Eavesdropping (22 page)

Although it was not immediately understood, many of the
flâneurs
were also motivated by a second desire, one that was not initially apparent. It was the Asmodean urge
to expose everyone
. But it was not a desire to illuminate them
individually
. Nor had that been the purpose of Asmodeus when he removed rooftops from the better homes in Madrid more than a hundred years earlier. True, the limping demon had taught his student, Cleofas, about the secret thoughts and actions of the
humans
inside, but in reality his focus was on the revelation of
human types
. So was the
flâneur’s
.

Was the
flâneur
an extrovert, a people person? Some period descriptions suggest so. “The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds and water of fishes,” wrote Baudelaire, in reference to one
flâneur
, the painter-illustrator Contantine Guys. “His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd.” But the
flâneur
had no interest in
connecting
with anyone in the arcades, no desire to
interact
. A glance at the personal correspondence of the early eighteenth-century English poet Joseph Addison provides a partial explanation. After a spell in the country, Addison wrote a friend that he was sick of people prying into his personal affairs. He planned, he said, to “get into the crowd again as fast as I can,
in order to be alone.”
Multitude and solitude were one and the same, wrote Baudelaire. The man who wants to be alone must be able “to
people his solitude
.
⁹

But
flâneurs
were not the only curious citizens in Paris. There was a second class of individuals,
badauds
, commoners who were given to idle observation, with exaggerated reactions and little real understanding of anything that they witnessed. The typical
badaud
was drawn to things that happened in the streets. He “is astonished by everything he sees,” went the entry in a contemporary dictionary, “he believes everything he hears, and he shows his contentment or his surprise by his open, gaping mouth.’
¹⁰

Accounts indicate that
flâneurs
were more independent than
badauds. The flâneur
“is always in full possession of his individuality,” wrote Victor Fournel in 1858, reinforcing what
Le Flâneur
had said a half century earlier, whereas the
badaud
“is absorbed by the outside world, which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself.”
¹¹

There was another difference between these two kinds of spectators. The
badauds
were observing things that happened in the arcades. The
flâneurs
were not. They were observing the
badauds. ln
a moment we will see why, but there is a characteristic of
flâneurs
that needs to be considered first: their sex.

Considering their desire to gaze upon human scenes, and to use the crowd “to people their solitude,” it may come as little surprise to know that the Parisian
flâneurs
were men. What does this mean, and how does it fit with other facts about vigilance and eavesdropping that we have seen?

Sex differences appeared in the eavesdropping data that we examined earlier, and it was a challenge to interpret them. We saw, for example, that four and five centuries ago English men were arrested for eavesdropping far more often than women. Although it was tempting to attribute this disparity to biological factors, we reasoned that some of the difference may have come from a cultural fact: the invasive, under-the-eaves type of eavesdropping that was outlawed typically occurred at night when women were unlikely to be out. We also noted that women, more than men, testified in court to things they had seen in the vicinity of their home, but then we recognized that the home was a place where men spent less time. True, we did see deeper reasons why men and women might have preferred to observe and investigate as they did, but our question about
flâneurs
still remains. What caused the sex bias in
flânerie
? Were the arcades sex-biased as well?

Certainly most of the public spaces in mid-nineteenth-century Paris belonged to men. They dominated the coffee houses, the theatres, and the streets. But women did frequent the arcades. Indeed, it was planned and fervently hoped that they would do so. The arcades were lined with boutiques that specialized in women’s things, and many of the staff were female. Moreover, unlike the streets, the arcades were
intérieurs
, and bore few of the taboos of public areas. Lithographs of the period also show plenty of women in the arcades (even if few were depicted alone, as some men were). So there could have been the odd
flâneuse
here and there, but accounts agree that the
flâneurs
were uniformly male.

But there are other reasons to suspect that a masculine noun for the arcadian “stroller” was appropriate. For one, if plunging into the arcade was a way of achieving solitude, is this something that women would have wanted? Men more nearly fit the description of the loner, the hunter, the autonomous being who feels he can easily survive on his own.

It is also the case that
flâneurs
were highly visual, like the artists they admired (some, like Constantin Guys, actually were artists), and we do not have to look far for connections between maleness and vision. Various authors have written about the “male gaze;” none, to my knowledge, has written about a female equivalent. Scopophilia, a love of looking, is strongly associated with males. Men are often thought of as voyeurs; it is hard to find any uses of the word “voyeuse.” There are Peeping Tom laws, but no statutes that specifically forbid Peeping Tammys. In the 1950s Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues, following on from Gilbert Hamilton, found that men were far more drawn to, and excited by, visual sex than are women.
¹²
Nearly ninety percent of modern American stalkers—many of whom are merely seeking to maintain visual contact with their victim—are men.
¹³

Female (and feminist) scholars do not doubt the male advantage in
flânerie
. “Moving through public spaces emerges as a uniquely gendered practice,” wrote Anke Gleber.
¹⁴

Flâneurs
were hunters of human images. Like other kinds of hunters, including Cartier-Bresson and the other photographers who patrolled the streets of Paris a century later, they had found a way to observe their prey without their prey observing them. How did the
flâneurs
get away with this? After all, the prototypical
flâneur
was dressed like a dandy, often seen with an umbrella over one arm, or hands crossed behind the back. Some were depicted with opera glasses. Are these ways to
avoid
attention?

