Political and Artistic Divides in Baudelaire: An Aesthetic of Evil Baudelaire and Benjamin: Persons or Monads?
For Baudelaire, being an artist cannot be separated from the kind of person one is. And in ‘Benediction’, the first poem in Flowers of Evil, after the initial address ‘To the Reader’, Baudelaire directly draws the reader to the birth of the poet and the damage inflicted by his mother. The damage that people do each other is an original kind of evil – it may be more prevalent in some sociological defined groups than others, but it can happen anywhere. We say this at the outset because it is a fundamental line of divide between Benjamin and Baudelaire, who takes us into an intrapersonal world in which, as ‘L’Enfant déshérité’ (‘disinherited child’) his own person is formed by the curses and ‘ferocity’ of a mother who tears out his heart and tosses it to a dog. This child, who ‘s’enivre de soleil’ (‘is intoxicated by the sun’) and who responds in his way to his mother is able to transform a curse into a blessing because he can see all the cruelty and sorrow of the world as he draws upon ‘de pure lumière’ (‘pure light’).
For Benjamin, on the other hand, ‘when we read Baudelaire, we are given a course of historical lessons by bourgeois society.’[1] Although this statement is indicative of the fact that Benjamin will read Baudelaire within a Marxist historical-materialist framework, his Marxism is also in keeping with his earlier (pre-Marxist) formulation of truth as ‘the death of intention’, which requires ‘total immersion and absorption.’[2] Yet Benjamin is not interested in eliminating his own intention as author, and his ideological intention overlays the subject matter he critiques. At the same time Benjamin’s Marxism is not without various adaptations and unorthodox components. For his aesthetics owes much to the accumulated assemblage of his diverse interests and influences which, apart from Marx himself, ranges: from Marxists such as Lukács, and Adorno, to political activists like Blanqui, and Sorel (who inspired anarchists, Marxists and fascists) to utopians like Fourier and Saint-Simon, and writers as stylistically different as Kafka, Proust, and Gide. Likewise, while he draws upon his Judaic heritage he was also appreciative of ideas he found in the vitalist, and anti-Semite, Ludwig Klages, and the conservative and Nazi ‘crown jurist’ Carl Schmitt. Yet for all these contradictory influences, there is also an approach to truth that gives his work a coherence that would also evolve aesthetically and politically as he matured. He was, as he wrote in The Origin of Tragic German Drama, intent on accessing the ‘the most minute details of subject-matter.’[3] The objects of reality were to serve as (material) ‘monads’,[4] and his own contribution as a writer and thinker lay in disclosing the monad’s constitutive forces.[5] This stands in the closest relationship to the weight that he ascribes to the ‘origin’:
“There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development.”[6]
What must be dispensed with, if this method is to have any success, is the complete chaos of contingency which every theory has to supplicate. Thus, he adds:
“every primitive ‘fact’ should straightaway be considered a constitutive determinant. Indeed, this is where the task of the investigator begins, for he cannot regard such a fact as certain until its innermost structure appears to be so essential as to reveal it as an origin. The authentic – the hallmark of origin in phenomena – is the object of discovery, a discovery which is connected in a unique way with the process of recognition.”[7]
One of the great attractions of Marxism, for Benjamin, was that it provided a methodological means of accessing ‘the constitutive determinants’, which Benjamin could then deploy in his analysis, thus cutting through the chaos and poetic intentions and contingencies of Baudelaire world and thought. Baudelaire was a social symptom or cipher of the larger goal. That goal was social redemption, and that goal predated his Marxism. Thus while Benjamin’s philosophical interests predated his Marxism, his turn to Marxism did not require a change of philosophical purpose. Rather Marxism, for Benjamin, provided a more rigorous methodology involving class and political economy in the understanding of the social forces that had to be overthrown to achieve social redemption. In this respect, Benjamin’s thought had been ‘political’ from the outset, and Marxism reinforced the monadic determinism that overrode any personal intention on the part of the ‘players’ being studied. Thus, Baudelaire’s personal intentions, and the insights he thought he had about reality, were to be folded into a larger array of forces (and intentions) which Benjamin, qua theorist, possessing knowledge of ‘the constituent determinants,’, could espy.
