To unveil his new flatmate Sherlock Holmes’ occupation, Watson makes a list of everything that he knows as Holmes only learns what is useful for his mysterious work. He knows anatomy in an “accurate but unsystematic” manner, Chemistry “profoundly”, his “sensational literature” knowledge are “immense” and has “a good and practical” knowledge of British laws. If Watson does not come to an immediate conclusion, one that knows Holmes work could tell that he elaborated his own “mixture” of knowledge to understand scientifically all the clues from a crime scene and deduce the identity of the guilty criminal.

         Charles Baudelaire in his essay The painter of modern life describes an anonymous painter (Constantin Guys) which cannot be called simply an artist but rather a “man of the crowd”, a man who “understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses”. (1) He is Baudelaire perception of a flâneur: a man observing the city’s inner life for its inherent poetic and lively aspect, using what he sees in the street for his artistic work.

            If the detective narrows pragmatically his observation to understand and resolve a particular tragic event, the flâneur on the contrary fills himself with a pell-mell collection of useless events to compose his own work. Walter Benjamin, in his book Charles Baudelaire, describes the masses that inhabit the modern cities as the asylum that shield an asocial person from his persecutors. This is for him the origin of the detective story.

I. The Flâneur

            The figure of the Flâneur is closely related to the industrial and economical changes that occurred in large cities like Paris and London. Between 1853 and 1870, under the reign of Napoleon III, the Baron Haussmann changed the face of the medieval Paris. Large and comfortable avenues replaced the tight and dangerous allées. An increasing numbers of gas lanterns also made the streets much safer. Large department stores opened and brought a new type of activity: shopping. Shopping is the combination of strolling and buying. People spent entire days outside their home, enjoying the increasing number of shops and cafés in the capital.

What Baudelaire sought in the streets was the spectacle of this newly crowded city.  

In his book the painter of modern life He depicts the flâneur through the exemple of Constantin Guys, an watercolorist who’s interest is “the whole world”. To Baudelaire, Guys is not an artist but more a man of the crowd because he goes beyond the narrowness of his circle, his enclosed neighbourhood… He “wants to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe.” He is the “spiritual citizen of the universe” Therefore the “mainspring of his genius is his curiosity”.

Constantin Guys promenade aux Champs-Elysée

Guys is for Baudelaire a man of the crowd, a direct reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s short novel published in 1840 with this same title. In Poe’s story a lonely convalescent amuses himself “poring over advertisements, observing the promiscuous company in the room and peering through the smoky panes into the street.” He describes the crowd in the streets of London as a constant flow made of “innumerable varieties of figure” he pictures every common character within the crowd and their similarities: there is the “tribe of clercks”, “the gamblers”, the ones with a “satisfied, business-like demeanor.” He pursues this observation until the night when the “general character of the crowd materially alter” and when the “change of weather has an odd effect upon the crowd.”

The structure of the story is based on the narrator’s curiosity or voyeurism:

The street and its anonymous and endless flow of figures is rich enough to be a source of wonder and inspiration. When the protagonist starts to follow an old man which fascinates him, the generalized observation of the crowd becomes more specific as the narrator depicts every action.

Guys’nature is for Baudelaire “always in the condition of that convalescent”. The state of being convalescent implies a rebirth and thus seing things for the first time. Baudelaire wants the flâneur to be always surprised and delighted by what he sees even with the most common events like the ones we encounter everyday in the streets. The “perfect flâneur” is a “passionate spectator” and he sets his house anywhere in the city where he can fill himself with the “electrical energy” of the crowd.

He is a “solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert”.

What is the goal of flânerie? It seems as if the flâneur is simply delighted by the presence of the crowd and its observation. Baudelaire argues that he is looking for the “modernity”, “he makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory”.

