Badaud

The badaud is an important urban type from 18th and 19th-century French literature, one that has been adapted to explain aspects of mass culture and modern experience.

It was an old inheritance, but was elaborated as an urban type in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to describe the street crowds that were an essential feature of the Parisian landscape.

The Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (1867) defined the term in this way: "The badaud is curious; he is astonished by everything he sees; he believes everything he hears, and he shows his contentment or his surprise by his open, gaping mouth.

An early nineteenth-century observer of the city, Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy, described badauderie as the one ineffable trait of the Parisian character.

"In Paris, everything becomes an event: a train of wood being floated down the river, two coaches running into each other, a man dressed differently from others, an armored car, a dog fight, if they are noticed by two people, there will soon be a thousand, and the crowd will always grow, until some other circumstance, just as remarkable, pulls it away.

"One is constantly jostled by a crowd of individuals who leave their houses each morning to kill time in city squares, intersections and on the boulevards; they have ten hours to dispose of, and when they return home in the evening, they want to have something to recount: an accident, a poor devil who falls from a bus into the street or faints from hunger, an old dog drowned in the Seine, etc., etc.

Auguste de Lacroix, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (The French Described By Themselves, 1842) explained: "The flâneur is to the badaud what the gourmet is to the glutton...