Walter Benjamin - The Arcades

[The Flaneur]


One must make an effort to grasp the altogether fascinating moral constitution of the passionate flaneur.  The police - who here, as on so many of the subjects we are treating, appear as experts - provide the following indication in the report of a Paris secret agent from October 1789:  "It is almost impossible to summon and maintain good moral character in a thickly massed population where each individual, unbeknownst to all the others, hides in the crowd, so to speak, and blushes before the eyes of no one."  Cited in Adolf Schmidt, Pariser Zustande wahrend der Revolution, v. 3 (Jena, 1876).  The case in which the flaneur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was fixed for the first time and forever afterward by Poe in his story "The Man of the Crowd."





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