« L'énonciation piétonnière ». Le boulevard au crible de l'Étude de moeurs (1821-1867)

Motivating the flaneur’s stroll, fueling observation of the social world, the boulevard is located at the very core of both the Tableaux de Paris and the studies of manners popular in the nineteenth century in the wake of Mercier. Depending on whether they facilitate or hinder the flow of the writing, these studies of manners can take the form, in structural terms, of “time-block texts” or “diagram-texts”. They present a dramaturgical (that is, staged) knowledge, relying on the paradigm of voyeurism, theatrical scenography, and writing by type. Thus transfigured, the Boulevard appears as the space of a paradoxical, fundamentally modern poetry, belonging to an ethics and an aesthetics of the “patchwork”.