wrote of the emergence of the flâneur in terms very similar to each other. Kracauer, however, emphasized more strongly the economic determinants of the role. He argued that the 1830s and early 1840s saw the age of the 'classic bohemia' in Paris. The bohemian was a
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student, living in his garret while planning to become a great writer or artist. Many of these students formed relationships and lived with young women from a humbler background—the grisettes. Kracauer argues that the bohemians came from the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie of artisans and clerks. Bohemia went into decline, he tells us, with the development of industrial capitalism, when this class was squeezed out as factories replaced workshops and the world of Louis-Philippe was replaced by the Second Empire of Napoleon III, the ultimate society of the spectacle.14
For Kracauer, the student bohemian was to be distinguished from the flâneur of a later date. Also distinct were the dandies, who in the 1830s and 1840s took possession of the Maison D'Or and the Café Tortoni in the Boulevard des ltaliens. This street was the centre of fashionable public life, and along it loitered the dandies, the bohemians and the courtesans—but also the population at large. 'Innumerable curious sightseers strolled through these streets on Sundays', writes Siegfried Kracauer: 'All classes of the population received a common and uniform education in the streets...their real education. Workers, laughing grisettes, soldiers, the petty bourgeoisie, who have few opportunities for strolling and gazing at shop windows during the week...all took the opportunity of gazing their fill on Sundays.'15
This special form of public life was played out in a zone that was neither quite public nor quite private, yet which partook of both; the cafés, the terrasses and the boulevards, likewise Benjamin's arcades, and, later, the department store and the hotel,16—these were commodified spaces in which everything was for sale, and to which anyone was free to come, yet they endeavoured to create the atmosphere of the salon or the private house. Here, the glamorous section of society was at home; the crowds came to stare at but also to mingle with them. The society which thus constituted itself as a spectacle was a society of outsiders, and the boulevards and cafés offered, as Kracauer puts it, a homeland for these individuals without a home.
Like Benjamin, Kracauer emphasizes the commercialization and commodification of two areas: writing and sexuality. Urban industrial life generated a demand for new forms of writing—the feuilleton, the magazine article. It gave birth to a new kind of literature, a journalistic record of the myriad sights, sounds and spectacles to be found on every corner, in every cranny of urban life. This was every bit as much the case in Britain as in France. It was a literature that was inquisitive, anecdotal, ironic, melancholy; but above all voyeuristic.17 As George Augustus Sala wrote in the London context: 'The things I have seen from the top of an omnibus! ... Unroofing London in a ride...varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, chameleon
14 Siegfried Kracauer, Offenbach and the Paris of his Time, trans. G. David and E. Mosbacher, London 1937. 15 Ibid., p. 23. 16 There exists an extensive literature on the department store. See, for example, Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920, London 1981; Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France, Berkeley, Ca. 1982; and Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, London 1985. 17 See Michael Wolff and Celina Fox, 'Pictures from the Magazines', in H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian City, Volume II, London 1973.
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life...Little do you reck that an [observer] is above you taking notes, and, faith, that he'll print them!'18
Kracauer tells us that in Paris, 'newspapers had hitherto been purely political organs, with circulations restricted to small groups of readers sharing the same views. Small circulations meant high subscription rates, and newspapers had to charge their readers 80 francs a month in order to be able to exist at all.' In the 1830s, however, came the commercialization of the press. Kracauer credits Emile de Girardin, publisher of La Presse, with initiating this revolution. Girardin charged only forty francs,…
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