• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.737-742
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• 2023

This paper attempts to analyze how Paris was transformed by Haussman through comparing flaneurs in works by Balzac and Baudelaire. In both writers' works, flâneurs as the emblems of modernity observe Paris, especially architecture. Although representative of modernity, they are ambivalently obsessed with the heritage of the past. Balzac's The Wrong Side of Paris, Godefroid as a male bourgeois, is a flaneur observing antiquated architectures, the heritage of past. In Baudelaire's "The Swan for Victor Hugo" the flaneur passing through the modern Caroussel feels the Old Paris is gone. In "Parisian Dream," illusionary Paris exhibits metopolitan imagery wrought by capitalism led by Napoleon the third. The difference between the two writers demonstrate how Paris was changed by modernity.