This mythic figure is having a moment. But to adopt his point of view is to look for meaning around all the wrong corners. The flâneur emerged from the imagination of Charles Baudelaire. In his ...

Benjamin, who famously analysed Baudelaire’s conception of the flâneur in his Arcades Project, written between 1927 and 1940, called attention to “these elegant ancestors of our malls ...

IN HIS 1863 ESSAY “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire introduces his audience to Monsieur Constantin Guys, the “perfect stroller (flâneur).” This cosmopolitan gentleman is ...

As Baudelaire wrote of the flâneur: “the crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and profession is to merge with the crowd”.

Mr. Sachdev is an essayist and cultural critic based in New York. In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire described the passionate city dweller as “a kaleidoscope ...

Stroll France’s capital and you’ll see human nature on full display, from doyennes taking their café to lovers cooing by the River Seine. As poet Charles Baudelaire put it, in Paris “the ...