Flâneurs and Passantes: The Fauna of Paris Boulevards

Edgar Degas: Place de la Concorde, 1875 The street is deafening. It roars and jostles and reeks of horses and coffee and coal smoke. Then — a flash of black. A woman, tall, in deep mourning, lifting the hem of her skirt with one gloved hand as she crosses the boulevard. Agile, noble, with a leg like a statue. She meets your eye for exactly one second. Then she is gone, swallowed by the crowd, and you will never see her again. This is the opening of Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet “À une passante” — “To a Passer-By” — published in Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, and it is as good a way as any into the whole strange ecosystem of the Parisian boulevard. Because the boulevard of the Second Empire and the Belle Époque was not merely a road. It was a theatre — purpose-built, well-lit, populated by a cast of social types so recognizable that the French press devoted entire pocket-sized books to cataloguing them. Let us make the introductions. . I. The Stage: Haussmann’s Theatre . Boulevard…