In the French context, writers from Villon to Baudelaire have aestheticized the vision of the stroller or the loiterer and have dignified this act with a word: flânerie. By definition, it is the activity of strolling, delighting in the sights of the city and its tumultuous crowd, all the while remaining aloof from it. The flâneur is the painter of modern urban life, transforming what was an instant of public observation into a philosophical reflection, often a reflection turned back upon the private self.  Heinrich von Kleist's letters from Paris exemplify this particular vision. Even his sentences take on a meandering, endlessly unfolding form:

Ever so often, I am walking through the streets, my eyes wide open, and I see--lots of ludicrous, even more abominable things, and eventually something beautiful. I walk through the long, crooked, narrow...streets redolent with the smells of a thousand disgusting fumes, along the narrow but high houses...almost as if to multiply the location. I twist myself through heaps of humans, screaming, running, panting, pushing each other, hitting, and turning without complaining, I look at someone, he looks back...and we will both have forgotten about each other before we turn the corner (Kleist 1964: 212).

                In the past twenty years, critics have sought to establish the flâneur as an important key to understanding the intersections between modernity, vision, and public spaces (Kleber, Schwartz, Tester). Summing up this epistemological angle, Vanessa Schwartz claimed that "Flanerie...is a shorthand for the mode of modern urban spectatorship that emphasizes mobility and fluid subjectivity" (Schwartz 1998:9). While the vision of the flâneur of the nineteenth century has been dissected from Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire to recent criticism by Anke Gleber, Janet Wolff, Marshall Berman, and Keith Tester, there seems to be a void of inquiry regarding the flâneur of the twentieth, even twenty-first century.  What does the contemporary face of the flâneur look like? Is it still one capable-- long after the dandy has departed-- of "botanizing on the asphalt" and who still offers us a variety of "viewing positions" from which to perceive the city (Benjamin 1973: 36)?

                Paris specifically is an ideal site for exploring such questions. By synecdoche, it represents all large modern cities and is itself a symbol of modern life; Paris represents historically the coincidence between the birth of the modern city in the 19th century and the birth of the flâneur as a social type exemplifying masculine and bourgeois privilege.1 But also Paris is a place that, in unchanging ways, still invites a certain narcissistic pleasure for the modern-day tourist or flâneur. We feast on the scene unfolding before us so much more because we are also part of it. Before we ever even arrived, it existed for us in our imagination as the capital of love and romance. Paris forms the quintessential urban palimpsest that has been nearly over-represented in literature, film, and popular culture more generally speaking, so much has it appeared in these various kinds of discourses over time. As Victor Burgin notes, this tempers our experience of Paris as we are living it: "The city in our actual experience is at the same time an actually existing physical environment and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, a city in a comic strip, a city in a pie chart, and so on" (Burgin 1996: 48).

                Particularly for those in love, Paris creates the conditions for a kind of urban narcissistic personality. On the one hand, lovers can be private in public--intimate and yet not physically alone. Boulevards and cafes facilitated this for those lovers of the 1860s and 1870s who could experience an enhanced emotional euphoria because of the traffic of people and horses that populated the streets and bore witness to their coupling. More than a mere physical space, the city became an enhanced mental space. Martin Berman explains this is a particularly Parisian phenomenon, resulting from the architectural configuration of the boulevards in the capital:

This romantic experience could be felt especially intensely in front of the endless parades of strangers moving up and down the boulevards--it was those strangers they gazed upon and who in turn gazed at them. Part then of the gaze in the new modern city of Paris was of the multitude of passers-by, who both enhanced the lovers' vision of themselves and in turn provided an endlessly fascinating source of curiosity (Berman 1983:126).

For these passers-by, the spectacle of observing intimacy in a public setting begs the questions: Who were these people? Where did they come from and where were they going, what did they want, and whom did they love? The more the public participated in the extended "family of eyes", the richer became their vision of themselves.

                Speaking of the effects of the rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, Berman also remarked that what is of central importance to Paris in this period is the reconstruction of urban space that allowed for new ways of seeing and being seen. The effects of the massive rebuilding of Paris by Haussman, in which workers blasted a vast network of new boulevards through the heart of the old medieval city that displaced 350,000 people, was that "all these qualities helped to make Paris a uniquely enticing spectacle, a visual and sensual feast...after centuries of life as a cluster of isolated cells, Paris was becoming a unified physical and human space" (ibid 151). Not only did the new Paris also provide something for those who needed visual witnesses to their most private affairs, all Parisians were united in the "family of eyes" which bore witness to not just the happy embrace but also the growing social issue of urban poverty. Haussman's boulevards ostensibly opened up the city. They destroyed the barriers both social and geographical that separated the classes, and, as a consequence, rendered the urban tableau visible in ways unimaginable to the strollers of the past. The "new" Paris democratized vision, brought the margins to the center, and exposed the flâneur to scenes unexpected, unpredictable, and also unpleasant. He was brought face to face with the sight of the down and out, which even today often disgusts, forces one to avert the eyes, and disturbs, more than the most lewd display of sexuality in the street towards which our gaze is sometimes drawn.

