The Flâneur and the Aesthetic

Abstract

The article reinterprets the sources of Parisian flânerie with the view of exploring 19th-century understandings of cultural and aesthetic modernity. It distinguishes between two separate though interconnected formulaic narratives about the flâneur. The first is the popular flâneur, associated with a new type of urban commercial culture characteristic of the 1840s; while the second is the avant-garde flâneur, embodied in Baudelaire's critical texts of the 1850s and 1860s. Juxtaposing these two different narratives of flânerie allows us to draw two conclusions. The first is that the 19th century's evaluations of cultural modernity were considerably more optimistic than later interpretations would lead one to believe. The second is that the realms of popular and avant-garde cultures were far more porous and inter-dependent than canonical literary criticism has contended.