Exhibit 21
Aflâneur
(from Louis Huart,
Physiologie du flâneur
, 1841)

One way that
flâneurs
were able to observe arcadians in their natural state was by moving slowly and deliberately. Moreover, the
flâneurs
were not actors, not reactive or labile, not swept up by urban events like the
badauds
. Even if their clothing attracted attention, this attention was directed at the
flâneurs
as
exhibitors
, not as investigators.

Flâneurs
also situated themselves in areas where they would attract little notice. A drawing by Edouard Travies depicts a
flâneur
standing behind a crowd, which is looking in the opposite direction at a puppet show.
¹⁵
More often,
flâneurs
mingled with the other arcadians, gravitating toward the center of some assemblage. From there, attention would naturally fan outwards, toward some thing or event at the periphery. The principle was articulated by Addison. In a crowd, he wrote, “
I can there raise what speculations I please upon others without being observed myself
.”
¹⁶

The
flâneur
, wrote sociologist Christopher Prendergast, was “an expert at converting the city into a fund of interesting ‘sensations.’”
¹⁷
In fact he was a closet taxonomist, but he was not applying his perceptual and interpretive skills to butterflies or birds or plants, as other taxonomists do. The
flâneur
was sorting through the different classes of his own species. He was categorizing the people of Paris. Walter Benjamin understood this, writing that the real mission of the
flâneur
was “
botanizing
.” In 1841 Albert Smith referred to the various categories of beings seen on the streets of London as “social
zoologies
.”
¹⁸

But why go around classifying Parisians? What could this possibly accomplish? Clues are to be found in the demographics of Paris. In the mid-1800s the population of Paris was just over one million, having tripled since the turn of the century. This was more strangers than many Parisians—especially the newly urbanized—had ever seen, and there was, according to literature professor
Richard Sieburth, an “uneasiness associated with the emergence of the modern urban crowd.” Embedded in that crowd were pickpockets, thieves, and confidence men. They would have to be identified if pedestrians were to avoid what Sieburth called the “potentially threatening exteriority of the city.”
¹⁹

But there were other demographic factors at work here. Psychologists have long known that when people are overloaded with anything, they either withdraw or begin to look for similarities and patterns. This reduces a cumbersome number of separate entities to a manageable number of recognizable categories. One million individuals cannot be intelligible, but according to unconscious assumptions that were operating at the time, a fractional number of categories might be.
²⁰

The citizens of Paris were also diversifying, making their actions harder to predict. The individuation of city folk was described eighty years ago by a Parisian psychiatrist, Eugène Murkowski. “I go into the street and meet a number of people,” he wrote, “but each of them, while forming a part of a whole, follows his own path and his own thoughts; we go in opposite directions.”
²¹

“We are a society of selves,” wrote Nicholas Humphrey. “
We
are a set of
I’s
, he went on, echoing the words of Baudelaire, “individuals who due to the very nature of conscious selfhood are in principle unable to get through to one another and share the most central facts of our psychical existence.”
²²

In
Paris, A Rainy Day
, painted by Gustave Caillebotte in 1877, pedestrians are seen following their own paths. Each is heading in a different direction, inspired, one assumes, by a strictly private goal or plan.
²³
In their distance from others, and different trajectories, the strollers seem to express a desire to be regarded as unique individuals—individuals with minds of their own.

If there was a visual conversation in the streets of Paris, what Renoir and other artists were recording was each stroller’s individual, and oblique, “comment.” As passionate spectators,
flânerie
intercepted these comments, these individual contributions to the
Parisian buzz, but how did their interpretations become public? How did all the “botanizing” affect the people of Paris?

Exhibit 22
Paris: A Rainy Day
, Gustave Caillebotte, 1877

To have any effect on the people of Paris, the lessons of
flânerie
would have to be conveyed in some form—and they were, thanks to
physiologies
. These were satiric ethnographies in the form of paper-bound, pocket-size books.
Physiologies
offered citizens and tourists information that would be needed to negotiate the city of Paris but, unlike other guidebooks, made no mention of restaurants and public monuments. Their sole focus was anthropological, a description of the people one was likely to encounter in the streets. “From the itinerant street vendor of the boulevards to the dandy in the foyer of the opera-house,” wrote Benjamin, “there was not a figure of Paris life that was not sketched by a
physiologie
.”
²⁴
There
were
physiologies
of the adoring lover, the English tourist, the bluestocking, the prankster, the Bourbonnais, the bourgeois, the drinker, the bachelor and the spinster, the hunter, the cuckold, the creditor and the retailer, the country priest, the stevedore, the salesgirl, and—inclusively—the
flâneur
himself.
²⁵
In London, Albert Smith came up with the gent, the ballet-girl, the mooner, the Regent Street idler, the lounger, and the flirt, among others.