By contrast, Baudelaire’s embrace of aestheticism was a personal decision, and not one that can simply be dissolved into the times in which it was made – for while the dandy may have belonged to a certain time span, it is a recurring type, perhaps even an archetype of the modern decadent aesthetic revolt. It is as evident in the cabarets of Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, as in the glam rock movement of the 1970s, and the new romantics of the 1980s. More important, though, than the dandy per se is the role played by art in helping a group’s self-aestheticization as a means of ‘dealing’ with their lives, a means of fashioning selves and establishing new kinds of behaviors and forms of solidarity. Modernity, as sociologists from Marx to Durkheim to Weber and beyond have rightly observed, is a fragmenting process, though it also facilitates new social assemblages out of those fragments. This was something that Baudelaire not only observed, and personally participated in, but which his work helped develop.
Baudelaire saw that art may serve as an important means for bonding. The fostering of ‘aisthesis’, sensory perception through feeling, is what an innovative artist excels in. That shared ‘aisthesis’ becomes a force for people to mutually love and hate certain aspects of themselves and their surroundings, and in their shared passions make their own little bit of reality that reflects and feeds (though it may also drain) their selves. Yet the loyalty to a sub-culture can be very different from the loyalty and sacrifice that, until relatively recently, had been required by such archaic forces of sociality as the tribe, the family, faith, or motherland. Membership in a modern aesthetic community is often an evanescent affair, a fad or stage that one may pass through in one’s self-development.
Being an artist, in the context of modern life, gives one a degree of freedom not only to be a creator, and even an icon, but to participate in the contradictory opportunities and possibilities that are the accompaniment of modern fragmentation and fusion. A modern artistic soul has all manner of mosaic and contradictory potentialities at their disposal. This notion of freedom and self-making not only poses a threat to the ostensible (for Baudelaire, hypocritical) moral norms but also to the redemptive plan embedded in Marxism, the fulfilment of which requires a class struggle, and hence a proper diagnostic of the classes constituting modern society, and also a knowledge of the decisive determinations of those classes. Thus, in the opening salvo of ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, Benjamin positions Baudelaire as a political type, and then cites Marx to cement this type as dubious and reactionary:
“The bohème appears in a suggestive context in the writings of Marx. In this category he includes the professional conspirators he talks about in his detailed note on the memoirs of the police agent de La Hodde – a piece that appeared in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850. To evoke the physiognomy of Baudelaire means to speak of the way in which he resembles this political type.”[8]
Benjamin then approvingly cites Marx’s claim that bohemian conspirators were divided into the occasional and professional conspirators, and that their entire (conspiratorial) is ‘determined’ by its social position, and the precariousness of their lives.[9] And, for Benjamin, one of the most fascinating things about Baudelaire’s poetry is the part it plays in exposing the degeneracy of bourgeois society and its damnable power relationships. For Benjamin Baudelaire ‘is a secret agent – an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule.’[10]
To be sure, Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire does not completely extinguish Baudelaire’s personality, but the personal is largely enclosed by the social and economic, which in turn is defined politically. From the outset, in discussing Baudelaire and Benjamin, we are confronted with two very different sets of intentions. That one set of intentions has become more fashionable today in certain circles is not in dispute, but that there is more rigor involved in the choice of one over the other is contestable. Or to put it slightly differently, other than a demonstrable confirmation of an absolute, the difference may amount to little more than interest and fashion/ paradigm. Marx’s absolute was to be espied in objective laws of economic development in general and, in the particular, when it came to modern society, in ‘the germ cell of commodity production’ which is the monad of his analysis. On the other hand, Benjamin, although convinced by the centrality of the commodity within modern capitalist society (and hence also convinced by Marx of the adequacy of the sign of socio-economic designation of the times in which he and Baudelaire lived), appealed to the absolute in theological terms. The seepage between critical theory and post-structuralism and theology, which started to gain momentum in the 1980s and has since become an industry, suggests that Benjamin’s ‘tactic’ has been greeted with some enthusiasm. Whether it is really an improvement over Baudelaire’s own brilliant formulation that ‘God is the only being who, to govern, need not even exist’[11] is questionable and, given Benjamin’s secularism, it may even be apt for Benjamin.
