(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn

Modern Humanities Research Association 2007

Modern Language Review, 102 (2007), 13956
WALTER BENJAMINS MYTH OF THE FLA
^
NEUR
The notion of the ^ aneur, developed by Walter Benjamin at the height of 1920s
and 1930s modernism when the surreal potential of the previous centurys
industrial urban space was explored, has exerted considerable inuence on the
way we now interpret nineteenth-century depictions of the city. The concept
has gained unquestioned cognitive statusa sum of insights to be taken for
grantedin contemporary cultural theory. It is the contention of this article
that Benjamins idea of the ^ aneur is not only of limited value for an under-
standing of nineteenth-century urban experience, but can be seen positively
to hamper it. This detrimental eect results from Benjamins dogmatic ap-
plication of a high-modernist, aesthetic concept of self-loss, derived from a
(awed) reading of Baudelaire and Poe, to the interpretation of earlier, journa-
listic sources conceptualizing the ^ aneur. Compared with the mode of viewing
formulated by Poe and Baudelaire, the kind of urban observation presented by
these ephemera of the 1830s and 1840s is dismissed as lacking cognitive value.
This dismissal has led to a neglect, if not downright demolition, of a whole
genre of nineteenth-century city sketches in deconstructive criticism. What
has shielded Benjamins pronouncements from being questioned is not only
their own critical thrust informed by Marxist and Freudian theory, but their
apparently solid foundation in empirical textual study. In order to question the
substance of his arguments and to expose his notion of the ^ aneur as a moder-
nist myth, I shall rst discuss Benjamins theorizing of modernity in relation
to the idea of the city stroller. It was his aim to enlighten modernity about
itself, but his critique has, I argue, had an obfuscatory eect which was both
unintentional and necessary, given the peculiarities of his thinking, and which
has been perpetuated by Benjamin-inspired cultural theory. As a second step, I
shall discuss some nineteenth-century materials to illustrate my critical points
against Benjamin and to show that his ideas have handicapped our understand-
ing of precisely those journalistic sources (e.g. the Physiologies) from the study
of which his statements derive some of their claim to authority.
Langsam durch belebte Straen zu gehen, ist ein besonderes Vergn ugen. Man wird
uberspielt von der Eile der anderen, es ist ein Bad in der Brandung. Aber meine
lieben Berliner Mitb urger machen einem das nicht leicht, wenn man ihnen auch noch
so geschickt ausbiegt. Ich bekomme immer mitrauische Blicke ab, wenn ich ver-
suche, zwischen den Gesch aftigen zu anieren. Ich glaube, man h alt mich f ur einen
Taschendieb.'
Franz Hessels Spazieren in Berlin (1929), from which this passage is taken,
contains motifs that are central to Benjamins idea of the ^ aneur. These include,
on the one hand, delight in immersing oneself in the crowd, the object of
observation, and on the other hand, being viewed with suspicion since the
keen reading of urban physiognomies shows an anity with the business of
' Franz Hessel, Der Verd achtige, in Ein Flaneur in Berlin: Mit Fotograen von Friedrich
Seidenst ucker, Walter Benjamins Skizze Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs und einem Waschzettel von
Heinz Knobloch (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1984), p. 7. The volumes text is a re-edition of Hessels
Spazieren in Berlin.
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140 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
criminals and detectives. Given Benjamins friendship and collaboration with
Hessel (who in 1926 introduced himto the Kunst des Spazierengehens in Paris
and was his co-author for a planned essay on arcades), it is not surprising that
the rst-person observer of Hessels Berlin sketches should be closely related to
the third-person ^ aneur depicted in Benjamins later work. In fact Benjamins
review of Spazieren in Berlin, published in Die literarische Welt shortly after
the books appearance, constitutes an important journalistic link in the genesis
of his concept of modernity as it was to be outlined in his 1930s essays on
nineteenth-century Paris,` and in Das Passagen-Werk, his fragmentary magnum
opus with which these essays are directly or indirectly connected. In all of them
the ^ aneur features among the modern archetypes.
Das Passagen-Werk also oers a clue regarding the methodological signi-
cance of the ^ aneur. The vast array of textual snippets assembled in it includes
Benjamins own aphoristic remarks as well as quotations from contemporary
cultural studies, and also excerpts from nineteenth-century sources dealing
with phenomena of novelty, e.g. arcades and department stores, panoramas,
exhibitions, fashion, and gaslight. The position from which all these observa-
tions are made seems to be that of a strolling spectator, someone who collects
mental notes taken on leisurely city walks and publishes them in the form of
feuilleton sketches and witty essays. In short, they resemble observations of a
^ aneur, the viewer who takes pleasure in abandoning himself to the articial
world of high capitalist civilization. One could describe this gure as the view-
ing-device through which Benjamin formulates his own theoretical assump-
tions concerning modernity, converging in a Marxist critique of commodity
fetishism. Drawing on HegelianMarxist dialectical patterns, this critique is
supposed to make palpable, through precise observation, the secret mecha-
nisms of capitalism which provide the key to revolutionary change:
Der Flaneur ist der Beobachter des Marktes. Sein Wissensteht der Geheimwissenschaft
von der Konjunktur nahe. Er ist der in das Reich des Konsumenten ausgeschickte
Kundschafter des Kapitalismus.
As an observer and connoisseur of market uctuations and as someone at the
same time on a reconnaissance mission in the consumers realm, the ^ aneur pos-
sesses the perceptiveness to register all the signs of commodication. Thus his
nineteenth-century view empowers the twentieth-century theorist of moder-
nity, who also has an interest in overcoming alienation, to turn into a concrete,
non-theoretical vision the utopian potential inherent in industrial capitalism.
See Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985), pp. 68 and 79.
Walter Benjamin, Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiede-
mann and Hermann Schweppenh auser, 7 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), iii, 19499.
This edition is abbreviated henceforth as GS.
` Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts (1935, an expos e for the Passagen-Werk), Das
Paris des Second Empire bei Charles Baudelaire (1938), and

Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire
(1939). They are available in English translation by Harry Zohn as The Paris of the Second
Empire in Baudelaire and Some Motifs in Baudelaire, and by Quintin Hoare as ParisThe
Capital of the Nineteenth Century; all in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in
the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in GS, v/12, v/1, 53738. Das Passagen-Werk is avail-
able in English translation by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin as The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
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martina lauster 141
This happens at the precise moment when the archetypal signs of modernity,
such as arcades, gaslight, and panoramas, are becoming extinct. As Karlheinz
Stierle has pointedout: F ur Benjaminsteht die Erkennbarkeit des Vergangenen
nicht in einem kontinuierlichen Proze der Wirkungsgeschichte, sondern sie
ist bezogen auf den privilegierten Augenblick, which is the moment in the
1920s and 1930s when die abgeschiedene Moderne erkennbar wird. In other
words, the nineteenth-century ^ aneur passes on his ability to capture his own
dynamic presentdie abgeschiedene Moderneto the 1930s cultural philo-
sopher who re-presents a past present in a moment of insight. His innovative
thinking in aphoristic images is intended to help release modernitys powers of
revolutionary transformation.
