flâneur

Since 1854 the French word flâner has meant to stroll, loaf, or saunter. So a flâneur is one who saunters. Indeed, a flâneur is now one who does a little more than saunter since the French poet  Baudelaire proposed a new meaning: ‘a person who walks the city in order to experience it’.

Baudelaire’s ‘gentleman stroller of city streets’ plays a double role in city life: he is a detached observer, and as such, has a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. The concept is French, so I can’t help but think of Paris. To be a flâneur in Paris is dead easy.

I emerge from my hotel, look left or right and simply make a series of random choices about where to proceed. A distant landmark attracts my attention, or the immediacy of what is going on in a side street. The result is not-quite-aimless wandering. I stumble into the wonderful rue Mouffetard Sunday market entirely by accident.

The modern flâneur always has a camera. Susan Sontag, the American essayist, says in her 1977 essay On Photography that the photographer is “an armed solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world picturesque.” She’s nailed it.

The art of the flâneur is to come across the unexpected. Nothing major or of great moment might arise, in which case the trick is to be alert for small delights, hidden beauty. But always the next move is unknown until it reveals itself. A map is essential, but only consulted in order to find a way back to your lodging when the random sauntering is done.

Can one be a flâneur in other places, risky places? Kolkata, Chicago, Capetown? When in Alice Springs my daughter goes running with her dog Indie, no map, no idea where she’s going.  She blunders into a town ‘camp’ and the unfettered Indigenous curs attack her.

My new job has taken me to Newcastle, Sydney, Adelaide and Darwin, but with little time to play the flâneur. Time is crucial. Strolling cannot be hurried and a spare twenty minutes or even an hour is insufficient for a proper reflective ramble, or photography.

The early morning, including dawn, or an entire afternoon are the best times to be a flâneur.

Rock on.