Typical flaneur, from PHYSIOLOGIE DU FLANEUR, 1841.
The hardest thing to learn about Paris is how to walk.
In rural Australia, where I grew up, it wasn’t unusual to walk a mile into town for a quart of milk and a mile back. The habit remained, even after I moved to the city. Once, high on conversation with a friend who’d just traveled six hundred miles from Melbourne – not on foot, however; one had to draw the line somewhere – we walked into central Sydney for breakfast. This meant crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which is 2/3 of a mile long, never mind the approach roads and exits, but we didn’t notice.
I tried to apply this method to Los Angeles, setting out from my new apartment in Westwood, heading for the campus of UCLA, which I’d estimated to be no more than a mile away. After a couple of blocks, however, it was clear this was no place for pedestrians. Not a single person shared the sidewalk. So few used it, in fact, that one could see their footprints in the accumulated grit. In the unused doorways of apartment buildings, yellowed takeaway menus and supermarket flyers gathered in drifts. Small signs next to flower beds, which I assumed showed the variety of bloom planted there, actually read, on closer examination Armed Response. Trespassers Will be Shot. Ray Bradbury wrote a story called The Pedestrian, about a walker arrested by the police for being out at night rather than inside like everyone else, watching television. I’d assumed it was a fantasy. Now I wasn’t so sure.
No wonder, then, that many Americans, particularly from California, where walking is often limited to crossing from parked car to mall entrance in the shortest possible time, don’t so much walk as scamper. Conversations that begin with them at my shoulder end with me almost bellowing at their speedily diminishing backs.
Needless to say, this is not the French style. “Nobody has yet found a better way to travel slowly than to walk,” explains Frédéric Gros in Walking: A Philosophy. “It requires two legs; nothing more. Want to go faster? Don’t bother walking – roll, slide or fly: don’t walk. But once you are walking, it’s not performance than counts but the intensity of the sky, the splendour of the landscape. Walking is not a sport.”
Rue de l’Ancienne Comedie in mid-nineteenth century. Note mud, hoof-marks and lack of a sidewalk.
If the French, and particularly Parisians, glamourise walking, it’s because, for them, the experience is still quite novel. Until Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, only twenty percent of its streets were paved. The rest were mud in winter and dust in summer, mixed liberally in both cases with excrement, both animal and human: sewers were, likewise, a relatively late development.
If you wanted to cross a street without wading up to your ankles, you paid some husky young lad to piggy-back you to the other side. People who could afford to do so travelled by coach or on horse-back, not stepping down until they’d reached a dry paved courtyard. Few streets boasted sidewalks - our street, rue de l’Odéon, had the first in Paris. Mostly there was just a narrow ledge, enough for a foothold as you climbed into a carriage or onto your horse.
Some things never change. From PHYSIOLOGIE DU FLANEUR, 1841/
With sidewalks, however, came the concept of walking for the pleasure of it. Sellers of wine, beer, coffee and tea put out samples and tables and chairs at which to enjoy them, and café society was born. Once again, it was left to the French to invent words to describe this novel experience. One was promenade. Another was flaner. Both, technically, mean to stroll, but there’s an important distinction. In his Physiologie du Flaneur, published in 1841, Louis Huart explains “Want to make a simple promenade? Go with a friend. If you want to flaner, go alone.”
The flaneur goes out alone because, frankly, he – or perhaps she; flanerie isn’t exclusive to men – is looking for trouble. Their feet automatically lead them down narrow alleys and into interestingly shadowed cafes. As Edmund White says in his book The Flaneur, “his wanderings will take him more often to the strange corners of Paris than to its historic centre, to the strongholds of multiculturalism rather than to the classic headquarters of the Gallic tradition.” Even White confessed once that, having been denied an interview by Pierre Boulez, director of the avant garde music institute IRCAM, he always, when walking his dog, passed by the vent that provided air to its underground premises and encouraged him to crap into it. A truly Parisian piece of mischief – and of flanerie.
Samuel Lopez-Barrantes and I will be discussing White’s book on the Paris Writers’ Salon next Sunday. For those who don’t know it, it’s a kind of on-line book club where people get together via Zoom to discuss books and other literate matters that relate to Paris. This link explains it in more detail.