Such a question goes to the very heart of the dispute between faith and knowledge. Knowledge of God (that God’s existence can be rationally demonstrated – from Aristotle through Anselm, Aquinas etc.) can only be accepted in the affirmative if one concurs about what reason is. But the existence and nature of reason has proved to be no less thorny than God’s existence. If faith is confirmed through experience, and reason is seen, along with our senses, history, cultivation etc., as one other contributing feature of (human) experience, then reference to the God(s) is meaningful in a manner that requires no need of (the) God(s) being rational. The reason we raise this matter is simply to underscore that barring rationalist metaphysical commitments, fashion, and social/ political consensus, there is nothing about human experience that can force one to renounce supernatural forces as part of the tapestry of human experience. And this applies as much to the devil, of whose existence Baudelaire sees confirmation everywhere, as to God, who, as depicted by Baudelaire, may well have lost all hope and interest in redemption. We are back to our own devices.
Baudelaire was sufficiently satisfied to find readers to commune with. Benjamin wanted something more: he wanted to summon his readers to political action. While one can demonstrate the many ways in which our sociality is furnished and dictated by forces beyond any single person’s control, one may just as easily argue that any one person’s or group’s understanding of the constitutive features of sociality can be critically questioned, and found deficient. That is to say, the Marxian (and Benjamin-ite) invocation of the whole, or constituent determinant, over the part may well suffice for those who undertake this kind of appeal. But it is as laden with its own bundle of problems as those that accompany appeals to the part over the whole. The part versus whole problem (the One and the Many) is a founding problem of metaphysics. But a metaphysical problem can only generate a metaphysical solution by virtue of the relationship it sets up between totality, to which it holds the keys, and parts. This is why Marxism is inevitably a metaphysic. In everyday life, however, we generalize and particularize on the basis of the practice within which we are engaged. The Marxist practice, which became essential to Benjamin’s practice, is that of the social diagnostician. But one’s worth as a diagnostician is only as good as the diagnosis.
It is not easy to make simple judgments about any person, much less assess the condition of their soul. And Baudelaire was more complex than most. Baudelaire embodied ambiguous, even contradictory passions. Part of him would have liked to be a noble libertine, with money to bestow on all who granted him their sexual favours, like those aristocrats in Zola’s novel Nana who spend their time and money indulging their passions. But neither his financial situation, nor his heart would allow such total indiscrimination. While he settled early into relations with prostitutes (and suffered the syphilitic consequences), he formed a deep and committed attachment to Jeanne Duval, herself a prostitute/courtesan/muse, which was apparently non-sexual for most of the 20 years that their relationship lasted. Within this period, he also formed an obsessive devotion to Apollonie Sabatier, a concert artist and ‘kept’ woman, which lasted until it was reciprocated, and was, quite likely, unconsummated. It would seem that the most important relationship in his life was with his mother: and this too was a complicated affair. While he often appeared indifferent and caustic, gentleness and modesty were also an essential part of his character.
Baudelaire did not belong to any school and led his own artistic career in proud and aloof loneliness He praised the romanticism of Hugo, while at the same time he eulogized the realism of Balzac. He esteemed the aestheticism of Gautier and he introduced, through his translations, Edgar Allan Poe to France. Supporting a certain camp did not mean participating in it; criticizing a certain work did not mean opposing the writer’s position. Baudelaire was syphilitic, and consumed laudanum. His life was disorderly, and often hard, enduring times of relative penury, and public hostility. He was plagued by insomnia, cramp, and nightmares. Laziness, sickness (evil) and despair were his intimate companions. He celebrated cruelty but also sought kindness, he threw himself into the ephemeral, while at the same time he hungered for eternity. In many ways, his maladies were typical ailments and productions of modern life. And like many gifted modern souls, his aesthetic prowess was his means of coping and transcending the chaos, confusion, and despair of his life.
