On Flâneurs and Arcades

Walter Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale
(Paris, 1937, Gisèle Freund)

                    Flânarie could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades. “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury,” says an illustrated guide to Paris of 1852, “are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature.” It is in this world that the flâneur is at home; he provides the arcade—“the favorite venue of strollers and smokers, the haunt of all sorts of little métiers”—with its chronicler and philosopher... The arcades are something between a street and an intérieur. If one can say that the physiologies [1] employ an artistic device, it is the proven device of the feuilleton [2]—namely, the transformation  of the boulevard into an intérieur. 

                    The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the house façades as a citizen is within his four walls. To him a shiny enameled shop sign is at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his living room. Buildings' walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries; and café terraces are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. That life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of permutations can thrive only among the gray cobblestones and against the gray background of despotism was the political secret of the literature of the physiologies.

Walter Benjamin
“The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”

in The Writer of Modern Life, Essays on Charles Baudelaire
Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstron, and Harry Zohn (trans.)

Notes: 

1. Physiologies are pocket-size books which juxtaposed descriptions of Parisian life with street scenes, portraits and mawkish caricatures, were uniquely popular in early 19th century Paris (Alexander Zevin, “Panoramic Literature in 19th Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday,” 2005, Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship)
2. A feuilleton was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles. (Wikipedia)