The Immobile Flâneur
Motionless Travel and the Art of Xavier de Maistre
“Imagination, realm of enchantment—which the most beneficent of beings bestowed upon us to console us for reality—I must quit you now.”
My personal paradox is that though I greatly enjoy reading and writing about the art of travel, I do not myself actually enjoy traveling, other than in its psychological manifestation: the contemplation of the human condition. It’s fair to say that I might exhibit all the traits of long term agoraphobia, with my daily trip a block away to pick up my New York Times and morning tea and scones being a major achievement in the realm of geographical traversal. And as for social distancing, that concept makes me smile since all I needed to do during our present predicament was to extend my normal everyday six-foot distance rule to nine feet of protective rapture.
Engraving of Xavier de Maistre by Cyprien Jacquemin, 1820.
As an art critic and curator, I tend to do my traveling through the close study of visual artworks, by gazing at paintings, photographs and especially cinema. All the more charming and enchanting then was my discovery a few years ago of the breathtakingly original travel writing of one Xavier de Maistre. In 1790, while serving in the Piedmontese army, the French aristocrat de Maistre (1763-1852) was sentenced to forty-two days house arrest for the offense of dueling. The result was his discursive, mischievous memoir, Voyage Around My Room.
Far from writing a book review about a book written centuries ago, my interest is in exploring the alluring concept of extensively traveling without going anywhere at all. Like myself, de Maistre was capable of deriving extreme pleasure from traveling into the works of art he surrounded himself with.
The challenge of how to satisfy wanderlust (even if I’ve never personally experienced it) remains the same whether it is an externally-enforced quarantine or a self-induced choice. In the case of de Maistre, we have a rare being who chose to capitalize on his seemingly poor turn of events by writing one of the most compelling and mystifying travel books ever undertaken. He demonstrated deftly that traveling around your own room can be a novel means of expanding your worldly perspective, even in the absence of the so-called world per se. Thus it is accurate to depict his quirky little tome as an ode to travel without any movement, a motionless journey which can still result in an inspirational experience.
Strangely enough, the author didn’t take his work very seriously and did not consider himself to be a writer at all. But his elder brother, a famous philosopher and counter-revolutionary named Joseph, was apparently so blown away by his book’s modernist sensibilities (I would even call them so prescient as to validly, and impossibly, be considered postmodern) that he privately published his kid brother’s odd meditations on the motionless state of travel.
Memorial of Joseph and Xavier de Maistre in front of the Castle of Chambéry. Photo by S23725 from Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0
When Joseph was appointed ambassador to the court of Alexander I, Czar of Russia, Xavier was appointed to several posts including director of the National Library and the Museum of the Admiralty. In 1812 he married a Russian lady, Mrs. Zagriatsky, and he remained on in Russia even after the defeat of Napoleon. He actually did succeed in traveling physically quite a bit later on, living for a time in Naples before returning to St. Petersburg, where he died in 1852. His actual lived life was already practically a palpable novel combining creative elements of both Flaubert and Tolstoy. So we are somewhat mesmerized when he looks at the everyday objects in his room, its furniture, artworks, clothing, and personal items, as if they embodied scenes from a voyage to some strange land.
His room itself, which he transforms into a kind of flat earth, is a long square shape with a perimeter of thirty-six paces. “When traveling through my room,” he shares with us, “I rarely follow a straight line: I go from the table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there I set out obliquely towards the door, but even though, when I begin, it is rarely my intention to go there, if I happen to meet an armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and I settle down in it without further ado. Later, I encounter my bed, and thus continue my voyage.” That travel “towards a picture” is perhaps the most notable thing about the author, for he manages to make us believe, throughout his unfolding narrative of immobility, that artworks can be open windows inviting us all to dream with our eyes wide open.
William Hamilton, Marie Antoinette being taken to her Execution, October 16, 1793, 1794, oil on canvas, 60 x 77 1/2 in. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille, France.