Baudelaire and 1848: Excitement, Revenge, Pleasure
None could escape the political turmoil of France in the mid-nineteenth century with the republican revolt of 1848, the abdication and flight of Louis Phillipe, and the rise to power of Louis Napoleon. Moreover, Baudelaire’s response to the revolt of 1848 has also contributed to reading him as a political poet. We have already mentioned Fiektau and Sahlberg’s readings coming out of West Germany, but there have been numerous other attempts to read Baudelaire, in light of 1848, as a political poet. However, there is little agreement about what his politics meant exactly. Thus, for example, Debarati Sanyal’s The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form, which portrays Baudelaire as essentially a ‘poète engagé’, is devoted principally to Baudelaire’s ambiguous relationship to violence, as both victim and aggressor, and the intertwining of aesthetics and politics expressed in Le Spleen de Paris. Sanyal emphasizes the counter-violence in Baudelaire’s poetry; his striking back bitterly and ironically against post-1848 bourgeois political intimidation and violence.[12] On the other hand, Sonya Stephens’ Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony examines Baudelaire through the prism of a particular form of politics. Here, politics is to be understood principally as the tool of maneuvering and intrigues, although this does not exclude consideration of the ideological implications of this in the specific context of 19th century France, particularly with respect to power (both literary and social) and the dominant discourse of his day. In exploiting such discourse, the prose poems, according to Stephens, parody its truth and explode its hegemony, and offer, in its place, moral ambiguity. By engaging with the dominant discourse in this way, the prose poem asserts its status as ‘low’ art.[13] Stephens holds that it is through the application of Baudelaire’s theories of comic art in the prose poems that the full significance of this [low art] is revealed.
Timothy Clark, in The Absolute Bourgeoisie: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851, argues that some artists, including Baudelaire, are ‘often more political than it looks at first sight.’[14] Like Clark, Graham Chesters, in his ‘A Political Reading of Baudelaire’s “L’Artiste inconnu”’, also seems determined to find politics in Baudelaire, even if it may not be in plain sight. But, as he points out, the period of 1848-51 in France provides a plethora of material for Baudelaire envisaging a link between art and politics. Poetry, then, by its very nature, can be seen as a form of political action.[15] J. M. Merriman, in The Agony of the Republic, also makes the reasonable point that poetry under the influences of Blanqui and other insurrectionists during the Second Republic, provided a revolutionary underpinning of political motivation.[16] Richard D. E. Burton in his Baudelaire and the Agony of the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution also takes the uncontroversial position in his discussion of Baudelaire’s social, political, and aesthetic views during the Second Republic and its immediate aftermath, that Baudelaire’s political features are complex and controversial.[17] Burton’s judgment is supported by the little evidence that we have about Baudelaire’s response to 1848 and his subsequent thoughts on the event.
When it comes to being precise about Baudelaire’s political commitments and involvements, there is no substantial evidence to add to that surveyed by Eugène Crépet in his Baudelaire: Étude Biographique and William Bandy’s summary of the core issues in a paper delivered to the MLA, in New Orleans December 1939.[18] (Although Jules Mouquet’s and W.T. Bandy’s Baudelaire en 1848: La tribune nationale provides a detailed account of the national tribune of 1848.)[19] Crépet rightly points out that Baudelaire was capable of holding contradictory positions. In The Salon of 1846, he ‘had expressed the most aristocratic contempt for the republican party, the fierce enemy of luxury, the fine arts, and belles lettres.’[20] In so far as this would be the attitude that is more conspicuous throughout his career, the question is not only to what extent did he support the republican cause, but also what was it that he was supporting? The question of the extent of that support has been raised by Bandy, who points out that Crépet had accepted the accounts of three witnesses to Baudelaire’s involvement, whilst discounting the letters he had received from Champfleury (Jules Fleury Husson), ‘a man who was unquestionably in close touch with Baudelaire at the time of the Revolution of 1848’. The letters ‘contain a categorical denial of Baudelaire’s presence at the barricades and even of his adoption of democratic and socialist doctrines.’[21]
Bandy also notes that Baudelaire’s name appeared in ‘Le Courrier Français for February 28, 1848, where it was included in the Société Républicaine centrale, founded by Blanqui.’ He adds that: ‘In the second and definitive list of members which appeared in the same newspaper on March 10, 1848, there was no mention of Baudelaire’s name’, and he infers from this omission that while ‘Baudelaire attended the first meeting of Blanqui’s club and even signified his adherence by signing the register, the people’s government had been proclaimed only three or four days before. During ‘the week or ten days that followed his republican ardor cooled and he re-considered his original intention of joining Blanqui’s club.’[22] The sense of vacillation and unease about his involvement is also evident by the fact that while Baudelaire was a co-founder of the revolutionary newspaper, Le Salut Public, the paper died ‘in its infancy the following day with its second number.’[23] The third ‘piece of evidence’ adds little more to the idea of Baudelaire as a sincere political republican. Baudelaire’s name appeared on the masthead of La Tribune Nationale, on April 8, 1848. But there is no article signed by Baudelaire.[24]
The events of 1848 did indeed draw in Baudelaire, but they tend to underscore the fleetingness of any larger political commitment. A note from Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals provides an accurate appraisal of Baudelaire’s political involvement: ‘To be a useful person has always appeared to me something particularly horrible.’[25] And as the rest of that note indicates, Baudelaire came to see the entire event ironically:
1848 was amusing only because of those castles in the air which each man built for his utopia.