But this empowerment hinges on the assumption that the nineteenth-century
^ aneurs viewhowever sharp with regard to the novelty and strangeness of
the things he observesis obscured as by a veil, and that it takes the hind-
sight of the later critic to free modernity from the veil of the middle-class false
consciousness of its early observers. Benjamin formulates this process of en-
lightening modernity about itself in terms of waking from a dream, and his
central image denoting the dream is that of the phantasmagoria: Die Menge
ist der Schleier, durch den hindurch dem Flaneur die gewohnte Stadt als Phan-
tasmagorie winkt. The ^ aneur here views his familiar urban environment
not as genuinely entfremdet, but as merely verfremdet by a veil of illusion
which is that of the urban crowd. This idiosyncratic image, typical of Ben-
jamins allegorical thinking, needs explaining. Phantasmagorias were a form
of pre-cinematic visual entertainment, a subgenre of the magic-lantern show,
where an image was projected onto a diaphanous screen from behind and the
projector moved backwards and forwards, creating in the audience a sense of
Gothic thrill through the illusion of an approaching or vanishing gure.` By
describing the ^ aneurs vision of the city as phantasmagoric, Benjamin implies
that it is clouded by the dream-factory vision encountered in the early enter-
tainment industry. He indirectly also refers to Marxs metaphorical description
of the commodity in terms of a religious fetish, a thing which owes its magical
status solely to the human brain investing it with such power, but appearing, to
the community venerating the fetish, as an autonomous object. The phantas-
magoric appearance, created by human craft and yet seeming to possess a life
of its own, also forms part of Marxs inventory of images when he depicts the
apparent independence of the commodity, resulting from the abstract nature of
social relationships producing it:
[D]ie Warenform [hat] [. . .] mit ihrer physischen Natur und den daraus entsprin-
genden dinglichen Beziehungen absolut nichts zu schaen. Es ist nur das bestimmte
gesellschaftliche Verh altnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier f ur sie die phantas-
Karlheinz Stierle, Aura, Spur und Benjamins Vergegenw artigung des 19. Jahrhunderts, in
Art social und art industriel: Funktionen der Kunst im Zeitalter des Industrialismus, ed. by Helmut
Pfeier, Hans Robert Jauss, and Francoise Gaillard (Munich: Fink, 1987), pp. 3947 (p. 39).
Ibid., p. 54.
` See Ulrike Hick, Geschichte der optischen Medien (Munich: Fink, 1999), pp. 14656; also
Margaret Cohen, BenjaminsPhantasmagoria:The Arcades Project, inThe Cambridge Companion
to Walter Benjamin, ed. by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
pp. 199220 (p. 207).
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142 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
magorische Form eines Verh altnisses von Dingen annimmt. Um daher eine Analogie
zu nden, m ussen wir in die Nebelregion der religi osen Welt uchten. Hier scheinen
die Produkte des menschlichen Kopfes mit eignem Leben begabte, untereinander und
mit den Menschen in Verh altnis stehende selbst andige Gestalten. So in der Warenwelt
die Produkte der menschlichen Hand. Dies nenne ich den Fetischismus, der den Ar-
beitsprodukten anklebt, sobald sie als Waren produziert werden, und der daher von der
Warenproduktion unzertrennlich ist.
Benjamins ^ aneur moves in the Nebelregion not so much of a religious world,
but in that of capitalist reication, by perceiving the man-made, familiar city as
a phantasmagoria, an autonomous, potentially fear-inspiring world of objects
independent of himself. Yet the shock that this alienation could impart is mi-
tigated by the phantasmagoric screen, the crowd in the street, which shrouds
the familiar, yet alien city in a nebulous tissue. Presumably the implication
is that the urban crowd, itself a potentially disturbing phenomenon, absorbs
the ^ aneur as one who feels in his element and at home in it, deriving an
aesthetic thrill by moving along incognito, and therefore not (yet) being fully
exposed to the shock of alienation. On the other hand, being at home in what is
denitely not home and viewing what is familiar through a defamiliarizing veil
make Benjamins ^ aneur an ambiguous gure, partly perceptive of the shifts in
subjectobject relationships brought about by industrialization, partly deluded
about them. His greatest delusion is spatial, since he experiences the streets as
an interior, a mixture of shopping arcade, conservatory, living-room, panorama,
music hall, cabinet of curiosities or botanical collection, and Great Exhibition
hall. This interior unites all times, all parts of the globe, and all phenomena of
contemporary society, and their availability in one moment or glance intoxicates
the ^ aneur so that his inner life begins to tick like a clock, signifying a physical
internalization of the world of objects. The following compilation of extracts
illustrates these key points in Benjamins vision of the ^ aneur:
Bekannt ist, wie bei der anerie L ander- und Zeitenfernen [. . .] in den Augenblick
eindringen. Wenn die eigentlich rauschhafte Phase dieses Zustands anhebt, pocht es im
Aderwerk des Gl ucklichen, sein Herz nimmt den Uhrtakt an.'
Die Strae wird zur Wohnung f ur den Flaneur, der zwischen H auserfronten so wie
der B urger in seinen vier W anden zuhause ist. Ihm sind die gl anzenden emaillierten
Firmenschilder so gut und besser ein Wandschmuck wie im Salon dem B urger ein

Olgem alde; Mauern sind das Schreibpult, gegen das er seinen Notizblock stemmt;
Zeitungskioske sind seine Bibliotheken und die Caf eterrassen Erker, von denen aus er
nach getaner Arbeit auf sein Hauswesen heruntersieht.''
[With reference to the sociological sketches written by journalists of the July Monarchy,
and quoting Eduard Fuchss work on caricature:] [. . .] Alles delierte vor uber . . .
Freudentage und Trauertage, Arbeit und Erholung, Eheliche Sitten und Junggesel-
lengebr auche, Familie, Haus, Kind, Schule, Gesellschaft, Theater, Typen, Berufe. Die
Gem achlichkeit dieser Schildereien pat zu dem Habitus des Flaneurs, der auf dem
Asphalt botanisieren geht.'
Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen

Okonomie, vol. i, in Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels: Werke, ed. by the Institut f ur Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, vol. xxIII, 7th
edn (Berlin: Dietz, 1972), pp. 8687.
' Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/1, 528.
'' Walter Benjamin, Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, in Charles Baudelaire: Ein
Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, in GS, i/2, 511604 (p. 539).
' Ibid., p. 538.
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martina lauster 143
Der St adter, dessen politische

Uberlegenheit uber das Land im Laufe des Jahrhunderts
vielfachzumAusdruckkommt, macht denVersuch, das Landin die Stadt einzubringen.
Die Stadt weitet sich in den Panoramen zur Landschaft aus wie sie es auf subtilere Art
sp ater f ur den Flanierenden tut.'
Die Erscheinung der Strae als Interieur, in der die Phantasmagorie des Flaneurs sich
zusammenfat, ist von der Gasbeleuchtung nur schwer zu trennen. Das erste Gaslicht
brannte in den Passagen.'`
Benjamin thus creates an interdependency between, on the one hand, the pre-
cise registering of a nineteenth-century environment which is characterized
by an unprecedented process of Verdinglichung,' and an almost hallucina-
tory mental state on the other hand. He clearly does so in order to highlight
fetishizationa term which he, psychologizing the Marxian category, denes
as the endowment of inanimate things with sex-appeal'as part and parcel of
the city dwellers anxieties and desires. The ^ aneurs whole relationship to the
world of commodities and his position in the competitive market are discussed
in an equally ambiguous manner so as to highlight his function as a threshold
typeone who has the potential, but not the illusion-free insight, to recognize
his own commodication:
als Flaneur begibt [. . .] sich[der Literat] auf denMarkt; wie er meint, umihn anzusehen,
und in Wahrheit doch schon, um einen K aufer zu nden.'