                Baudelaire himself was most interested in the marginal person who, thanks to what he called architectural vandalism, was left exposed to the public eye having no where else to hide in the rationalized city and suddenly highlighted by the recent innovation of gas streetlights. Baudelaire saw in the figure of the poor child playing with a rat, or an old woman begging, a condition similar to his own as the poète exilé alienated from his time and place. The homeless allowed Baudelaire to focus on the social margins of the modern city, thereby acknowledging his own position at those margins. As Benjamin noted, "the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place" (Benjamin 1969: 172). Baudelaire argued in the Salon of 1846 that if modernity was to be captured, attention had to be redirected from "the public and official subjects" of art, from "our victories and our political heroism" to "private subjects which are very much more heroic than these": the "pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences--criminals and kept women--which drift about in the underworld of a great city" (Baudelaire: 118-119). And within these categories, the "floating existences", more than the "pageant of fashionable life", were, by virtue of their social isolation, emblematic of what it was to be modern. For Benjamin, the modern poets come to "find the refuse of society on their street and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse." Through the process of identification with such "floating existences", Baudelaire (and later, Benjamin) established the view from the margin as the characteristically modern urban pose. Julie Abraham, in her study of homosexuality in the metropolis "Metropolitan Lovers", astutely remarked that:

Focusing on marginal subjects and simultaneously claiming a marginal position and perspective would become standard moves in the work of elite men writing about the modern city. By claiming allegiance to the margins, such men could sidestep the prospect of their own eclipse by modernity, the threat to their gender and class status contained in the potential empowerment of women of all classes and the urban masses (Abraham 2009:33).

                Let us not forget that the flâneur does not socially align completely with the clochard for obvious reasons (one would not call the clochard a gentleman of leisure), yet the ways in which they see the world may bear a certain resemblance. Neither the flâneur nor the clochard is engaged in paid work activity, both are outsiders to the social practice of working for a living and both see themselves as enjoying an existence apart from, yet in close proximity to, the crowd. As ambulant subjects of the city, both are interested in survival, although the pun works only in French: the clochard in "survivre", the flâneur (and I'm thinking particularly of Baudelaire and Breton) in "sur-vivre", living above naked experience, searching to augment reality, as it were. 

                In the nineteenth century, flânerie was the preserve of the elite but they shared the urban stage with the homeless so that their closeness in space and time to each other created a certain identification between the two as members of a kind of errant culture. Belonging to the other side of the economic and social spectrum, the homeless exist as the disjointed subjects of the city who have no choice but to loll about the banks of the Seine, pestering the passersby, generally adding a rather dubious shade of gray to the palette of the landscape. Unlike the flâneur, the tramps or clochards of Paris failed to produce literature based on their wanderings. Whatever gifts of perception the clochard may possess, they do not bear the fruit of poetry, however mundane or depraved the subject--so many flowers of evil, unless you count the newspapers the homeless now publish and distribute on the street (and that is recent).

                To be sure the difference between the flâneur and the clochard lies not in the kind of gaze upon which they seize the street scene in front of them but in the gaze that is thrown back upon them. The crowd may allow the flâneur to exist as the lone remnant of a former France made obsolete by Republican ideals but the crowd is made uneasy by the presence of the homeless man. Like the flâneur, however, the presence of the clochard on the street disturbs and fascinates at the same time. Neither flâneur nor clochard is ever addressed by the crowds but we can be certain that they are both watched.

                The last century's literature of the flâneur begins with an extension of Baudelaire's project. Apollinaire writes his Flâneur des deux rives, Aragon, le paysan de Paris, Leon-Paul Fargue his Pieton de Paris, all of which continue the narration of Paris as either a site of unexpected daily dramas, l'imprévu, or an occasion for nostalgia. On the one hand, these authors longed to rehabilitate the dying art of flânerie that had become demoded by a capitalistic culture obsessed with work and making money. On the other, it gave them purpose at a time, the twentieth century, which made irrelevant destitute aristocrats who once enjoyed a privileged existence as relics of a pre-industrialized France. The literary accounts of Paris written by the flâneurs mentioned above are tinged with nostalgia for a dying city, populated by certain social types ("Le Parisien", "La Parisienne", "le juif") that are themselves careening toward extinction, and time-honored cafés and bars soon to be replaced by something more glitzy and modern. They saw themselves in this mirror of the changing urban space that threatened to leave no place for them. The death-obsessed narrative of a Leon-Paul Fargue communicates the loss both of the city he once knew at the turn of the century and the loss of his own position in it as the future of the flâneur became uncertain. It would be difficult to find the creative and productive force of a Baudelaire in the twenty-first century, although the homeless retrace Baudelaire's steps daily in the metropolis, unaware of the literary heritage that haunts their meanderings. Oddly enough, the flâneur does not disappear in the advent of modernity but reinvents himself as a promeneur solitaire with a camera in his hands.