1848 was charming only through an excess of the ridiculous.
Robespierre can only be admired because he has made several beautiful phrases.[26]
In another note from the journal Baudelaire writes: ‘Politics. I have no convictions, as men of my century understand the word, because I have no ambition. There is no basis in me for a conviction.’[27] For Baudelaire, the event was little more than an occasion for taking pleasure in an outburst of energy:
My wild excitement in 1848.
What was the nature of that excitement?
The taste for revenge. Natural pleasure in destruction. Literary excitement; memories of my reading.
The 15th of May. Still the pleasure in destruction. A legitimate pleasure, if what is natural be legitimate.
The horrors of June. Madness of the people and madness of the Bourgeoisie. Natural delight in crime.[28]
He continues by speaking of his fury at Louis Napoleon’s coup, a man seen by many as a scoundrel and inept leader, including the conservative Tocqueville. Finally, the following remark of Baudelaire’s, quoted by Crépet, is perhaps the best summation of Baudelaire’s ‘republicanism’, for it reinforces the sheer attractiveness of the depravity and evil energy that became an end in itself, and is indicative of Baudelaire’s ironic distance and subversion of the telos of the virtue of the revolution.
“When I consent to be a republican, I do evil, knowing it. Yes, I live the Revolution! always! Nevertheless! But I am not fooled! I have never been fooled! I say: ‘Long live the revolution!’ as I would say: ‘Long live Destruction! Long live Expiation! Long live Punishment! Long live Death! We all have the Republican spirit…We are democratized and syphilized.”[29]
As he would also write in his Intimate Journals: ‘Revolution confirms Superstition, by offering sacrifice.’[30] It was the leap back into superstition, the superstition of the reality of the devil, that would be such a defining feature of Baudelaire’s aesthetic and critical insights into the society around him. The revolutionary appeal to freedom and equality was the expression of the modern faith in reason and virtue rather than the archaic faith in sacrifice as the basis of social order, a faith common to pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. One of the most distinctive features of the enlightened philosophes was that their ‘world-picture’ was based upon the cleavage between the superstitious and the non-superstitious. All authority that had not come from reason itself was seen as illegitimate. But the old order, where it had been more than just conquest, and where authority was settled, had evolved out of the reciprocal sacrificial quid pro quos that had given rise to the three estates of ‘those who fought’, ‘those who prayed’, and ‘those who labored’. By the mid eighteenth century, this triadic social division had largely lost all meaning, being most conspicuous in second estate membership having become a means for tax avoidance, money making and resource extraction requiring very little or no reciprocal duties.[31]
Thus, while it is understandable that the philosophes projected their reality onto the past and the entire world, it was a myth. Baudelaire did not subscribe to that myth, even in 1848. That Baudelaire took no interest in politics would be to overstate the case, and he would write to Ancelle in 1853: ‘I have persuaded myself twenty times that I would no longer interest myself in politics, and, with each grave question, I am seized again with curiosity and passion.’[32] What he refused was an interest in the typical republican and socialist politics of his day, primarily because they were built upon ‘sandcastles’.[33] The myths of progress and emancipation he found more fanciful than merely accepting a social order where there was some stability so he could get on with what mattered most to him: his art. In one note he writes: ‘There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic. Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd.’[34] But as much as he admired de Maistre, whose critique of the dangers of the French revolution were meant to try and stave off a catastrophe in Russia, Baudelaire’s thoughts on the best form of government were far less significant than his desire for his own creative independence.