The idea of the writer/^ aneurs unconscious prostitution on the literary market
is then heightened by the image of entering a commercial medium of en-
tertainment in which the writer/viewer/^ aneur unconsciously loses his self-
determined, partial vision to an illusion of total vision:
Der Schriftsteller, der den Markt einmal betreten hatte, sah sich dort um wie in einem
Panorama.'`
The nexus between ^ aneur and modern writer or artist was, of course, made by
Baudelaire long before Benjamin, with similar accents placed on self-loss and
its thrills. Indeed, following Benjamins essays on Baudelaire, todays general
knowledge associates the conceptual origins of the nineteenth-century ^ aneur
rmly with Baudelaire,' that is to say, with his interpretation of Edgar Allan
Poes story The Man of the Crowd and with his comments on the draughtsman
Constantin Guys. One of the most famous passages from the essay Le peintre
' Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/1, 48.
'` Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 552.
' See Hartmut B ohme, Fetischismus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert: Wissenschaftshistorische
Analysen zur Karriere eines Konzepts, in Das schwierige neunzehnte Jahrhundert: Germanistische
Tagung zum 65. Geburtstag von Eda Sagarra im August 1998, ed. by J urgenBarkho, Gilbert Carr,
and Roger Paulin (T ubingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 44565 (p. 446).
' Die Mode schreibt das Ritual vor, nach dem der Fetisch Ware verehrt sein will. [. . .] Sie
verkuppelt den lebendigen Leib der anorganischen Welt. [. . .] Der Fetischismus, der dem Sex-
Appeal des Anorganischenunterliegt, ist ihr Lebensnerv(Walter Benjamin, Paris, die Hauptstadt
des XIX. Jahrhunderts, in Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/1, 81654, v/2, 6551350 (v/1, p. 51)).
' Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 536.
'` Ibid., p. 537.
' See the Wikipedia entry Fl^ aneur, which attributes not only the rst identication of the
type to Baudelaire, but even the Benjaminian phrase describing him as a botanist of the sidewalk
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur> [accessed 10 May 2006].
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144 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
de la vie moderne, in which Baudelaire discusses The Man of the Crowd in
the context of Guyss work, celebrates self-loss in the crowd as a precondition
of artistic creativity. Benjamin includes this passage in his collection for the
Passagen-Werk:
Pour le parfait ^ aneur, pour lobservateur passionn e, cest une immense jouissance que
d elire domicile dans le nombre, dans londoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif
et linni.
^
Etre hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez soi; voir le monde,
^ etre au centre du monde et rester cach e au monde, tels sont quelques-uns des moindres
plaisirs de ces esprits ind ependants, passionn es, impartiaux, que la langue ne peut que
maladroitement d enir. Lobservateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito.
[. . .] Cest un moi insatiable du non-moi, qui, a chaque instant, le rend et lexprime en
images plus vivantes que la vie elle-m^ eme, toujours instable et fugitive.'
It is well worth pointing out that this passage refers entirely to the painter of
modern life, Constantin Guys, and that Baudelaire at no point associates the
^ aneur with the unknown man of the crowd espied by the narrator in Poes
story. The reason Baudelaire enhances his essay on a visual artist by referring
to a narrative work is the fresh, unconditioned perception of the people in the
street that Poes narrator, in Baudelaires view, shares with Guys. Yet to see the
object of the narrators vision, the man of the crowd, as a ^ aneur is absolute
nonsense; if anything, it is the observing narrator who could be labelled thus.
Benjamin, howeveras John Rignall has pointed outcontrives the glaring
misinterpretation of Poes hunted, unknown man as a ^ aneur. The man of
the crowd becomes identical for him with the ^ aneur at an advanced stage in
his development, just as, Benjamin claims, Baudelaire saw him in Poes story,
i.e. as the bohemian outcast hiding in the crowd, moving in the jungle of the
city, and succumbing in the end to the lure of commodities in the jungle of a
department store. Hence posterity has become accustomed to thinking of Poe
and Baudelaire as twin names with regard to the ^ aneur, i.e. the man of the
crowd. This is one particularly persistent facet of the Benjaminian myth of the
^ aneur which I want to address.
Benjamins carelessness with regard to his sources, conducive to myth-
making, does not end here. When he eventually realizes that Poes protagonist
is not a ^ aneur, he corrects himself in his second essay on Baudelaire (

Uber
einige Motive bei Baudelaire), but corresponding statements in the Passagen-
Werk have been left unchanged, such as:
Dialektik der anerie: einerseits der Mann, der sich von allem und allen angesehen
f uhlt, der Verd achtige schlechthin, andererseits der v ollig Unaufndbare, Geborgene.
Vermutlich ist es eben diese Dialektik, die Der Mann der Menge entwickelt.`
Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/1, 556.
' Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne, in uvres compl etes, ed. by ClaudePichois,
2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 197576), ii (1976), 683724 (pp. 69192).
See John Rignall, Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992), p. 13.
[. . .] ein Unbekannter, der seinen Weg durch London so einrichtet, da er immer in ihrer
[=der Menge] Mitte bleibt. Dieser Unbekannte ist der Flaneur. So ist er von Baudelaire auch
verstanden worden, als er in seinem Guys-Essay den Flaneur lhomme des foules genannt hat
(Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 550).
` Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/1, 529.
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martina lauster 145
It is also worth pointing out the inconsistency in Benjamins own line of
interpretation when he reaches the discussion of Poe and Baudelaire, the
culmination-point of his chapter on the ^ aneur in the essay Das Paris des
Second Empire bei Baudelaire. Here he asserts that Poes unknown man (the
one wrongly identied by him as a ^ aneur), who wanders aimlessly through a
department store, has lost his way in the labyrinth of commodities just as the
earlier type of ^ aneur had lost his way in the labyrinth of the city:
Wenn die Passage die klassische Form des Interieurs ist, als das die Strae sich dem
Flaneur darstellt, so ist dessen Verfallsform das Warenhaus. Das Warenhaus ist der
letzte Strich des Flaneurs. War ihm anfangs die Strae zum Interieur geworden, so
wurde ihm dieses Interieur nun zur Strae, und er irrte durchs Labyrinth der Ware wie
vordemdurch das st adtische. Es ist ein groartiger Zug in Poes Erz ahlung, da sie der
fr uhesten Schilderung des Flaneurs die Figur seines Endes einbeschreibt.
