Entre o Chiado, o Carmo e Paris
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Victor Fournel described flâneur as a photographer of the urban experience5, who starts the shutter with a blink of an eye. He immerses himself in the crowd merging with the mass of passing bodies. Passionate-street viewer, amateur detective6, away from home, yet feeling at home everywhere. According to Baudelair, this walking gentleman, playing a key role in understanding and portraying the city, walked aimlessly, and the nothingness and emptiness which he felt around him he filled with a lot of impressions7. Sometimes you could see him with a turtle on a leash with which he traversed the city arcades. He imposed trends, so in the mid-nineteenth century, more and more walkers appeared on the streets of Paris experiencing the city in a slow rhythm, holding their “elegant” turtles8 on ribbons. Flâneur an esthete, a lonely artist-stroller, steeped in mystery and curiosity, has become the key to philosophical reflection on the city. The city itself has become a stage where every day, among thousands of disguises and props, “real life”, “the art of quasi-meetings”, the game of observation was played out. Flâneur is a sophisticated player who plays in directing street life, where passers-by are actors and their lives are performances. However, this director is non-invasive, it is not about instructing or interfering, but merely observing. Scenarios are written by wandering, its pace and route, while art itself is a vibrating improvisation, a process that never ends, consisting of numerous episodes. Life is an art in the eye of a walking flâneur. And the city and its streets is a fascinating scene, feeding us new emotions every day. Flâneur is the first and honest researcher in the city. His experience, however, is fragmentary, deprived of the whole view. The whole can be tried to capture only on the path of reflection to which the experiment leads. Without a “experience of journey”, there is no reflection or philosophical attempt to understand the city. Flâneur is its precursor.9
5. F.-V. Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris), Publisher A. Delahays, Paris 1858. 6. P. Dejneka, Flâneurie the essence of the phenomenon and transformations, University of Warsaw, 2000 [online], <http://www.dejneka.fp.pl/> [access: 07.06.2015]. 7. S. Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and Paris of his time, translator A. Sapoliński, Warsaw 1992, p. 85. 8. R. Prouty, A Turtle on a leash, “One-way street”, 28.10.2009 [online], <http://onewaystreet.typepad. com/one_way_street/2009/10/a-turtle-on-a-leash.html>, [access: 07.06.2015]. 9. W. Benjamin, Angelus Novus. Ausgewählte Schriften 2, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 417. “The flâneur type brought Paris to life,” said Walter Benjamin in the introduction to Franz Hessel’s book.
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