The Freedom of the Artist
To place himself in service to the political was for Baudelaire to diminish the real poetic gift he had and to curtail the freedom to create unencumbered by the constraints of what his times considered right or wrong. That freedom was never to be understood in an abstract or philosophical sense, as for example in Rousseau and Kant, whose interest in freedom cannot be separated for the search for some ideal constitutional form for the state.[35]
Baudelaire was contemptuous of the abstract and vacuous virtues that he saw as being ubiquitous with the relative cultural triumph of the enlightenment. It is through the prism of this contempt for the enlightened progressive view of reality, in which abstractions become the sources of evaluation and hence the mediators of the value of human experience, whether personal social or historical, that we can begin to appreciate why Baudelaire was attracted to both Catholicism and the devil. We can put it this way: the ‘enlightened’ bourgeois craved citizenship and endless discussions of how to make each other virtuous; Baudelaire chose diving into ‘life’, with all its putridness, and delight. Baudelaire reveled in the decadence that is the inevitable undertow and corollary of modernity. The abstract moralist and political actor either condemns this outright or desiccates it in order to have it fit into their template of the permissible. Generally, Baudelaire saw the virtuous as hypocrites and in Artificial Paradises, he notes: ‘When I say moralist, I mean the pseudo-moralist hypocrite.’[36] To be sure, all societies normalize and condemn, make choices about social cultivation. However, it is the great opening in the variety of possibilities, possibilities which are often infected and evil, that Baudelaire not only notes but is prepared to celebrate. This was also how a particular modern sub-culture type, the dandy, approached life.[37]
The Dandy versus the Bourgeois
Pierre Bourdieu’s observation that aestheticism and moral contempt for the bourgeoisie are intrinsically related, stemming from writers and artists being deprived of the material benefits of pursuing the bourgeois life, [38] holds true for Baudelaire. For while Baudelaire often despaired about financial difficulties whilst pouring contempt on the bourgeoisie, one thing is certain: Baudelaire celebrated those who lived beyond the aesthetic and moral horizons of the bourgeoisie. Above all, he celebrated those who transformed themselves into living works of art, the dandy.
In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ Baudelaire dealt most directly with the question of modernity, presenting Constantin Guys as the ideal prototype of modern life and Dandyism.[39] Baudelaire loved the way that Guys notices and ‘addresses’ the world as it is, in its finery, as in his detailing of military uniforms, and textures; he is indifferent to moral condescension, sentimentality, and hypocrisy as shown in his defiant paintings of prostitutes. As an artist, he is interested in the beauty that he finds in his world, he is able ‘to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory.’[40] In the eyes of Baudelaire and Guys, modern life was tantamount to a bountiful occasion for new stimuli of creativity. The dandy was above all someone who makes a decision to seize every moment freely and creatively, to make something of every possibility. The dandy was the incarnation and personification of the freedom and creation that makes of life a life. Albert Camus encapsulates the aesthetic and character of the dandy when he observes that the dandy ‘inaugurates an aesthetic of solitary creators, who are obstinate rivals of a God they condemn.’[41]
Living in modernity, for Baudelaire, means either abandoning all sense of beauty, and thereby being immersed in the heaviness and misery of the world, or facing up to the challenge and opening one’s appetites so that one is strong enough to appreciate the beauty that is there in all its hideous splendor, its gory glory, and putrefied dazzlingness. The dandy revels in the beauty of decadence because this is the kind of beauty that has genuine existence within the urban condition of modernity. The romantic, in the manner of Rousseau, pines for what has been lost, and creates fantasies about the majesty and sublimity of a nature unsullied by human contact. The romantic might leave the city to sojourn in their idyllic world, but the modern world, even if its encroachments can be kept at bay, remains with its squalor, grime and shadows, its dark stimulants and seductions. The decadent finds the light of delight in these dusky, damnably beguiling phantasmagorias. But to indulge this, one has to be in tune enough with one’s senses and, like Baudelaire and indeed every poet who sacrifices him or herself to the beauty of their words, dandies trusts their senses. In their trust, they invariably enter into forbidden labyrinths of the senses in search of clandestine encounters and ecstasies that vitalize.
The contrast between the solicitous collusions of the decadent and the solidarity required by politics is stark, whether it be the solidarity of those seeking a better economy based upon delayed gratification and individual initiative (the bourgeoisie), or the solidarity of the socialists to improve workers’ conditions and overcome poverty. Political solidarity might draw on the senses to regulate and coordinate – the march is the great example of political solidarity – invariably under symbols of unity, beaming faces of leaders, flags, patriotic music and such like. Such solidarity is always a sacrifice for some higher future utility than mere ingratiation into the energies of life. To be sure there is something childish and selfish in the decadent’s squandering of energies in pursuit of immediate satisfaction, and it cannot be denied that the aging decadent may well be living a wretched life (though others may merrily defy until the end). But this is the risk of dandyism: how to get it right? How to step outside convention and routine and the dutiful modalities of social reproduction and not drown in one’s senses?