Seeing the ^ aneur epitomized in Poes man of the crowd who is lost in the
labyrinth of merchandise as he was before in the labyrinth of the streets, Ben-
jamin atly contradicts his former assertion about the city being turned into
familiar, homely spaces by the ^ aneurs of Paris. Nor does it stand up to logic
to imply that these strolling observers (represented in Parisian journalism well
before 1840) constituted an initial version if Poes so-called ^ aneur (in his
story rst published in 1840) is deemed both the earliest representation of
the type and an anticipation of his demise in the fully commodied universe
of capitalism. Unconcerned by either of these contradictions, Benjamin even
reiterates his point about exterior spaces being treated as interior ones by the
^ aneur, arguing that while the arcades had represented the kind of familiar
environment as which the street oered itself to him, the department store into
which the arcades are degenerating now becomes an external space, a labyrinth
of streets for him, as the city had been to himbefore. To add to these nonsensical
twists, the ^ aneur is represented as oering himself, both in the arcade (exterior
turned into interior) and in the department store (interior turned into exterior),
as a commodity to any interested buyer; unconsciously, one presumes, but the
implied expression auf den Strich gehen suggests otherwise. Even allowing
for the associative freedom of Benjamins thought, this argumentif it can be
called thatis simply absurd, though it has not prevented the idea of streets
being turned into interiors and urban observers prostituting themselves on the
market from becoming part of the critical canon.
How reliable, one wonders, is Benjamins whole concept of the ^ aneur if it
Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 557.
The idea of a ^ aneur turning exteriors into interiors appears, for example, in Carol Bernstein,
Nineteenth-Century Urban Sketches: Thresholds of Fiction, Prose Studies, 3 (1980), 21740:
Many [. . .] urban sketches contain the presence [. . .] of an observer on the scene. [. . .] Even
if he were to depict only the publicly observable life of the city, like the ^ aneur, he would, as
Benjaminnotes, turn the exteriors into interiors, impart to them a degree of intimacy and make all
forms of external urban life potentially available (p. 236). The idea of the ^ aneur as a producer of
sketches whose lightness of touch masks his commodied business can be found in Alison Byerly,
Eortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-CenturyPainting and Literature, Criticism, 41 (1999),
34964, where she deals with Washington Irvings introduction to his Sketch-Book of Georey
Crayon (1820): His sauntering gaze makes him a perfect example of Benjamins ^ aneur, who
wanders through the city streets, apparently a man of leisure, but in fact, according to Benjamin,
a strolling commodity (p. 354).
(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn
146 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
is not only self-contradictory, but has no solid foundation in Poes or Baude-
laires work either? Let us rst recapitulate the main qualities of the icon of
modernity that the ^ aneur has become through Benjamins writings. He is a
type that prefers arcades and gaslight, looks at the city as if it were a panorama
or indeed a phantasmagoria, turns the boulevard into an int erieur, collects
urban physiognomies like a botanist collecting specimens, and, as a Literat
prostituting himself on the market, shows an anity with the commodities he
gazes at in window displays. This icon, for sure, is not a type that ever existed
in social history, but a literary reection of a complex kind, resulting from a
triple reading (or misreading) process from Poe via Baudelaire to Benjamin.
Benjamin, as John Rignall has remarked, himself invests an epistemological
gureBaudelaires observateur passionn e denoting a manner of viewing
with the qualities of a material type, expressive of developments in the era of
High Capitalism. By virtue of the ^ aneurs sturdy afterlife in cultural studies,
where he occupies the place of a type, a nineteenth-century literary cipher of
vision has thus become a myth, i.e. something that is believed to have materially
existed.
Benjamin cannot be held responsible for what posterity has done with his
ideas, but the myth of the ^ aneur can be seen as a direct result of his own habit
of condensing conceptual understanding into idiosyncratic images. His inten-
tion to strip nineteenth-century modernity of its fetishist veil has backred
in the sense that the phenomena he discusses (arcades in particular) and his
highly imaginative way of interpreting them have themselves, paradoxically,
acquired iconic status in contemporary cultural and literary studies. In Hart-
mut B ohmes terminology, these contemporary critics are trapped in a process
of unintentional fetishization which already bedevilled the work of their cri-
tical models, from Marx via Nietzsche to Freud, the very thinkers who drew
attention to fetishist phenomena in enlightened Western societies:
Der Fetischismus, der dem Kapitalismus einwohnt oder auch ihm nur imputiert wird,
pr agt sich der Kritik in seltsamen Inversionen auf. Die obskure koloniale Herkunft des
Fetischismus-Konzeptsimplantiert ins Denken eine fatale Bindung ans Objekt, welches
doch uberschritten werden soll. Die Geste der Kritik bleibt beherrscht durch eine Art
religi osen Bann. [. . .] Philosophie wird zum Ikonoklasmus. [. . .] Diese kritische Wucht
aber setzt sichbei Marxwie bei Nietzsche, und sp ater auch in der Psychoanalyse, in eine
Bewegung um, welche zur Kreation neuer Idole und Fetische f uhrt, deren Bannkraft
im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert vielleicht alles ubertrit. (B ohme, p. 465)
I would not go so far as to describe an uncritical adoption of Benjamins idol
of the ^ aneur as fetishistic, but the way in which nineteenth-century depictions
of metropolitan viewing have acquired typological solidity in the form of Ben-
jamins ^ aneur certainly resembles the process of fetishization in criticism as
analysed by B ohme. My own critical intention is therefore not to attack the
fetish, since this only conrms its iconic status, but to counteract myth-making
through an examination of textsBenjamins own as well as those he draws on.
The ^ aneur is seen here as a social phenomenon, the object of the materialist historians
gaze rather than the exponent of a certain kind of vision, the seeing subject himself (Rignall,
p. 14). In this context Rignall also refers to Adornos early critique of Benjamins rst essay on
Baudelaire, focusing on the lack of mediation, the very mediation that the concept of the ^ aneur
as representing a way of seeing provides.
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martina lauster 147
For the myth of the ^ aneur has blocked critical paths towards the non-ctional
source materials that fall within the remit of the Passagen-Werk, and it is time
to unblock our approaches to documents of nineteenth-century urban observa-
tion, which is tantamount to removing the phantasmagoric veil that Benjamins
interpretation itself has drawn over them. Benjamin includes excerpts from
Parisian sketches of the 1830s and 1840s in the Passagen-Werk and refers to
them in his essays. They include the Physiologies, a highly popular genre of
illustrated booklet depicting social types and phenomena in a witty way and
swamping the Parisian book trade between 1840 and 1842. Their generic name
hints at the fact that physiology and zoology were paradigmatic sciences in the
early days of sociology, and that the empirical science of society borrowed its
methodological framework from the sciences of life.
