This essay explores the aesthetic and theoretical implications of canonical urban writing in French literature from roughly 1830 to 1930. Beginning with Balzac and the popular works of his time such as the tableau, I trace the rise of the flâneur as the quintessential embodiment of new modes of reading and writing the city. I then turn to Baudelaire’s poetry and aesthetic theory, which reveals the conception of the city as materials awaiting metamorphosis through symbolism and allegory. In the fiction of Zola, I analyze the eponymous grand magasin of Au Bonheur des Dames as a paradigmatic site of phantasmagoria that produces the counter-force of the conte within Zola’s realist representation. I then read two essential Surrealist novels as reflective of these issues of representation that continued to vex the twentieth century. The Surrealist appropriation of flânerie, their preoccupation with chance and with le merveilleux, their insistence upon the visual and its power of enchantment—these concerns ground them firmly within the French literary tradition at the same time as they seek to break with it. In these works, are utopian spaces realized, or do such efforts end in disenchantment? does the flâneur reach new heights in literature or simply reenact ad infinitum Icarus’s ill-fated flight? With such questions in mind, I explore the ambivalence that prevailed in the urban literary aesthetics of nineteenth-century writers, and which continued well into the twentieth century through the works of the Surrealists and the criticism of Walter Benjamin.

In 1934 Walter Benjamin gave a peculiar address in Paris that has been preserved for readers as “Der Autor als Produzent.” In this speech, Benjamin outlines the radical political responsibility of an author, particularly a German author, in that era to inculcate a revolutionary ethos in the public. Among the strategies he outlines for achieving this goal, Benjamin highlights the newspaper as the embodiment of that age’s conditions and a means of subverting bourgeois forms and consciousness. Benjamin fails to mention, however, that his friend Siegfried Kracauer had striven for years during his tenure as an editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung’s feuilleton section to effect precisely that end through his journalistic writing. Understanding the project Kracauer tried to achieve elucidates an often overlooked front in the struggle for the German conscience and consciousness that played out in the feuilleton sections of both leftist and centrist periodicals during the Weimar Republic. By exploring Kracaeur’s journalistic program in its historical context as well as in context of the work of other leftist Weimar feuilletonists, this essay hopes to elucidate how, despite ultimately failing to effect a revolution in the bourgeois worldview that might have prevented the fascists’ rise to power, the work of Kracauer and his contemporaries nevertheless expanded the possibilities for culture writing and redrew the boundaries of political discourse within German journalism.