ABSTRACT
The street – even more the grand boulevard – the urban masses passing by, new leisure, new money and the idle stroller (the flâneur), the voyeur and his leer, the dandy and the embourgeoisement of fashion, the streetwalker plying her trade (the ‘banal labor[er]’), constitute the city of the new industrial world against which Baudelaire wrote his poetry. In the modern metropolis, the oldest profession also moves from the brothel to the boulevard – democratised as urban display, presenting as mass article in a wonderfully expanding world of mass consumption. So every woman that walks (in) the street will be imagined as the (at least imminent) whore.