These sketches show that the interest of urban observers in arcades, and in
other hybrids between exterior and interior spaces, is actually minimal. On the
other hand, street life proper, particularly modes of movement and transport,
attracts the highest interest. Benjamin, while amassing materials on omnibuses
in the Passagen-Werk, says almost nothing about them in his essays on Baude-
laire and Paris. Moreover, the sketches prove that the signicance of the ^ aneur
as both a social type and a cipher of modern viewing (but only one among
a number) was part of common knowledge as early as 1832. The gure was
thus not rst conceptualized by Baudelaire in his essay on Guys (written in
185960, rst published in 1863), but much earlier. However, the sketches
give the ^ aneur a meaning which signicantly diers from the aestheticizing
concept of the Second Empire, in other words, the concept we have inher-
ited from Baudelaire and Benjamin. Rather than presenting the ^ aneur as a
demonic, prince-like, man-of-the-world artist, they depict him as an ordinary
city-dweller, a Mr Anybody, in other words, as precisely the social type of which
the man of the crowd celebrated in Baudelaires eulogy on Guys is a late artis-
tic reection. Richard Burton has categorized this dierence as one between
the pre- and the post-1850 incarnation of the ^ aneur, referring to the rst as a
roving empiricist and to the latter as little less than a visionary:
Whereas the pre-1850 ^ aneur strives to understand the individual Other in his or her
otherness, the homme des foules, as described by Baudelaire, seeks to lose all selfhood in a
quasi-mystic (or quasi-orgasmic) fusion with la foule consideredas an undierentiated
and anonymous mass.`
This dierence could also very probably be seen as one between an early dis-
cursive, non-ctional treatment of the new social type and his later iconic,
visionary transformation in prose ction as well as in Baudelaires poetry and
aesthetics. Why does Benjamin, the materialist historian, draw only on the
aesthetic variant for his own theoretical conclusions about the ^ aneur? Why
does he include the early journalistic sources in the material collection for his
Passagen-Werk, but dismiss them as of little intrinsic value in his conceptual
essays? Because journalism is unproductive in terms of his philosophical mis-
sion, which ultimately has to rely on the KunstwerkBaudelaires poetry or
` Richard D. E. Burton, The Fl^ aneur and his City: Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 18151851
(Durham: University of Durham, 1994), p. 5.
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148 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
metropolitan ctionconveying the shock eect of modernization. Benjamin
sees the whole genre of quotidian sketches, subsumed by him under the broad
heading of feuilleton, as a sedative for the middle class, i.e. as socially and ideo-
logically suspect and therefore unreliable:
Die beruhigenden Mittelchen, welche die Physiologisten [writers of Physiologies] feil-
hielten, waren bald abgetan. Der Literatur dagegen, die sich an die beunruhigenden
und bedrohlichenSeiten des st adtischenLebens gehalten hat, sollte eine groe Zukunft
beschieden sein. Auch diese Literatur hat es mit der Masse zu tun. Sie verf ahrt aber
anders als die Physiologien. Ihr liegt an der Bestimmung von Typen wenig; sie geht
vielmehr den Funktionen nach, welche der Masse in der groen Stadt eigen sind. [. . .]
Hier erscheint die Masse als das Asyl, das den Asozialen vor seinen Verfolgern sch utzt.
Unter ihren bedrohlichen Seiten hat sich diese am zeitigsten angek undigt. Sie steht im
Ursprung der Detektivgeschichte.
Der urspr ungliche gesellschaftliche Inhalt der Detektivgeschichte ist die Verwischung
der Spuren des Einzelnen in der Grostadtmenge.
Benjamin here assigns aesthetic durability and hence quality to Literatur in
the form of the detective story (to which he unscrupulously also subsumes
Poes Man of the Crowd, as a kind of X-rayed version of the genre)' and
declares the Physiologies written by journalists to be transitory and therefore
worthless. Since detective ction engages with the phenomenon of masses in a
way that does justice to the unsettling experience of the individuals anonymity
and loss of moral ties in the asylum of the crowd, it points forward to the
twentieth century, even if it is itself part of the nineteenth-century ^ aneurs
delusion. This seemingly avant-gardist, but in fact quite conventional value
judgement is predicated on the devaluation of entertaining journalismthe
typological portrait written for the dayas a genre providing something more
dubious than phantasmagoric illusion, in other words, opiatic medicine (Mit-
telchen). In Benjamins view, it numbs the authentically experienced anxieties
of readers in an increasingly threatening urban environment. The non-ctional,
witty proto-sociological study of type is thereby denied any cognitive capacity.
This problematic judgement is informed by the suspicious attitude of Ger-
man Kulturkritik towards the billige Eleganz of the feuilleton, even though,
paradoxically, journalism and its ruses (such as recycled aphorisms) very often
provide the very medium in which this cultural criticism is expressed.`
Kai Kaumann has noted the tendency to see the newspaper press as the
letzte Verfallsform of narrative communication in Benjamins criticism of the
Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 542.
Ibid., p. 546.
' Poes ber uhmte Novelle Der Mann der Menge ist etwas wie das R ontgenbild einer Detek-
tivgeschichte. Der umkleidende Sto, den das Verbrechen darstellt, ist in ihr weggefallen (ibid.,
p. 550).
With reference to works such as Dumass Mohicans de Paris, Benjamin writes: Welche Spur
der Flaneur auch verfolgen mag, jede wird ihn auf ein Verbrechen f uhren. Damit ist angedeutet,
wie auch die Detektivgeschichte, ihres n uchternen Kalk uls ungeachtet, an der Phantasmagorie
des pariser Lebens mitwirkt (Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 543).
See ibid., p. 529.
` One striking example of Benjamins own recyclingcan be seen in the image of the street as an
int erieur which appears in his 1929 review of Hessels Spazieren in Berlin (Die Wiederkehr des
Flaneurs, GS, iii, 19499 (p. 196)) as well as, almost verbatim, in Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/1,
533, and Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 539.
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martina lauster 149
Physiologies and the press. This devaluation of Gebrauchsliteratur, Kau-
mann argues, is part of a selective reading process favouring negativity, which
in turn has established a Benjaminian myth of modernity:
Benjamin gewinnt an Baudelaires Schriften die Begrie, die auch sein Verst andnis
der modernen Grostadt pr agen: Begrie wie Reiz uberutung, Choc, Subjekt-Verlust,
Sinn-Verlust, Entfremdung, Diskontinuit at etc. Trotz der fr uhzeitigen Warnung von
Hans Robert Jau [in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation], da Benjamin Baudelaires
Schriften einseitig als Zeugnis f ur das denaturierte Dasein der grost adtischen Masse
interpretiert und dar uber die dialektische Kehrseite der Entfremdung: die mit der Ab-
sage an die Natur freigesetzte, neue Produktivkraft des Menschen verkannt hat, ist
Benjamins Interpretation f ur die neuere literaturwissenschaftliche Forschung zur mo-
dernenGrostadt mageblichgeworden. Baudelaires Gedichte [. . .] sowie einige seiner
Kritiken sind in Benjamins Lesart zu den wichtigsten Zeugnissen der Moderne und
der modernen Grostadt avanciert, die von der Literaturwissenschaft bis zur v olligen
Ersch opfung bem uht werden. [. . .] Auf diese Weise entsteht der literarische und lite-
raturwissenschaftliche Mythos der Moderne. (Kaumann, pp. 2829)
With regard to literary studies, this myth means that the view of the city as
beunruhigend and bedrohlich constitutes the norm by which the quality
of nineteenth-century urban depiction is measured. Anything that is found
to be beruhigend and harmlos (Benjamins corresponding, negatively con-
noted epithets) must be aesthetically worthless and ideologically unsound. This
raises the question as to why critics following Benjamin engage with journa-
listic city sketches at all, if the only insight they are expected to yield is that
of their superciality; often, of course, also their perceived power strategies.
