I didn’t set out to become a flâneur.

In fact, I didn’t even know I was describing one.

Some time ago, I wrote an enry for An Englishman in Paris about something I had come to think of as a marché lent – a slow walk through Paris.

It wasn’t sightseeing in the conventional sense. There wasn’t necessarily a destination. It wasn’t about ticking off another museum, monument or famous street.

It was simply about walking.

Looking.

Noticing.

Taking a coffee.

Watching people.

Following a street because something about it looked interesting.

Then, rather inconveniently, I discovered that somebody had already invented a word for it.

Flâneur.

The discovery sent me down something of a rabbit hole.

Because the modern understanding of the flâneur – the cultured, detached observer wandering the streets of Paris – is very different from the word’s earlier associations with idleness, laziness and wasting time.

Over the course of the 19th century, writers and thinkers transformed the idea.

Honoré de Balzac described flânerie as the “gastronomy of the eye.”

Charles Baudelaire turned the flâneur into the artist-poet of the modern metropolis.

Walter Benjamin subsequently looked at the figure through a very different lens, connecting the flâneur with the marketplace, capitalism and the changing experience of the modern city.

And then Paris itself changed.

Haussmann’s transformation of the city altered the very landscape in which the flâneur operated. Medieval streets disappeared. Boulevards opened up. Arcades declined. Department stores became new centres of urban observation and consumption.

The city changed.

So did the flâneur.

And that is what this episode of Coffee Pot Conversations explores.

Rather than simply returning to Baudelaire, I wanted to take a deeper look at what it actually means to be a flâneur: how the figure developed, what distinguishes flânerie from simply walking, how the flâneur relates to the crowd, why appearance mattered, and what happens when the city itself becomes too fast for slow wandering.

I’m also joined throughout the episode by Professor Federico Castigliano, Professor of French and Italian Studies and author of Flaneur – The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris, whose knowledge adds another perspective to a subject I’ve been increasingly fascinated by.

The more I thought about the flâneur, the more I realised that the question isn’t really:

Where are you going?

It’s:

How are you experiencing the city while you are getting there?

And perhaps that is why the idea still feels surprisingly relevant.

Because despite everything that has changed, there is still something rather wonderful about walking through Paris without needing to get anywhere.

Just don’t call it wasting time.

It’s flânerie.