From boulevards to barricades: a flâneur’s guide to Ireland's War of Independence

When one thinks of the flâneur and Ireland, it is possible that Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s principal character from his masterpiece, Ulysses, might spring to mind. The fictional character’s odyssey through the streets of Dublin in June 1904 resemble that of the flâneur, as laid down in the nineteenth century by the French canonical writers, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.

However, in terms of the flâneur and Ireland, another case merits our attention, that of Henri Béraud (1885-1958), a French journalist who visited Ireland in September 1920. Béraud was just one of many foreign journalists who travelled to the island of Ireland during the War of Independence and Civil War to report on the latest political and military developments and to see what life was like for ordinary people caught up in the fighting.

Béraud belonged to the fabled group of journalists known as the grand reporters. These highly respected reporters, whose ranks included such French journalistic icons as Albert Londres and Joseph Kessel, were labelled the princes of their profession. An article carrying their signature would significantly boost sales of that edition, as readers knew that they were guaranteed a good quality entertaining read.

The grand reporter was sent, usually at very short notice, to the latest flashpoint around the globe to gather news and views and send them back for immediate publication. A cross between a war correspondent, investigative reporter and special envoy, they are a curious breed of journalist who stands at the crossroads between investigative journalism and travel writing. In the 1920s, Béraud invented the term flâneur salarié, or paid flâneur, in order to describe his work as a grand reporter journalist. In doing so, he was associating himself with the flâneur, this quintessentially Parisian cultural archetype that was a feature of many great works of literature and that had been caricatured by artists such as Honoré Daumier and Louis Huart.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word flâneur as “a lounger or saunterer, an idle ‘man about town’”. The flâneur was an observer, a decipherer, who spent their time strolling in the city. They were someone who was at home in crowds. As Baudelaire wrote of the flâneur: “the crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and profession is to merge with the crowd”.

But Béraud’s flâneur was different from the classic interpretation of the literary archetype as expressed by Baudelaire and others. Béraud’s flâneur had a specific job to. He was indeed paid to wander about, but he also had to write down what he witnessed. He was active, not passive. In contrast with Baudelaire’s flâneur, who was free to amble about the city without any precise objective, Béraud’s flâneur must produce something at the end of the day to satisfy his editor; otherwise he would be out of a job.

When he visited Ireland in September 1920, Béraud was already a journalist of note in France, but the time he spent in Ireland and in other foreign countries in the subsequent months and years would have added to his public profile and boosted his popularity. For several weeks in the autumn of 1920, his reportage articles describing his travels to Dublin, Galway and Belfast featured frequently on the front page of Le Petit Parisien, which was the biggest selling newspaper in France at the time. The articles, which were often accompanied by a photograph of the subject of the article, were broadly sympathetic to the Irish. He describes his clandestine meetings with members of the Sinn Féin leadership as pleasant and convivial, in contrast with the formal, business-like interviews with British army commanders and Unionist politicians and supporters in Belfast.

Béraud was a writer of some talent. He was a published poet, and an award-winning journalist and novelist. In 1922, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his novel, Le Martyre de l’obese, a comic tale about the trials and tribulations of the fat man. The book is still in print to this day and it could be argued that Béraud produced enough quality work during his lifetime to be remembered and admired for his work today, but his literary legacy has been severely tainted by his wartime writings.

During the Nazi occupation of France, Béraud continued to publish his anti-British missives in Gringoire, the popular weekly news magazine that he edited. At the liberation, he was arrested, tried and convicted for the crime of “contact with the enemy”. His death sentence was commuted to hard labour for life by General De Gaulle, who said that he had studied Béraud’s case closely, but could not understand how he could have legitimately been charged with that crime.

Béraud’s story is just one of many in a new book that explores the flâneur outside his usual haunts of Parisian streets and arcades. In The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives, we get a fresh perspective on this important nineteenth-century urban figure. The book consists of 16 chapters written by researchers from European and North American universities and museums. Each chapter focuses on a different geographical location. As well as my chapter on Béraud’s saunter through Ireland, we also get a glimpse of the flâneur ambling through the streets of Amsterdam, Brussels, Le Havre, London, Madrid, New York, Prague and St Petersburg. Several of the chapters contain illustrations of maps, photographs, cartoons and caricatures.

As the book’s editor, Richard Wrigley, professor of art history at the University of Nottingham, has noted in the introduction: “the primary purpose in gathering these texts together was to adopt a different perspective, by means of which to approach the flâneur in a new light – that of internationalism”. Wrigley continues: “by stepping away from Paris, we can review the potential for an expanded, more versatile combination of the flâneurs two essential features – walking and looking, and how they might take on different forms and purposes depending on context”.

Oliver O'Hanlon contributed the Irish chapter to The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives, published by Cambridge Scholars