1. Benjamin's fullest discussion is found in "Le Flâneur" (1939), a chapter of his unfinished Paris du Second Empire chez Baudelaire, which was to have itself been part of a larger work, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). The Baudelaire dossier is found in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Scheppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-89), bk. 1, vol. 3. See the edition by Jean Lacoste, Charles Baudelaire: Un Poète lyrique à l'apogée du capitalisme (Paris: Payot, 1982), which has Benjamin's own notes, full references to the works of Baudelaire cited or mentioned by Benjamin, and excellent explanatory notes by Lacoste (the last two missing in the English translation ). See also "Le Flâneur" (M), in the translation of the Das Passagen-Werk, Paris, Capitale du XIX ^e siècle, trans. Jean Lacoste (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993), 434-72.

2. The first recorded usage dates from 1585 in Touraine. The Norman flanner deriving from old Scandinavian flana ("courir étourdiment ca et 1à") appears in 1645. Oscar Bloch and Walther Von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française , 6th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), 265.

3. The works discussed in this section of the text are noted below in chronological order.

Le Flâneur au salon ou M ^r Bon-Homme: Examen joyeux des tableaux, mêlé de Vaudevilles (Paris: Chez M. Aubry, 1806). The date can be determined by internal evidence (it is also penciled in the copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale). M. Bonhomme witnesses the laying of the foundation at the Étoile of the monument for the heroes of Austerlitz (the battle was in December 1805; work on the Arc de Triomphe began in 1806) and discusses paintings exhibited in the previous and the current Expositions, which are those of 1804 and 1806, respectively.

4. Janet Wolff argues that the absence of a flâneuse, that is, a female figure in public life, is emblematic of the absence of women from modern social theory, which has focused on the public sphere. "The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity," in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 34-50. In a different light, Cheryl Morgan posits Delphine de Girardin, whose regular newspaper column Lettres parisiennes appeared between 1836 and 1838, as a female flâneur. But Girardin is a "cross-dressed" flâneur, since her persona in these columns is a titled man-about-town, the vicomte de Launay. Cheryl Morgan, "Writing Women In(to) the July Monarchy Press: Fashion, Feminism, and the Feuilleton'' (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993).

5. "Pour moi, Paris est une fille, une amie, une épouse, dont la physionomie me ravit toujours parce qu'elle est pour moi toujours nouvelle." Balzac, "Le Mendiant," 5:1422, n. 3. From this sexual urban hermeneutic Michele Hannoosh elaborates a Parisian epistemology that defines the text itself as female, at once the object of desire and the subject of investigation. Balzac's "ironic realism'' both distances the writer from and immerses him in the city-text. "La Femme, la ville, le réalisme: Fondements épistémologiques dans le Paris de Balzac," The Romanic Review 82 (1991): 127-45.

6. Richard D. E. Burton's provocative study ties figures of ubiquity who see without being seen (from the detective, the capitalist, and the flâneur to the Flaubertian auctor absconditus ) to the panopticon, the carceral structure identified by Foucault with the emergence of the modern state. "The Unseen Seer, or Proteus in the City: Aspects of a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Myth," French Studies 42 (January 1988): 50-68.

7. See in particular "Les Foules" in Le Spleen de Paris, which, although it does not explicitly name the flâneur, reviews virtually all the current themes of flânerie. Baudelaire names the flâneur in "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," chap. 3, "L'Artiste, Homme du monde, Homme des foules et Enfant," Oeuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1976), 2:687-94. (All works of Baudelaire are cited in this edition.) Benjamin identified Baudelaire's connection to the physiologies and what I have called literary guidebooks. See "Le Flâneur," Charles Baudelaire: Un Poète lyrique à l'apogée du capitalisme, 55-56. See also Karlheinz Stierle's detailed analysis of the mediating influence of this tradition, "Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris,'' New Literary History 11 (Winter 1980): 345-61.

8. References to Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale will be to the excellent edition by C. Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1984) and will be indicated by page in the text and notes. The single occurrence of flâneur as a substantive refers to unknown strollers in the crowd (271). For "flâner" or "flânerie' (all in reference to Frédéric) see pp. 129, 136, 140, 159, 267, and 365, to which can be added "au hasard" in reference to walks (116, 210 262), "vagabonder" (146, 366), "il faisait dans Paris des courses interminables" (73), ''s'en allaient par les rues" (104), and "sa promenade" (389). References are translated to this edition from Charles Carlut, Pierre H. Dubé, and J. Raymond Dugan, A Concordance to Flaubert's "L Éducation sentimentale," 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1978).

9. As Marie-Claire Bancquart aptly observes in a splendid article, "les monuments se taisent." "L'espace urbain de L'Éducation sentimentale: Intérieurs, extérieurs," Flaubert, la femme, la ville (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 143-57 (quotation, p. 153). See also P. M. Wetherill, "Paris dans L'Éducation sentimentale," Flaubert, la femme, la ville, 123-37, in which Wetherill also stresses the reciprocal fragmentation of the city and the novel.

10. Émile Durkheim, Le Suicide—Étude de sociologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France-Quadrige, 1990), 324. The Durkheim quotations in the text are found on pp. 325-26.

11 . Citations below are drawn from Benjamin, "Paris, Capitale du XIXe siècle," in Gesammelte Schriften 5:60-77; and Paris, Capitale du XIX ^e siècle, 47-59.

12. "Ne t'occupe de rien que de toi. Laissons l'Empire marcher, fermons notre porte, montons au plus haut de notre tour d'ivoire, sur la dernière marche, le plus près du ciel. Il y fait froid quelquefois, n'est-ce pas? Mais qu'importe! On voit les étoiles briller clair et l'on n'entend plus les dindons." Flaubert to Colet 22 November 1852, Correspondance, 3d ser. (1852-54) (Paris: Conard, 1927), 53-54.

13. I develop this argument in "The Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris," in The Flaneur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994).