“The flâneur emerged from the imagination of Charles Baudelaire. In his 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire eagerly proposes an ambulatory figure he calls a “passionate spectator.” He is modeled after a real person, Monsieur C.G., but Baudelaire does not disclose any real information about his mind or manners. And anyway, Baudelaire admits, he made him up: “To give complete reassurance to my conscience it must be supposed that all that I have to say of his strangely and mysteriously brilliant nature is more or less justly suggested by the works in question—pure poetic hypothesis, conjecture, a labor of the imagination.” In other words, this wanderer of the city, chronicler of the present, and contradiction-laden figure of the crowd, has always been a myth.”
“Death to the Flâneur“, Jo Livingston, Lovia Gyarkye, The New Republic, March 27, 2017