The Lost Art Of The Flâneur

Flâneur: “A man who saunters around observing society.”

London. Paris. Amsterdam. Prague. Budapest. Sarajevo. Each exquisitely beautiful city has been touched by the art of the flâneur. In it’s simplest form, the French word simply means to “stroll”, or “wander”. In English however, its romantic sensibilities get lost, as wandering and loafing in our context, can imply laziness, when in fact it is quite the opposite. There is an art to being a Flâneur.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve — the famous French literary critic — believed that to flâneur was the “very opposite of doing nothing”, with the French playwright Honore de Balzac, describing flânerie as the “gastronomy of the eye and a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape”. Charles Baudelaire, the French poet presented this striking view of the art of the flâneur, as a artist-poet of the city:

“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world — impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not — to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life”.

The flâneur became more than just a graceful and detached observer of the city. They personified the sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the city’s inhabitants. The concept of the flâneur became meaningful in architecture and urban planning. The flâneurs in early twentieth century Paris would actively take part in town planning and city regeneration, as they represented the urban voice.

The modern flâneur still represents those lofty ideals, but architects, town planners and designers have overtaken the flâneur as the voice of the city. Today’s flâneur doesn’t always stroll around the city, taking in the views. The art of flânerie can be viewed as a philosophical way of thinking and living. It is a lost art no more.