In Vallotton’s thirty relief prints, the crowds gather no matter it is a crime scene, a disaster, a funeral, or a spectacle. They are dense and uncountable crowds, curious and raucous crowds, silent and dignified crowds.98 The crowds ran to the site of an explosion, gathered on the boulevard to hear the latest news of a disaster or the scene
98 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 42.
of a crime.99 These crowds are a commonplace in the illustrations of the weekend pages of the press and the columns of the faits divers—a column newspaper reporting unusual accidents and crimes in the last third of the nineteenth century.100
Such curious crowds were first described and dubbed as badauderie in journalism.101 Before analyzing how the image of badaud became a motif of journalism, I would like to define the differences between the flâneur—the stroller—
and the badaud—the curious observer, the rubberneck, the gawker—two emblematic figures of the street.102
The flâneur was a literary type in nineteenth century France. He was the man of leisure who went into the street in search of some satisfaction for his overdeveloped sensibilities.103 The flâneur was a man of leisure, an idler, an artist, an urban explorer, a connoisseur of the street by various accounts.104 It became a familiar character during the nineteenth century and later became the object of scholarly interest in the twentieth century because of Walter Benjamin’s devoted analysis of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.105 In his critical explorations of Baudelaire, Benjamin embarked on an analysis of modernity in which the flâneur was a powerful symbol.106 The flâneur was not only a figure of the modern artist-poet who was keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, but also an amateur detective and investigator of the city.107 He was a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.108
105 Benjamin used the flâneur to explain the tumult of metropolitan life, to trace the class tensions and gender divisions of the nineteenth century city, in order to represent alienation and the detached relationship between individuals as a characteristic of modernity. Shaya, (as note 89), p. 47.
106 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 47.
107 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 47.
108 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 47.
In “The Painter of Modern Life” (written 1859-1860), Charles Baudelaire describes Constantin Guys as the “perfect flâneur,” one who moved through the crowd like a fish through water.109 As Baudelaire mentions “for the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”110 According to this context, the point of view of Vallotton in Badauderies Parisiennes is that of the flâneur. He is depicting the crowd of the street as an observer, a detective, an amateur of the street. He portrays vividly not only the modern street life of the city such as the people appreciating music in a concert (“Around the Summer Concert Café”
(Autour du Café-Concert d’été)) (Fig. 12) or people transshipping in the bus station of
“The Omnibus Bureau” (“Le Bureau d’omnibus”) (Fig. 87), but also contemporary inventions such as “The Luminous Posters” (“Les Affiches Lumineuses”) (Fig. 88) and the hot air “The Balloon” (“Le Ballon”) (Fig. 89). In these relief prints, Vallotton positions himself as a flâneur who depicts onlookers through the perspective of the stroller.
However, what he shows in Badauderies Parisiennes is the other figure of the street, the badaud. The Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (1867) defines the badaud in this way: “The badaud is curious; he is astonished by everything he sees; he believes everything he hears, and he shows his contentment or his surprise by his open, gaping mouth.”111 In the book jacket of the Badauderies Parisiennes, the man with his mouth wide open who is turning away his gaze from the Seine to look back at the advertising board carrying the book’s title suits perfectly this description (Fig. 45).
However, he is not the only one in Badauderies Parisiennes who suits the definition of
109 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 48.
110 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863, p. 9.
111 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 49, quoted from Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, under the word
“badaud,” 1867.
the badaud. Another entry about the badaud from he Larousse encyclopedia of 1867 shows him at work:
“One is constantly jostled by a crowd of individuals who leave their houses each morning to kill time in city squares, intersections and on the boulevards; they have then hours to dispose of, and when they return home in the evening, they want to have something to recount: an accident, a poor devil who falls from a bus into the street or faints from hunger, an old dog drowned in the Seine, etc., etc.; and when one of these Tituses of the pavement has seen nothing, he cries:
I have lost my day!”112
According to the Larousse’s definition, the crowds in the scenes of Badauderies Parisiennes such as a horse tumbling in a traffic accident as for example in “The Car’s Accident” (“L’Accident de Voiture”) (Fig. 5) or a drown body found on the river bank in “The Victim of Drowning” (“Le Noyé”) (Fig. 10) conform fully to the badaud’s spirit.
No matter badaud or flâneur both figures of pedestrians had a special connection to Paris.113 An early nineteenth century observer of the city described badauderie as the one ineffable trait of the Parisian character: “In Paris, everything becomes an event:
a train of wood being floated down the river, two coaches running into each other, a man dressed differently from others, an armored car, a dog fight, if they are noticed by two people, there will soon be a thousand, and the crowd will always grow, until some other circumstance, just as remarkable, pulls it away.”114 These urban masses are badauds which come in a group, a gathering, a crowd of badauds.115 Therefore,
112 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 50, quoted from Larousse encyclopedia, 1867.
113 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 50.
114 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 50, quoted from V.-J. Etienne de Jouy, L’hemite de la Chaussée d’Antin, ou observations sur les moeurs et les usages parisiens au commencement du XIXe siècle, vol. 1, 1815 Paris 1997, p, 140.
115 Shaya, (as note 89), p. 50.
badaud was much more likely to be used in the plural form whose multiplicity was emphasized while flâneur was taken to suggest the singularity of an individual which could be embodied in an artist’s observation of the crowd.
To sum up, what Vallotton the illustrator presents in Badauderies Parisiennes is the point of view of the flâneur on the badaud. Besides, badauderie was understood as a popular practice of the crowd of the Parisian street and contrasted to the more developed practice and intelligent observation of flâneurie.116