Benjamins reading, combined with a notion of control derived from Fou-
cault, makes it possible to dismiss the whole genre as a middle-class attempt to
make a threatening urban environment controllable. The concept of the ^ aneur
in particular serves as a most convenient instrument to assure contemporary
nineteenth-century specialists or cultural theorists of their own infallibility
as critical interpreters. One example is Richard Sieburths inuential demo-
lition of the Physiologies published in 1985. For him their main characteristic
is their perfect harmlessness, which allows him to see them as a genre that
is fundamentally petit-bourgeois, virtually lacking in any penetrating social
insight. Without further ado, arcades are declared the main territory where
innocuous social botanizing is practised by the ^ aneurs,` and the readers of
mass-produced Physiologies then have the pleasure of feeling empowered as
social botanists and as viewers who can move around without being seen, laugh
about others without being laughed atbut, little do they know, they all fall
victim to a cosmic phantasmagoria:
See Kai Kaumann, Es ist nur ein Wien! Stadtbeschreibungen von Wien 1700 bis 1873:
Geschichte eines literarischen Genres der Wiener Publizistik (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: B ohlau,
1994), pp. 2728.
The reference to Jausss Literaturgeschichte als Provokation is to the 1970 edition (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp), p. 58.
Richard Sieburth, Une id eologie du lisible: le ph enom ene des physiologies, Romantisme, 47
(1985), 3960: Comme Walter Benjamin fut le premier a le montrer, linocuit e (Harmlosigkeit) et
la parfaite bonhomie de la satire contenues dans les physiologies les signalent comme un genre fon-
damentalement petit bourgeois, virtuellement d epourvu de v eritable p en etration sociale (p. 45).
` See Benjamins statement on the Habitus des Flaneurs, der auf dem Asphalt botanisieren
geht (Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 538).
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150 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
Acheter une physiologie cest donc se procurer un acc es indirect a toutes les pr erogatives
de la ^ anerie: oisivet e, curiosit e, ubiquit e et par dessus tout la certitude que la ville peut
^ etre connue et ma^tris ee comme un jeu pr ed etermin e de signes [. . .]. [. . .] Le succ es de
cette litt erature panorama de l epoque a sans doute quelque rapport avec lassurance
de pouvoir voir sans ^ etre vu. Un r^ eve semblable dinvuln erabilit e [. . .] est sous-jacent
au m ecanisme renconfortant de la satire dans les physiologies, car il rend leurs lecteurs
capables de jouir de la sup eriorit e (diabolique, comme le dirait Baudelaire) du rire sans
^ etre eux-m^ emes impliqu es comme cibles du ridicule. (Sieburth, pp. 57 and 58)
[Les physiologies] iraient nalement moins dans le sens dune appr ehensionde la r ealit e
sociale que vers son occultation syst ematique dans ce que Walter Benjamin nomme
lunivers dune fantasmagorie. (p. 46)
This regardless of the fact that the physiologies are a parodistic genre, poking
fun at the more serious sketch collections, such as the serial Les Francais peints
par eux-m^ emes (183942), and their exercises in social classication. Nor does it
in the least take account of the fact that these socially classifying sketches, which
the physiologies parodistically respond to, created a portrait of the metropolis
in collections of hundreds of individual contributionsnot dissimilar, in fact,
to Benjamins own synthetic picture of modernity in the Passagen-Werk, ein
Bild des 19. Jahrhunderts [. . .], das die Leuchtkraft des Traums oder der
unwillk urlich sich onenden Erinnerung hat (Stierle, p. 39), which is com-
posed of hundreds of (usually discursive) fragments. Benjamin himself draws
the analogy between sketch collections and huge circular paintings by describ-
ing them rightly as moral panoramas, but this analogy does not do them jus-
tice if, as he and his followers believe, they merely replicate the entertaining
and informative medium of the visual panorama.` The cognitive claim, for
example, of Les Francais peints par eux-m^ emes to synthesize an Encyclop edie
morale du XIXe si ecle (thus the serials subtitle from Volume iv onwards) from
a vast number of individual typological sketches is as serious as that of the
Passagen-Werk to construct an Urgeschichte der Moderne from scraps. Ac-
cording to Stierle, Benjamin reads the nineteenth century in such a way da
aus Detail und Bruchst uck immer neue Bilder und Konstellationen entstehen.
[. . .] F ur diesen Bricolage des historischen Sinns ist alles brauchbar: Zeitungen,
ephem are Schriften, Plakate, die abgelegensten B ucher wie die groe Literatur
(Stierle, p. 40). I would argue that, since collections such as Les Francais peints
par eux-m^ emes construct proto-sociological encyclopaedias of the nineteenth
century from observation (including observations of seemingly insignicant
trivia, of the observer himself as well as of media of observation and popu-
lar entertainment), their cognitive value for a concept of modernity is in fact
As Nathalie (Basset-)Preiss already pointed out in 1984: N. Basset, Les physiologies au xixE
si ecle et la mode: de la po esie comique a la critique, Ann ee balzacienne (1984), 15772; and as she
has amply demonstrated in her book: N. Preiss, Les Physiologies en France au XIXe si ecle: etude
historique, litt eraire et stylistique (Mont-de-Marsan:

Editions InterUniversitaires, 1999).
` Benjamin says that the panoramatische Literatur of the sketch collections (e.g. Le Livre des
Cent-et-un, Les Francais peints par eux-m^ emes, Le Diable a Paris, La Grande Ville) enjoyed the
same popularity as the visual panorama and worked with similar devices: Diese B ucher bestehen
aus einzelnen Skizzen, die mit ihrer anekdotischen Einkleidung den plastischen Vordergrund
jener Panoramen und mit ihrem informatorischen Fundus deren weitgespannten Hintergrund
gleichsamnachbilden (Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, p. 537); see also the section
Panorama in Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/2, 65565 (p. 659), with a characteristic imprecision in
terminology: Sie sind gewissermaen moralische Dioramen.
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martina lauster 151
JIc. 1. Lavieille after Gavarni, frontispiece in Les Francais peints par
eux-m^ emes, 8 vols (Paris: L. Curmer, 184042), ii (1840). Wood engraving.
superior to Benjamins idiosyncratic picture constructed from prejudiced and
incorrect readings of texts.
From these sketches a reading of modernity in terms of a dynamic public
sphere becomes possible which diers fundamentally from Benjamins. More-
over, modernity is not something that only a present-day reader would be able
to reconstruct fromsketch collections of the 1830s and 1840s, but it is their own
(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn
152 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
self-conscious point of reference, as Gavarnis frontispiece to Volume ii of Les
Francais peints par eux-m^ emes makes strikingly clear. An allegorical, angelic-
demonic gure viewing him(?)self in a mirror while writing is seated on a pile
of books which can be identied as works of the great moralists (La Bruy eres
name is legible on one of the spines). The gure can thus be seen as an allegory
of the modern sketch-producer, engaged in adding live, present-day moral ob-
servations collected in notebooks to those of literary history bound in books.