The dandy is an anti-Enlightenment and anti-bourgeois intellectual, despising the vulgarity and false morality of the newly emergent bourgeoisie. That Baudelaire loathed the vulgarity of what he saw as the spiritually vacuous and destructive nature of bourgeois values is not in dispute. Probably the most explicit and prophetic (Benjamin rightly designates it thus) expression of this is to be found in an unpublished note by Baudelaire, some of which is quoted by Benjamin in The Arcades Project, where he comments on its broad concurrence with Nietzsche. Quoting the passage at length, it is obvious that it intersects with Benjamin’s broader Marxian concern with commodity fetishism. Yet it also illustrates important differences between the two:
“New example and new victims of the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that through which we thought to live. The mechanical will so have Americanized us, progress will so have atrophied all our spiritual side, that naught, in the sanguine, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be compared to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man to show me what of life remains. Of religion, I believe it useless to speak, and to seek the remnants, since to take the trouble to deny God is the only scandal in that field. Property virtually disappeared with the suppression of the right of the first-born; but the time will come when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will snatch their last morsel from those who think they are the legitimate heirs of the revolutions. But it is not particularly in political institutions that there will be manifest the universal ruin, or the universal progress; for the name matters little. It will be in the debasement of the heart. Need I say that the little of the political remaining will writhe painfully in the embrace of the general bestiality, and that governments will be forced, in order to maintain themselves and to create a phantom of order, to revert to means which will make our actual humanity shudder, although so hardened? Then, the son will flee from his family not at eighteen years, but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not in search of heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner in a tower, not to immortalize a garret by sublime thoughts, but to establish a trade, to amass wealth, and to compete with his infamous papa, founder and stockholder of a journal which will spread the light and which will cause the century to be looked upon as an abettor of superstition. Then, the wanderers, the outcasts, those who have had several lovers, and who were once called angels, in recognition of the heedlessness which shines, light of luck, in their existence logical as evil—then these, I say, will be no more than a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom that will condemn all, lacking money, all, even the faults of the senses! Then, that which will resemble virtue, what do I say? – all that is not ardor toward Plutus will be considered enormously ridiculous. Justice, if in that fortunate period justice can still exist, will interdict all citizens who cannot make a fortune. Your wife, O Bourgeois! your chaste partner, whose legitimacy is the poetry of your existence, thenceforth, introducing into legality an irreproachable infamy, zealous and loving guardian of your strongbox, will be no more than the ideal of the kept woman. Your daughter, with infantile hopes of marriage, will dream in her cradle of selling herself for a million, and you yourself, O Bourgeois, still less poet than you are to-day, you will see nothing amiss; you will regret naught. For there are things in men that strengthen and prosper as others weaken and decline; and, thanks to the progress of the times, you will have left of your entrails only the viscera! These times are perhaps quite near; who knows even that they have not come, and that the thickness of our skins is not the only obstacle that prevents us from appreciating the environment in which we breathe?”[42]
What Baudelaire does not have, and what Benjamin believes as a Marxist he is privy to, is a political solution to counter this state of affairs. As this passage indicates, Baudelaire does not believe that the spiritual resources will be found in what he calls ‘the sanguine, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the Utopians.’
It is true that Baudelaire offers nothing more than a personal and cultural response to what Benjamin sees as his anticipation of Nietzsche’s ‘last man.’ Whether, though, Benjamin’s social and political analysis delivers a genuine political way out is something we shall consider later; as for Nietzsche’s way out, the superman, in spite of North American ‘progressive’ and post-structuralist renderings of Nietzsche as a 68er (Deleuze) or harbinger of the democracy ‘to come’ (Derrida), fascism (in spite of Nietzsche’s own aversion to anti-Semites) was the form that his own politics of the future would most shape.[43] Given the disastrous political choices and commitments that were being made by so many intellectuals in the 20th century, Baudelaire’s decision, in spite of an aristocratic sensibility, to eschew political faith, to dive into and express the tortured and labyrinthine nature and excesses of the human heart can hardly be condemned for being delusional. What he provides poetically is much the same as what he says of ‘those festivals on which mountebanks, tricksters, animal trainers and itinerant merchants had long been relying, to compensate for the dull seasons of the year…an armistice, concluded with the malevolent forces of life, a respite in the universal contention and struggle.’[44] One can reasonably ask whether an artist can genuinely create more.
