Anyone who has spent time in Paris, of any class or gender or race, will have observed that Paris is a city designed for pedestrians. Apart from the café—that timeless Parisian institution to which I dedicated fifteen hundred words a couple of weeks ago—the sidewalk is the most democratic space in this gilded capital city. Indeed, the romantic allure of the café is wedded to the casual voyeurism of watching the crowd as it streams by on the sidewalk. If the café is a pacific island, the sidewalk is a tempestuous river, the crowd its pulsing current.
Pause: I remember a time when I was sucked underwater while braving the waves that batter the Anse du Diamant on the southern coast of Martinique. For a brief, panicked moment, I was afraid that I would drown then and there beneath the brilliant blue of the Caribbean Sea. But in my panic, I remembered that the only way to escape a strong current is to force your body to go limp and to allow yourself to float to the surface with the natural movement of the waves.
To be swept up in the swirling current of a crowd, to yield to a movement that surpasses the volition of any one of its individual actors, abides by the same principle: it is an act of deference or submission; it requires a respect for the crowd as an independent entity that ebbs and flows and obeys its own mysterious gravitational pull. It is a dangerous temptation, to be carried away by the crowd.
It has often been observed that Paris is a city that rewards those who take the time to explore it on foot. In his 2001 book, The Flâneur, the American expatriate author Edmund White writes, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.” In fact, walking in Paris has become such a culturally imbedded pursuit that the French have invented a word for it: flânerie.
In Paris, flânerie can become a compulsive addiction. The pace of walking, its contemplative rhythm, offers an invigorating compromise between steady motion and aimless idleness. And the urban landscape of Paris is particularly suited to the haphazard wanderings of the flâneur. Although the Baron Haussmann’s urban renovation destroyed the narrow, winding streets of medieval Paris, the modern city that came of age at the turn of the twentieth century gave new life to the urban wanderer. Indeed, the superficial uniformity of Haussmann’s Paris—with its broad boulevards lined with five-story limestone residences with narrow iron balconies, its sidewalks punctuated regularly by plane trees and identical benches and lampposts—compels the modern flâneur to walk on and on and on, endlessly.
Despite the unparalleled efficiency and reach of the Parisian metro system, with stops that are never more than a five minutes’ walk away (with the exception of a number of “trous noirs,” or black holes, on the outskirts of the city), the flâneur obstinately travels on foot, drawn to a quaint steeple peeking over the next row of tiled roofs, a shady square at the next intersection, or an antique bookstore just around the next corner, where dusty pages whisper secrets of a bygone era. This city invites the flâneur to wander until he’s hungry and exhausted and half-lost in some far-flung corner of the city he never intended to visit. Another block, another monument, another world. Descending into the underground labyrinth of the metro to take the next train home almost feels like a quiet defeat.
Flânerie, or the art of walking aimlessly, is a time-honored French tradition. Perhaps the first French flâneur was the eighteenth-century writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose Tableau de Paris (Panorama of Paris), a twelve-volume, twenty-eight-hundred-page collection of Parisian sketches, captures the essence of the capital city on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789. Mercier was famously wrong about the prospects of the impending revolution, writing that: “The Parisian’s instinct seems to have taught him that the little more liberty he might obtain is not worth fighting for. . . . Any such struggle would imply long effort and stern thinking. He has a short memory for trouble, chalks up no score of his miseries, and has confidence enough in his own strength not to dread too absolute a despotism.”
Despite compulsively cataloguing the everyday behaviors and customs of the common people he encountered while wandering the streets of Paris, Mercier’s magnified perspective on Parisian life paradoxically blinded him to the revolution that rumbled just over the next horizon. Mercier’s miscalculation is a prescient reminder that even the most careful and committed observers of society can gravely misinterpret the instinct of the crowd, magnifying anecdotal evidence into broad ideological narratives. (Of course I am thinking of the 2016 American presidential election. How could I not? When am I not?)
Edmund White has written that flânerie is the wanderer’s way of imposing “a personal vision on the palimpsest of Paris,” of carving out his own individual narrative in a city with infinite layers of sedimented history. The inherent aimlessness of the flâneur’s path, determined by sheer curiosity rather than preexisting narratives or guidebook itineraries, means that every true wanderer will come away with his own personal interpretation of the urban landscape. The perspective of the observer always frames his perception of the observed.
It is significant, in this regard, that the prototypical models of the French flâneur—from Mercier to Charles Baudelaire and even the American Edmund White—have all been men. In French, a gendered language, the masculine noun flâneur reflects the gender traditionally associated with the role. The feminine substantive flâneuse does exist in French, but most literary accounts of flânerie nevertheless adopt a male perspective. The flâneur, by definition, is an individual uninhibited by domestic responsibilities and with enough financial independence to spend his days wandering aimlessly about the city with no apparent objective or destination. Historically speaking, this individual is a white man. Or, as the American writer Lauren Elkin observes in her recent book on the female flâneuse, published just this year, it is as if “a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.”
