Meaning of flaneur | Babel Free

Definitions

1. One who wanders aimlessly, who roams, who travels at a lounging pace. One who walks to observe and enjoy rather than to get somewhere.
2. An idler, a loafer.

Equivalents

Examples

“[…]Bevil drew him up to the door-step of a house close by, where, on certain evenings, a well-known club drew together men who seldom meet so familiarly elsewhere—men of all callings; a club especially favoured by wits, authors, and the flaneurs of polite society.”

“It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime requisite of a graceful flâneur—the simple, sensuous, confident relish of pleasure.”

“Indeed I lost patience altogether, and asked myself by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run riot through a poor charmed flaneur’s quiet contemplations, his attachment to the noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of the loveliest of cities.”

“More than any other urban type, the flaneur suggests the contradictions of the modern city, caught between the insistent mobility of the present and the visible weight of the past.”

“Portsmouth is a flaneur’s dream come true, a place that simply begs to be explored randomly and on foot.”

“In observing Dublin in this way – its cultural and geographic context, its streets and skies, neighbours and wider world – Whitney is occupying consciously the role of flâneur, defined by Baudelaire as "a lounger or saunterer, an idle man about town", a gatherer of aesthetic impressions.”

“The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom.”

CEFR level