Flâneur Smellscapes in Le Spleen de Paris

Abstract

The figure of the flâneur haunts the pages of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris. As first-person narrator, man, woman, protagonist, or passer-by, the flâneur presence lends continuity to this collection of fifty seemingly disparate prose poems. The flâneur has also become almost inseparable from the backdrop of the city and its streets, which in mid-nineteenth-century Paris were crowded, muddy, and smelly. The purpose of this essay is to rethink the Baudelairean flâneur, and the prose poems, through olfactory perception. Odours inhabit intimate spaces and invade public environments, thus facilitating a process of mutual permeation, or, to use a word favoured in Baudelaire’s writing, a mutual penetration. An analysis of both the theory and practice of flânerie in the prose poems reveals that smell and flânerie function similarly as experiences of volatility, transience, intimation, and penetration in Le Spleen de Paris. Here textual references to the olfactory go beyond mimetic realism, contributing to a poetics of flânerie central to the prose poem experiment.