Flâneur
Pardon My French
Placing a hat on a vowel in a recent immigrant from the French language gives it a degree of swish that bare-headed A’s, E’s, I’s, and U’s rarely attain. Thus, the â in flâneur reminds us that the Anglophone incarnation of the vocable in question can usually be found at the intersection of boulevard Bobo and l’avenue Posh.1
Now older than many members of the US Senate, my venerable copy of Cassell’s New French-English Dictionary explained that flâneur comes from the verb flâner, which means ‘to lounge, to stroll, to loaf’. My faithful desk-side companion added that flâneuse can indicate either a flâneur of the female persuasion or a ‘long, low folding chair’.2
The English-speaking internet told a richer tale. The Internet Archive turned up lots of old books about pedestrian adventures in the City of Lights. Hathi of Mighty Memory sent me to a poem by the intellectual omnivore Oliver Wendell Holmes, père, who used flâneur to describe an episode in the life of a … you guessed it … intellectual omnivore.
I love all sights of earth and skies,
From flowers that glow to stars that shine;
The comet and the penny show,
All curious things, above, below,
Hold each in turn my wandering eyesMy favorite elephant-themed search engine also revealed the greatest prize of all, an essay, published on 6 March 1884, in an apparently short-lived magazine called The Present Age. In that piece, the anonymous author captured the essence of the flâneur.
The real flaneur is not an idler or a loiterer, who kills time; he belongs to the small number of privileged men, who have leisure and intelligence to study the human heart and society in the great books always opened before them. He is an ambulatory philosopher, a true peripatetic.
The flaneur is only possible in such a city as Paris, because only a light and gay people can afford him the materials for study. He may be described as a philosopher without any special knowledge, who exercises by instinct the faculty to seize by a glance and analyze while walking. The flaneur likes movement, but not to be hurried. He is the antithesis of the Cook’s excursionist.
The fictional boulevard Bobo celebrates an acronym, beloved of Francophone folk, that stands for ‘bourgeois bohemians’. Avenue Posh pays homage to avenue Foch, which was named in honor of one of the patron saints of Extra Muros, Ferdinand Foch. (The iron laws of French orthography command us to pronounce ‘Foch’ as ‘fock’. The Marshal, however, preferred the Gascon way of saying his name, with a ‘shush’ at the end.)
In the last century, flâneuse fell out of favor with the French folks who put labels on furniture. Recently, however, a pair of clever designers from Toulouse have applied the word to a person-powered vehicle that can serve as a wheel-chair, baby-buggy, bag holder, or shopping cart.
Brilliant. It is beautifully written, and for someone who is now a happy resident of France, I can but validate many of this post's sentiments. Chapeau.