Sole Searching

In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected French president, scandalized his country’s intelligentsia by going jogging. To Alain Finkielkraut, a public intellectual and television talk-show host, for a head of state to engage in such unseemly exertions signalled societal decline. “Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade,” he said. “Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body.” And Finkielkraut was far from the only writer for whom Sarkozy’s exercising carried a faintly ignoble whiff. The left-wing newspaper Libération suggested, only half jokingly, that the ethos of optimization, performance, and individualism associated with fitness culture is inherently — gasp — American.

The clamour extended a long tradition of romanticizing walking. From Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Thoreau to contemporary wellness influencers, people have long cast walking as an antidote to the bustle and regimentation of...