By eternal he is referring to the small amount of beauty that can be filtered from what one could see as the most common actions. One could understand that the purpose of flânerie is to keep from the infinity of actions happening everyday within the city those few moments that contain the feeling of the time one lives in. If a translation has to be done from reality to art it needs to be a distillation of the “mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it ”. In other words the task of the flâneur is to find beauty within the present-day life. He is therefore an active seeker, looking for what he considers to be worth of being fixed and Baudelaire argues that it is a hard exercise as for most of the people the “fantastic reality of life has become singularly diluted”.  

II. The Detective

In the first Sherlock Holmes novel of Arthur Conan Doyle: A study in Scarlet, the famous detective is dealing with a murder surrounded by very few clues. The case is first described as a “puzzler” by Scotland yard’s best official detective Tobias Gregson. Holmes mind acts exactly as puzzler solver: he puts together pieces of information into a thread of articulated events that leads directly to the murderer’s name.

He possesses the “science of deduction”. This same man that ignores elementary things as the rotation of the earth around the sun is able to deduce in a very short time and with few disparate elements very important facts about life itself.   

Watson discovers this article by Holmes entitled “the book of life” where he explains how to fathom one’s thoughts by observing his gestures. While trying to explain his flatmate Dr Watson his own way of reasoning Holmes points out the specificity of reasoning analytically:                                                                                                     

"Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically." In other words when a murder happens the result is already here and the analytical method would be to think about the different events that led to the crime rather than seeking any kind of clues and therefore getting lost in your research. Holmes knows what to seek for as he already has a hypothesis on the story preceding a crime thus avoiding getting bewildered by a lack of relevant clues.

In order to develop what he calls the science of deduction and to sharpen his analytical thinking Sherlock Holmes learns every single piece of relevant knowledge:

He knows all the criminal cases in history, all the different types of cigar, footprints, poisons… It allows him to construct possible scenarios with very few elements. Those scenarios narrow the research thus making the resolution of a case faster and clearer.

There is a lot of similitude between A study in Scarlett first published in 1887 and Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The murders in the rue Morgue written in 1841, which is considered as the first detective story in literature. The narrator is also the flatmate of a peculiar character Auguste Dupin who has an extraordinary ability to analyse events and therefore to find solutions to mysteries.

The novel starts with a description of the analytical thinkers which are fond of enigmas and who show in their resolution a “degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural”. An example of such a statement is Dupin’s sudden answer to a question that the narrator did not ask but just thought. Dupin explains how he deduced his flatmate’s thoughts by articulating the series of events that happened before.

Dupin criticizes the Parisian police’s for “not having any method in their proceedings beyond the method of the moment.”

He mentions Vidocq the legendary 18^th century french crook-turn-cop as an example of detective who “impaired his vision by holding the object too close” and therefore was incapable of seeing “the matter as a whole”. This critic of the usual policeman corresponds to Sherlock Holmes comment on Scotland Yard’s detectives Gregson and Lestrade “conventionality”.

Dupin develops his own point by showing how “Truth is invariably superficial” how the “depth lies in the valleys where we seek her and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.” This idea of seeing a criminal affair as a whole made of different element rather than seeking the truth by finding every possible clue is the core of both Dupin and Holmes science.               

III. Flâneurs and detectives

 Both the detective and Flâneur are facing puzzling events. Their aim is to recompose fragmented stories: bring order to the chaotic environment of the modern city. Their means are observation and deduction: rational for Sherlock Holmes, and imaginative for Charles Baudelaire. There is no flâneur or detectives without the modern large city. They are products of their time and new environment, a crowded city where you can remain unknown and commit crimes, a place where you can observe the passer-by without being seen or recognised.

Lost within a newly mechanized city where the flow of people corresponds to the flow of merchandize, where each object acquires banality with the industrialisation, the poet misses his Ideal. Baudelaire’s aim is to grasp the spirit of his time, the contemporary lives, but his environment is a crowded and anonymous city. Baudelaire’s imagination can only catch apparition from the moving crowd as Jacques Derrida argues in “Le Capital et la Capitale”(2): what circulates fast (at a mechanical pace) cannot be possessed. The flâneur is always confrontred to the frustration of the observer and those ephemeral apparitions being part of the moving city are uncontrollable and what the poet can only possess is the frustration of not fully possessing those moments. This feeling can be illustrated by the sonnet  “A une passante” (to a Passer-by) in Les Fleurs du mal where Baudelaire writes down the “fugitive” vision a woman’s glance in the deafening street. This apparition is full of unrealised potentiality.