The main dierence between historical, pre-modern moral observation and
the kind of sketches the reader will nd in the present collection, however, is
their apparent immediacy, capturing the here-and-now in an unprecedented
interplay between writing and drawing or letterpress and graphic image. The
fact that Les Francais peints par eux-m^ emes is an illustrated work can be gleaned
from the poster advertising the series in the background and the grati of
Parisian types below. On close inspection of the way the sketch-writer holds
the mirror, the viewer becomes aware that what is reected in it must be more
than the writers face and include images of his environment, i.e. the kind of
urban scenes that become the subject of sketches. The wall with its poster and
grati would be just one of this sort. The very medium of reproduction of-
fers a mirror image of the artists drawing, as Gavarnis reversed signature
implies. Sketches thus present themselves not as naive and spontaneous depic-
tions, but as a sophisticated genre working with reections, and these reections
include the medial conditions under which the genre operates, such as print
on an industrial scale, the collaboration of many in drawing the self-images of
the nation, and the continuitythrough printof the moralist tradition. The
composite nature of the gure, uniting angel, devil, and fool in a gesture of
vanity, hints at the old theatrum mundi and, at the same time, indicates the
loss of authenticity in a world of reproduction and commodicationa world
which Les Francais, a publishers commercial enterprise in the rst instance,
eminently represents. Benjamin could have found a prime example here of how
modernity is critiqued by a medium he deems incapable of penetrating vi-
sion. Accepting in ones own creations the Zertr ummerung der Aura, which
Benjamin sees as the heroic achievement of the lyric poet Baudelaire, is surely
also Gavarnis achievement, but it lacks heroism and therefore iconic potential
because it is an acceptance without communicating a Chocerlebnis.`'
The way in which panoramic (or encyclopaedic) sketch collections present
their views of the city can often be described as an inversion of the travellers
view of foreign places in a critical self-inspection of the social body. Their syn-
thetic structure responds to the increasingly diversied environment in which
social sign-reading has to be practised. In this context, the ^ aneur emerges
as one of a countless number of ordinary city-dwellers who read metropolitan
`' In Nietzsches terms borrowed by Benjamin, Baudelaire has achieved modern astral status,
the status of a star without an aura or atmosphere: [Baudelaire] hat den Preis bezeichnet, um
welchen die Sensation der Moderne zu haben ist: die Zertr ummerung der Aura im Chocerlebnis.
Das Einverst andnis mit dieser Zertr ummerung ist ihn teuer zu stehen gekommen. Es ist aber
das Gesetz seiner Poesie. Sie steht am Himmel des zweiten Kaiserreiches als ein Gestirn ohne
Atmosph are [Nietzsche, Unzeitgem ae Betrachtungen] (Walter Benjamin,

Uber einige Motive
bei Baudelaire, in Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, GS, i/2,
509690 (p. 653)).
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martina lauster 153
surfacesa far cry from the prince moving about incognito, getting aesthetic
kicks out of the experience. One publication of sketches Benjamin mentions
dismissively is the collective serial Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-un (183134).
It features a sketch of the ^ aneur which reads in parts like something well ahead
of its time. The type is described as able to sharpen contemporaries percep-
tions of their surroundings:
Rien n echappe a son regard investigateur [. . .], tout lint eresse, tout est pour lui un
texte dobservations. [. . .] Sous quel aspect inattendu sore a vos yeux, avec un pareil
d emonstrateur, le panorama mobile qui vous environne!`
Unlike Benjamins assertion that the medium of the panorama forms one of the
illusionary veils through which the ^ aneur views the city, this passage makes
it clear that the readers are thought to perceive their Parisian environment in
terms of a mobile panorama. Mobile panoramas were painted strips, often
used in stage shows of the 1820s, which depicted an urban axis such as the
Champs Elys ees and were run across the proscenium so that the spectators
had the impression of moving themselves.` The ^ aneur is here depicted as a
presenter who teaches the audience to take a fresh look at what they are wont
to see through the veil, as it were, of a popular medium, i.e. their urban en-
vironment, and thereby doing precisely the opposite of fostering illusion. The
unusual angle from which to view the city is that of sharp, investigating ob-
servation, and its medial paradigm is not the panorama, but the printed text.
Sketches self-reectively demonstrate their own superiority as discursive text
over popular optical media, uniting as they do the act of depiction and deci-
phering in the immediacy of reading, which is tantamount to the actual reading
of the signs on the page.`` Semiological decoding of metropolitan surfaces is
therefore the business of urban depiction in the 1830s and 1840s, as Richard
Burtons comments on the ^ aneur make abundantly clear:
To describe the ^ aneur as a semiologist avant la lettre is in no sense [. . .] to read back
into the past preoccupations of the present. On the contrary, the belief that urban life
consisted of a multiplicity of interlocking semiotic systems and that everything in the
city was, by denition, meaningful was so widespread amongst writers on pre-1850
Paris as to be virtually platitudinous [. . .]. (Burton, p. 2)
Reading surfaces was one thing; another was the awareness of a multiplicity
of interlocking semiotic systems which no single act of reading could make
available. The interpreter of signs was therefore necessarily also one of a mul-
tiplicity of readers engaged in the same business. Signicantly, the anonymous
author of the sketch Le ^ aneur a Paris in the (also signicantly entitled) Livre
des Cent-et-un is himself listed as un ^ aneur. Anonymity here does not imply
` Un ^ aneur, Le ^ aneur a Paris, in Paris, ou Le Livre des Cent-et-un, 15 vols (Paris: Ladvocat,
183134), vi (1832), 95110 (pp. 101 and 102).
` See Bernard Comment, The Panorama, trans. by Anne-Marie Gasheen (London: Reaktion,
1999), pp. 6365.
`` Two better-known examples are Dickenss Rapid Diorama, a chapter in his Pictures from
Italy (London: Bradbury @ Evans, 1846), and Balzacs Histoire et physiologie des Boulevards de
Paris, from the second volume of Le Diable a Paris (Paris: Hetzel, 1846). A full interpretation
of these can be found in my forthcoming book Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European
Journalism and its Physiologies, 183050 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn
154 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
a Baudelairean man of the crowd, but the new social type. The portrait of the
professional decipherer of the city by a professional decipherer, in a collective
medium which is itself characteristic of the changing social fabric of the July
Monarchy, therefore possesses the highest cognitive interest both for writers
and the reading public at the time and for nineteenth-century specialists today.
Like the other journalistic collections following in its wake,` the Livre des
Cent-et-un presents the ^ aneur as a new type whose existence is dened by
externality, by abandoning private space and moving in the streets as well as by
extroverting meaning which used to be hidden so that it becomes accessible in
urban physiognomies. The ^ aneur is thus also, from the start, a cipher for the
deciphering view which thrives in its proper environment, the urban crowd.
This crowd is not to be understood as an object which the ^ aneur and the
reader of a physiological sketch need in order to reassure themselves of their
diabolical superiority as decipherers. Nor are they, from an ostensibly secure,
static, unseen position, able to laugh about the other, as Sieburth argues, follow-
ing Baudelaires theory of laughter and indirectly Benjamins and Baudelaires
view of the princely observer enjoying his incognito here (Sieburth, p. 58). The
fantasy of seeing without being seen is exactly that of the 1820s swell observ-
ing the city from the snugness of a camera-obscura viewer, as in Pierce Egans
Life in London (182021).` Contrary to this perspective, the 1830s observer is
included in the crowd as its reective viewing device, and the same technique
of reading externality that he applies to the city needs to be applied to him as
a type. Social anatomy, in other words, has passed to collective ownership.
The sketch portraying the ^ aneur in the sixth volume of the Livre says that
it is unnecessary to catch a glimpse of the domestic secrets of the professional
stroller. Why? Because he has none. His ambience is the public sphere, and
in order to understand him you need to watch him move about the streets.
