What's a flâneuse?

   

You may be familiar with the flâneur, a nineteenth century French character epitomized by the novelist/journalist Honoré de Balzac and the poet Charles Baudelaire. The flâneur was top-hatted and carried a long cane; he was a dashing young gentleman whose literary prowess allowed him to describe and analyze social customs, art, commerce,and politics in the modernizing city.

Historians of nineteenth century France typically portray the flâneur as an exclusively male identity. Textbooks  reduce nineteenth century femininity to a choice between being a housewife -- the "angel in the home" -- or a whore. And nineteenth century urban working women are assumed to have been passive, objectified, and exploited, certainly not willing, active participants in the burgeoning capitalist marketplace.

For my senior history thesis at Brown, I used a rare collection of French popular literature and journalism to show that during the 1830s and 1840s, French gender ideologies were much more fluid and complex than has been previously assumed. Indeed, women writers used the genre of panorama -- a cross between travel guides, coffee table books, and the nineteenth century version of "the hipster handbook" -- to portray women who actively sought economic independence, sexual satisfaction, political ambition, and gender experimentation. I call these women writers and the characters they created "flâneuses" because they embody a female, feminist alternative to the highly priveleged male identify of "flâneur." My favorite flâneuses of the period are George Sand (pictured above) and Frances Trollope.