                    Amid the deafening traffic of the town,

                          Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty,

                          A woman passed, raising with dignity

                          In her poised hand, the flounces of her gown;

                          Graceful, noble with a statue’s form.

                          And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,

                          From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm,

                          The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.

                          A flash…Then night! – O lovely fugitive,

                          I am suddenly reborn from your swift glance;

                          Shall I never see you till eternity ?

                          Somewhere, far off! Too late! Never, perchance!

                          Neither knows where the other goes or lives;

                          We might have loved, and you knew this might be!

                                                                                Translated by C.F.MacIntyre

It appears like the famous verse from the poem An Invitation to Voyage are the antithesis of the modern city:

                              There, all is order and beauty,

                                       Richness, quiet and pleasure

And the poem itself the opposite of To a Passerby, an invitation for this idealized woman to leave the evil modern city and live together in an abstracted eden:

                                       My child, my sister,

                                       Think of the delight

                                 Of going far off and living together!

                                       Of loving peacefully,

                                       Loving and dying

                                  In the land that bears your resemblance!

It is impossible for Baudelaire to imagine this paradise within the context of a city because it lacks the precious order quietness where a peaceful love could be achieved. There is a need in the flâneur for something else, something he wants but cannot find, it is an endless exploration.

The detective on the contrary always finds a solution to the mystery.

Watson is the Witness of Holmes capacity to resolve cases with an extraordinary logic and rapidity and is certainly amazed to hear Holmes final comment at the end of his reasoning:

“You see the whole thing is a chain of logical sequences without a break or flaw."

With Baudelaire or Poe’s language the reader is almost scared by the immensity of the crowd and the loneliness of one self in this ocean, with Sherlock Holmes methodological thinking we follow the order and logic of the different event. The reader of detective stories searches the possible scenarios in a very playful way. He certainly feels reassured that one cannot just disappear within a city and that every criminal leaves traces that would at the end reveal his identity.    

“The original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big city crowd.”(3) argues Benjamin.

In The short novel a man of the crowd, the observer follows a suspicious man after having observed the crowd for a whole day. This old man absorbs his intention as there is something peculiar about him and he decides to follow into the streets. This flâneur, this observer of life in its surface in its flowing and changing aspect suddenly changes into a detective which has this very particular goal of finding the reason, the clues, the keys to one’s criminal behaviour. The narrator will seek for any indication that could help him to understand why this man seems so suspicious. This man retraces his step once a certain point reached and repeats the same walks several times. He enters shop after shop, without buying anything, without speaking. The weirder his attitude appears the more the follower wants to satisfy his curiosity. By the end of the novel the old man has not done any kind of action that could inform the follower he keeps on walking with no particular aim around the city. The narrator stops following him and make the conclusion that this man is “the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.”  and that it would be vain to follow as he would not learn anything new from him. 

If Baudelaire observes the city’s inner life and capture the beauty of its modernity, Edgar Poe’s character is fascinated by what is suspicious. The flâneur depends on what he sees he has no control on what he is seing. The world acts independently from him and his observation are reduced to his imagination. To some extent he sees what he wants to see and cannot verify his thoughts. The detective, this fictional character, narrows his thoughts to what’s necessary. He could be searching the entire city but would rather fix his attention to a story he had already elaborated. 

References :

(1)Charles Baudelaire: The painter of modern life, ed Phaidon page 9

(2)Le capital et la capitale a course on Baudelaire and the economy of the modern city given  by Jacques Derrida at the graduate Center of the city University of New-York Sept 28-Oct2,1991

(3)Walter Benjamin Charles Baudelaire: a lyric Poet in The Era Of High Capitalism ed.Verso p°43