Edmund White, a gay man and elite Parisian socialite, exemplifies the pernicious gender-ignorance of most literary accounts of flânerie. In The Flâneur, for example, he blithely writes: “Whereas the word cruise is part of only the gay vocabulary in English, its French equivalent, draguer, is also heterosexual. Straight people cruise one another in Paris; unlike Americans, who feel menaced or insulted by lingering looks on the street, French women—and men!—consider la séduction to be one of the arts of living and an amorous glance their natural due.”
As an acculturated American woman who has been living in France on and off for the better part of a decade, I call bullshit. To be alone in public, to pass imperceptibly, to wander aimlessly on the streets of Paris oblivious of those invisible frontiers where gentrified neighborhoods turn suddenly into seedy slums, remains the privileged purview of white men. What, then, is the experience of the female flâneuse? And where does she wander?
Let me begin with the American journalist Elaine Sciolino, who has lived in Paris with her family for a decade and a half. I first learned of Mercier’s street reporting in Sciolino’s The Only Street in Paris, a loving biography of sorts of the author’s adopted street, the Rue des Martyrs, a kilometer stretch of cultural and culinary paradise just south of Montmartre. Sciolino is an adept female flâneuse in her own right; her meticulously researched account of life on the Rue des Martyrs is a testament to her keen observation, journalistic tact, and narrative wit.
The content of Sciolino’s book deserves its own post, but for now I want to focus on an innocuous, throwaway sentence from Sciolino’s book that rattled my nerves when I came across it. In her chapter on flânerie, Sciolino writes: “I have a complicated relationship with Mercier, as he was the subject of a doctoral dissertation I long ago started and failed to finish.”
Why this honesty? Why this willingness to admit defeat in the middle of a text that unambiguously attests to the author’s competence, discretion, and expertise? I suspect that Sciolino’s cast-off confession is symptomatic of the condition of the female flâneuse writ large. Contrary to the male flâneur, the female flâneuse feels compelled to justify her own position as a purveyor of knowledge while also constantly acknowledging her own positionality. As a woman, the female flâneuse cannot assume a detached objectivity with regards to her surroundings. And her surroundings, as I have previously written, often pose an imminent threat to her sense of safety.
There is a sexual politics of public space of which every female flâneuse is acutely aware. I cannot remember a day that I have not been harassed—either verbally or physically, with varying degrees of sexual intent—while walking alone in Paris or elsewhere in France. Granted, I currently live and work in an up-and-coming, blue-collar neighborhood in the nineteenth arrondissement, where gender politics may be more fluid (I am being generous here) than in the stuffy, aristocratic neighborhoods of Paris. Yet my experience underscores another aspect of flânerie to which my white, male interlocutors often choose to remain blissfully ignorant: to wander aimlessly without inhibition or repercussion is as much a function of gender as it is of race and class.
(I opened this post by stating that the sidewalk is the most democratic space in the modern city. But democracy isn’t always fair, and it certainly isn’t blind to gender or class or race.)
Another female flâneuse comes to mind: the French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who poignantly articulates the precarious condition of the female flâneuse in her 1961 film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7.). (“Comes to mind” is too facile a phrase; it took considerable wandering in my Sherlockian mind-palace to come across upon a suitable example.) In Cléo de 5 à 7, Varda traces the title character’s transformation from an insecure shell of Western femininity—emphasized by series of fragmentary shots in the film’s opening scene of a manicured, made-up Cleo as she anxiously consults a tarot reader about an undiagnosed stomach pain—to a self-assured woman confidently strolling the streets of Paris. In the film’s pivotal scene, Cleo rips off her blonde wig and ventures out into the Parisian streets, at last unencumbered by the societal pressure of performing her gender. Cleo’s curiosity and independence blossom as she finally lays claim to the right to observe without being observed or objectified as a female body in a public space. Thus transformed into a female flâneuse, an active, observing entity, Cleo embodies the liberating androgyny that Virginia Woolf (the unparalleled female flâneuse of London) imagines in A Room of One’s Own.
Although one could certainly quibble about the feminist politics of Varda’s film (it is somewhat problematic, for example, that Cleo’s liberation only occurs after she sheds her feminine façade like last season’s skin, which one might interpret essentially as an rejection of femininity), its underlying message remains relevant. As a contemporary female flâneuse, perpetually wandering the streets of Paris, I endeavor to occupy and to document the public space of the sidewalk, with all its contradictions and sexual politics, and through writing, to claim my place amidst the crowd.
Solitary City 