What's a flâneur?

Andrew Henderson/The New York Times

From an article in the New York Times about "expansionist entertainers" who throw dinner parties on the sidewalk:

"He is captivated and inspired, he said, by the persona of the 19th-century flâneur — "the voyeuristic stroller," as Susan Sontag wrote in a 1977 essay, "who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes." Being a flâneur, Mr. Tsao said, "is all about taking in the world we've been given; we want to embrace it and engage with it."

The Arcades Project explains flaneur a little more:

The flâneur is the link between routine perambulation, in which a person is only half-awake, making his way from point A to point B, and the moments of chiasmic epiphany that one reads of in Wordsworth or Joyce.

Can't remember where I got this from:

Perhaps the most accomplished Flaneur was Gerard De Nerval who minced the streets of 19th century Paris with a live lobster on a ribbon.

When asked why he did this he replied...

"Because it does not bark and it knows the secrets of the sea".

From Other Voices, the (e)Journal of Cultural Critcism

"There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them."

"The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done."

To walk is to vegetate,to stroll is to live. —Balzac