The type whose denition it is to be outside reading surfaces is himself crying
out to be deciphered as a meaningful external phenomenon, and the author of
the sketch is signicantly named un ^ aneur. Nothing, we learn, escapes his
investigative gaze as he moves forward in the middle of the crowd of which he
is the centrenot an unseen centre of power, but a recognizable type on whose
reections the seen world centres. This type, himself subject to analysis, is pre-
sented as an integral part of the general movement on which his vision vitally
depends. From the latest display of luxury and lithographs in shop windows
to the progress of a building forever under construction, and a never-seen face,
everything is to him a text of observation.` This compulsive sign-reading is
` Apart from Les Francais peints par eux-m^ emes, they include serials such as Nouveau tableau
de Paris au XIXe si ecle, 7 vols (Paris: Librairie de Madame Charles-B echet, 183435); Mus eum
parisien (Paris: Beauger and Aubert, 1841); La Grande Ville, 2 vols (Paris: Maresq, 1844); Le
Diable a Paris, 2 vols (Paris: J. Hetzel, 184546); and others.
` [. . .] safety [. . .] should be the primary object of the traveller. The curious, likewise, in their
anxiety to behold delightful prospects or interesting views, ought to be equally careful to prevent
the recurrence of accidents. The author, in consequence, has chosen for his readers a Camera
Obscura View of London, not only from its safety, but because it is so snug, and also possessing
the invaluable advantages of siiIc and not being seen (Pierce Egan, Life in London; or, The Day
and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom [. . .], 3rd issue
(London: Sherwood, Jones @ Co., 1823), p. 18).
` Le voyez-vous mon ^ aneur, [. . .] comme il savance librement au milieu de cette foule dont
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martina lauster 155
further described as a phenomenon and actually a need (besoin) of civiliza-
tion at an advanced, aged (vieillie) stage. Because of specialization and the
division of labour, the ^ aneur has a single occupation, which is to see and to
see everything, like his ancestor, the serpent of Paradise.`` This Satanic drive
towards knowing and exposing becomes useful (utile) in modern society be-
cause the observer is himself part of the crowd culture he observes. Far from
enjoying the privilege of diabolical insight, he shares it with anyone who is
interested and by virtue of having his portrait, written by another nameless
stroller, published in a collective volume. Harmless this type may be, as Ben-
jamin remarks with regard to all the types analysed by sketches;` but this is
beside the point. What matters centrally is the fact that observation now has no
privileges attached to it, not even those of great literature. Thus, the ^ aneur
of the Livre des Cent-et-un, this heir of Satanic vision, is, typically, a retired
general, an emeritus professor, a former merchant or a diplomat temporarily
o duty. As he hardly ever leaves his own quartier, he knows every inhabi-
tant and every regular (chaque habitant et chaque habitu e) of the boulevard,
and he is himself known to the sta in all the restaurants of the area. By the
mid-1840s the suggestion of personal acquaintance between the ^ aneur and
his environment will have gone. However, even the earlier representation of
the ^ aneur as being in his element on the street is not important in terms of
making a threatening environment look familiar, but in terms of demystifying
the penetration of surfaces.
To conclude, streets are denitely not turned into interiors by the social ob-
servers of the 1830s and 1840s. Although the ^ aneur is portrayed as someone
who has abandoned his private space, this does not mean that exteriors are
experienced as familiar instead. The dwindling of privacy is in fact a much
more fruitful concept for an understanding of social processes and methods
of observation during the period in question. The way in which sketches per-
form social anatomy suggests a turning inside out, i.e. a defamiliarization, of
private, internal spaces, rather than a turning outside in, i.e. a familiarization,
of public, external space. In the same context one could point to the fact that
a perception of the urban environment as nature (see Benjamins likening of
the panorama to landscape and of the ^ aneur to a botanist) has ideological con-
notations that are alien to the observers of Parisian life. Yes, they do analyse
il est le centre [. . .]! Tout, autour de lui, ne para^t marcher, courir, se croiser, que pour occuper
ses yeux, provoquer ses r eexions, animer son existence de ce mouvement loin duquel sa pens ee
languit. Rien n echappe a son regard investigateur: une nouvelle disposition dans l etalage de ce
magasin somptueux, une lithographie qui se produit pour la premi ere fois en public, les progr es
dune construction quon croyait interminable, un visage inaccoutum e [. . .], tout est pour lui un
texte dobservations (Le ^ aneur a Paris, p. 101).
`` See ibid., pp. 9698.
` Nirgends durchbrachendiese Physiologien den beschr anktestenHorizont. Nachdemsie sich
den Typen gewidmet hatten, kam die Reihe an die Physiologie der Stadt. Es erschienen Paris la
nuit, Paris a table, Paris dans leau, Paris a cheval, Paris pittoresque, Paris mari e. Als
auch diese Ader ersch opft war, wagte man sich an die Physiologie der V olker. Man verga nicht
die Physiologie der Tiere, die sich seit jeher als harmloser Vorwurf empfohlen haben. Auf die
Harmlosigkeit kam es an (Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, pp. 53738).
[. . .] un g en eral en retraite, un professeur em erite, un ancien n egociant, un diplomate en
disponibilit e (Le ^ aneur a Paris, p. 100).
(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn
156 Benjamins Myth of the Fl ^ aneur
urban environments in terms of natural history, but only inasmuch as life sci-
ence (anatomy, physiognomy, zoology, and physiology) is a paradigm for social
science. No Physiologie or related publication would at any point suggest that
a place shaped by human history is to be understood as natural space. This
kind of understanding, which does also exist in metropolitan sketches, has, as it
were, an axe to grind. It is a reactionary view formulated against the Western,
historical, and dynamic interpretation of the city, as becomes evident from a
Viennese panoramic collection, Wien und die Wiener.' But even this collection
engages with the process of sign-reading in a democratized and everyday sort of
way. The light in which the sketch industry of the 1830s and 1840s needs to be
interpreted is that of the Enlightenment project making its way into quotidian
knowledge on a massive scale. This happens thanks to the very progress of
reproductive technologies (such as the use of stereotypes for reproducing texts
and images quickly and cheaply, and in high print-runs, on the steam-powered
press) that prepare the ground for the post-auratic forms of art of photo-
graphy and lm. While Benjamin appreciates their revolutionary potential in
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, he denies
such a capacity to the mass-produced illustrated sketch, not a Kunstwerk, but
a form that nevertheless points to its own reproducibility in such a way as to
imply a critique of modernity. Benjamins keen interest in the gure of the col-
lector, and his own activity as one of the kind, is clearly pregured in the huge
collections of contemporary types and phenomena that the nineteenth-century
sketch industry provided. But, like the ^ aneur, this type appears in sketches
as a signicant common gure of the time, occupying an important place in
an environment characterized by Verdinglichung, and not as our latter-day
Benjaminian icon of modernity, a Schicksalsdeuter and Allegoriker of the
object world.
IvivsI1v oi Fxi1iv `:v1I: J:is1iv
' Wien und die Wiener, in Bildern aus dem Leben, ed. by [Adalbert Stifter, Franz Stelzhammer,
and Carl Edmund Langer] (Pesth: Gustav Heckenast, 1844).
See the section Der Sammler in Das Passagen-Werk, GS, v/1, 26980, esp. pp. 27475 and
27980.