                By the 1930s, the dandy is nowhere to be found-as one proclaimed in La Règle du jeu, "c'est la fin de race"--and in his place we find his alter-ego in the filmmaker who seeks to square his vision with those marginal people of the city, who speaks out for the clochard but, most importantly, plays with our expectations about Paris as a romantic capital. For example, when we hear of the film from 1991, "Lovers on the Bridge", we expect to see lovers on the bridge kissing, as in the Doisneau photograph, yet the film depicts instead a pair of filthy clochards in a rather torturous folie à deux. Susan Sontag in her essay "On Photography" claims that photography "first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flaneur...the photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes (Sontag 1977:55)." To the photographer's and later, the cinematographer's eye, the subject of homelessness as an example of a "voluptuous extreme" provided the perfect vehicle to expose the hypocrisy of bourgeois values that have so seamlessly underwritten the codes of sociability in twentieth century France. If the nineteenth century flâneur gave us an image of Paris through his discerning yet pleasure-seeking eyes, then the twentieth century flâneur offers us a tableau of the city as seen from under the bridge, meaning, through the slightly crazed and famished gaze of the homeless.2 The new flâneur tracts the homeless and continues his social commentary for readers and spectators alike using photography and film as his mouthpiece. The cinéaste channels this perception of the city for spectators who would otherwise choose not to see Paris from this perspective. The roving eye of the camera delivers an image to us containing a certain touching element, the punctum, according to Barthes-- "la piqûre, le petit trou, la petite tâche, la petite coupure" (Barthes 1980:4), capable of eliciting an affective response. Yes, the streets provide the images but the filmmaker interprets them by framing them in such a way as to direct our attention toward the thing that we won't be able to forget. Perhaps more significantly, the range of spectators has also broadened so as to close the gender gap, meaning, that if Baudelaire's readers were by and large men, the spectators of 20th century film are both men and women.

                French cinema since the 1930s has returned obsessively to the question of homelessness and more specifically, to capturing this particular vision of the city. Take, for example, Marche à l'ombre (Michel Blanc), Une époque formidable (Gérard Jugnot), Enfermés dehors (Albert Dupontel), and as mentioned above Les amants du pont neuf (Leon Castex). The antecedent to these films, and perhaps the first of the genre, Jean Renoir's Boudu sauvé des eaux,³ deserves special recognition. Adapted from the play by René Fauchois in 1932, the film has been remade several times, including one in the 1990s with Gerard Depardieu, and the Hollywood remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Michel Simon's portrayal of Boudu emblematized the more than ten thousand clochards who lived in the city's parks or under its bridges in the 1930s and brought to light the social problem of poverty and homelessness in Paris. The plot is fairly simple, a tramp known as "Boudu" tries to kill himself by drowning in the Seine, presumably because he's lost his dog, floats down from his "home" in the Bois de Boulogne to the Pont des Arts where a bookseller, M. Lestingois, sees him from his bookshop window, runs to the bridge and dives in, all to valiantly drag a soaking Boudu to safety.  Boudu's trajectory as he floats down the Seine is Renoir's attempt at social commentary. Boudu departs from the Bois de Boulogne, a location redolent of Parisian summer pleasures boating and picnicking as well as the seedy nocturnal activities it is home to year-round, to the city center where he is rescued at the Pont des Arts, directly across from the Louvre and, as Renoir would have it (it is physically impossible in reality), in front of the Académie Française and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Renoir situates his dramatic comedy spatially at the very center of culture and learning, at the center of a city that considers itself to be the center of civilization. There, the bourgeois Monsieur Lestingois takes the clochard Boudu into his bookshop and home as part of a mission civilisatrice gone awry. The juxtaposition of the two men and the exploration of their desires and needs expose the hypocrisy at the heart of Lestingois' mission and the values he represents. "This 'boudu' belongs to filth, to waste, to the unassimilable; he is an instinct, an urge, a drive (What kind of name is Boudu? Does it connote a substance? An action? A disposition?)" and yet he exteriorizes something that is inside his bourgeois benefactor, Lestingois (Faulkner 2005). They belong to different worlds, experience the city entirely differently, and yet it is clear that their existences depend upon each other and that what both attracts and repels us about Boudu informs us about the very ideas about ourselves that we ignore, repress, or discard.

                If, as Vanessa Schwartz has argued, the nineteenth century flâneur is not so much a person as a position of power for he or she is as much part of the spectacle as able to command it, then it follows that the photographer and filmmaker alike are the contemporary flâneurs who use this position to make visible what the ordinary eye of the bourgeois spectator would seek to avoid. Baudelaire's dandy, and Renoir's tramp illustrate the different ways to know the city by offering an alternative way to see it, however, the filmmaker is able go a step beyond the poet. His vision (all so far have been male) imparts both a knowledge of the city from the view below, as it were, as well as knowledge from the view above, thereby rendering visible a contradiction between the two disparate portraits of the same place. Renoir tracks Boudu's itinerary through Paris, therein rendering him a legitimate subject of the city, in order to remind us of the discrepancies of wealth and power, education and social class, privilege and location, that have always defined each of the capital's twenty arrondissements. Through this lens, the margins are brought back into focus and the marginal people become domesticated within the "family of eyes". The observer becomes the observed, and as a result, as spectators of this unfolding drama, we cannot escape our own anxieties surrounding those less desirable elements of the urban tableau.