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