Throughout his shockingly abstract and obscure little treatise, de Maistre frequently pauses before this or that framed painting, print or etching, to marvel at the vistas depicted which he will not be able to enjoy visiting physically. He does, however, visit them psychologically, and in so dramatic a fashion that we are made aware of the salient and revolutionary changes in visual art that occurred during his lifetime and immediately afterward. De Maistre lived during a period of dramatic transition in cultural production, a revolution of the mind and sciences which would permit him to behold that most mystical of all creative tools: the camera. When de Maistre’s book was first published, the key painting of his time would likely have been William Hamilton’s neo-classical 1794 depiction of Marie Antoinette being lead to her execution. Whereas by the time of his own death in 1852, a key image would have been the anonymous daguerreotype photograph of miners toiling during the great California Gold Rush. In between, we appear to have our eccentric and solitary Xavier, exhibiting a kind of romantic self-absorption which had yet to fully find expression by others in the world of the arts. He lived in a turbulent era, not only because of the post-revolutionary period in France, but also due to sudden alterations in public taste and artistic sensibility: the shift from idealized and mythical beauty of neo-classicism to the startling realist and romanticist urges towards radical individualism.
Miners working in Spanish Flat, California during the Gold Rush, 1852. Image credit: Granger Archive
Indeed, just as sudden in its drastic overhaul of artistic practice and taste would be the arrival of technical means of reproducing images which seemed to eschew the ancient craftsman-like skills of the artistic hand. De Maistre’s sequel, A Nocturnal Voyage, appeared in 1825, only fourteen years before the invention of the camera, a French technological creation which would alter the course of painting, and indeed art history entirely. Equally prescient, when de Maistre passed away, it was only eleven years before the poet Baudelaire would himself embody the upcoming age in so visionary a manner, virtually inventing the twin concepts of both modernity and the flâneur.
In his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire defines modernity by examining the interrelations of beauty, fashion, and lifestyle through the eyes of an artist. He sees beauty and modernity as intertwined, defining beauty as "made up of an eternal, invariable element…and of a relative circumstantial element." Modernity is this inconstant element, the "ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is eternal and immutable." Baudelaire believes that an artist can learn technical skills from old masters, but to make art beautiful, he or she must understand the nature of "present-day beauty." The beauty of modernity comes from "its essential quality of being present." He suggests that artists break away from the academic style of painting, for the very reason antiquity resonates with us today is that it was able to capture the beauty of its own time. He claims that late 19th century artists cannot secure their place in history by painting someone else's present, but only by depicting their own. This is something that de Maistre managed to accomplish majestically, by depicting not just the time, but inherently his time: his personal and solipsistic forty-two days in detention.
Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784, oil on canvas, 130 x 167 in. Collection of Louis XVI, The Louvre.
And yet, paradoxically, de Maistre was so much of his own time that he speaks directly to us in our own time, serving as an involuntary emblem of sequestering and sheltering in place. Perhaps this is because he was so dramatically transitional between one epoch and the next that he literally embodies Michelet’s famous dictum: “Each epoch dreams the one that follows”. A further glance at the varied visual culture that birthed him reveals just how on the edge of modernity he really was. The primary visual style of his era was Neo-Classicism, which emerged in his youth in opposition to the perceived decadence of both the Baroque and Rococo. One of the key artists of this era was Jacques-Louis David, whose reverie-drenched 1784 painting Oath of the Horatii is indicative of a desire for a less ornate, though still mythical, style of representing core values. Still peculiar however, is the urge to look backward during a period when scientific empirical thought was supposedly displacing religious superstition and authority, when one would have expected a forward-looking mentality from an epoch hailed as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture.
It would be left to the upcoming cadre of naturalist artists, looming names such as Gustave Courbet, to fully grasp the import of the transitional period in which an oddball such as de Maistre found himself adrift. Courbet’s style of almost photographic realism of natural subjects (not surprisingly coinciding with the earliest decades of photography) are a hallmark of both de Maistre’s fascination with his own quirky persona and our own age’s solipsistic self-absorption. His self-portrait, The Desperate Man (1845) is but one prime example of the kind of pent up energy that de Maistre must surely have felt during his banishment to the island of his own shipwrecked apartment.
Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1843-45, oil on canvas, 18 x 22 in. Private collection.
One has to admire the unusual traits of a culture such as the French, who have even chosen to honor the memory of this strangely gifted immobile flâneur Xavier de Maistre by erecting a monument to both him and his brother Joseph, the elder sibling without whom we would never have even known of the existence of this marvelous being. Their statues stand proudly and paradoxically at the Castle of Chambéry, as if to extol the virtues of a truly unattainable travel destination: the future. Which is to say: our present.
