| Looking back at the emergence of the flaneur in French literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, one is struck by his fluctuating, ambivalent reputation, as well as by his ascendancy in a rather peculiar type of publication that thrived during the July Monarchy, entirely dedicated to the city of Paris and its inhabitants, namely panoramic literature. It is only when the type began to wane in the literature of the Second Empire, that the idea of the artiste-flaneur as painter of modern life gained momentum, first with Charles Baudelaire, then with Emile Zola, and crystallized around the persona of their common friend, Edouard Manet. This keen observer's intimate relationship with the modern metropolis (which defined him and outside of which he did not exist) became the paradigm of a new type of representation, which Nils Sandblad, speaking of Manet, coined "the realism of the flaneur ." Virtually every art historian who wrote about Manet after that concurred with the view that the flaneur epitomized early modernism as it arose in the course of the Second Empire and the Third Republic.In the latter part of the twentieth century, prompted by the publication of Walter Benjamin's essays in French and English translation, a new surge of interest in the flaneur has occurred, from which the flaneur has emerged as a pivotal figure in discussions of early modernism, not only in relation to the art of Manet, but also in theoretical essays pertaining to the issue of modernity in general. By looking beyond Baudelaire and Benjamin and focussing on nineteenth-century texts, I identify crucial notions about visuality, spectatorship and the modern observer which were largely ignored by Benjamin and have thus since been overlooked. I also establish a connection between the Surrealist literature that triggered Benjamin's interest in the nineteenth-century flaneur and later twentieth-century art practices, and I analyze the occurrence and significance of those rituals of random, purposeless, chance induced strolls, from their origins in the "promenades" of 18th and 19th-century Romanticism to contemporary peripatetic practices, drawing examples mostly from the International Situationist and Conceptual Art. |