The one political writer Baudelaire deeply admired was Joseph de Maistre (‘a genius’, a ‘seer’[45] – with Poe, one of the two men who taught him how to ‘reason’).[46] De Maistre had taught that human beings really crave authority and something to believe in, something that would give meaning and benediction to their bloodlust. He held that the only way to preserve any kind of peace was through terror and fear: the hangman is the essential condition for social concord. De Maistre’s sympathies for the old regime stemmed from his major fear that the new regime would be even more murderous. But while Baudelaire shares de Maistre’s hostility to the new faith in natural goodness, and fears where the Enlightenment may lead, Baudelaire’s and de Maistre’s interests only partly concur. Baudelaire’s interest in the dandy as a new kind of aristocrat comes out of a completely different set of interests that have little in common with the deeply politically committed de Maistre. This is amply evident in Baudelaire’s enthusiasm for the dandy as a new kind of aristocrat, who appears as a kind of interim figure between the emergent democracy and the twilight of the old world order. [47]
It is neither nostalgia for any past social-political form, nor, as in de Maistre, the attempt to provide a more robust and tried and tested political bulwark against the democratizing forces of modernity, that attracts Baudelaire to aristocracy. Further, and again unlike de Maistre, Baudelaire’s interest in the aristocracy has nothing to do with what was at the root of the aristocracy’s social authority, viz. their role as warriors able to provide an army for the crown.
For Baudelaire, what is interesting about the aristocracy is its ‘style’, evident not only in its clothing and general decorum, but in its sharp and elegant wit, and repartee. Once the state has become centralized and the army directly under the control of the crown, the aristocrat has enough wealth and leisure to devote to a life of pleasure and self-artistry. Similarly, the dandy does not want to build a life around their work and profession, unless, of course, it is creative work. With style as the issue, the matter of ‘birth-right’ is as irrelevant as the older social duties that the aristocracy had to perform. Stylistically, then, the aristocrat is a proto-type of the dandy, and if there is no longer any class to inherit their archaic social function, at least their style finds an enthusiastic heir in the dandy. Thus, for Baudelaire, the dandy is ‘the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.’[48]
Preserving ‘the distance’ between the spiritual and the material, taste and vulgarity, art and nature is what matters. The intellectual ‘height’ is made manifest as much in one’s decoration and adornment, as in the refined yet shocking (to the bourgeois) use of language, polished banter and trenchant cynicism. While the aristocrat was bred and ‘schooled’ by his class in taste, the dandy freely enters a life devoted to taste. The dandy also inherits the aristocrat’s haughty disgust with the moral standards of the bourgeoisie – standards that are utilitarian, materialistic, inflexible and hypocritical. Of course, the aristocracy would have recoiled from their existence being copied and caricatured by bohemians who were as determined as the bourgeois to let genius and talent be the real measure of their existence. Yet the fact was that both the dandies and aristocrats saw that faith in the Enlightenment ideals or morals was ultimately faith in the triumph of mediocrity.[49]
In his opposition to modern mediocrity and bourgeois mendacity, the dandy is also an oppositional figure, and it is this oppositional quality that is often behind the attempt to recruit Baudelaire into the political camp.[50] But Baudelaire’s oppositionalism was first and foremost as an artist, and Baudelaire generally thought that the attempt to subordinate art to political and moral ends was to draw art down into the mediocre and utilitarian taste of his fellow Frenchmen. Of French artistic and literary taste, he was unequivocal in his condemnation: ‘The Frenchman is a farmyard animal, so well domesticated that he dares not jump over any fence… in literature he is scatophagous. He dotes on excrements.’[51] And elsewhere he would observe:
“the French public…is not artistic, naturally artistic; that public is interested in philosophy, ethics, engineering, enjoys stories and anecdotes, is anything you like, but never spontaneously artistic. It feels or rather judges things successively, analytically…where we ought to see only beauty, our public seeks only truth.”[52]
The predominance of the age’s poor aesthetic taste, for Baudelaire, was closely associated with the wide-spread belief that poetry should cultivate morality, improve customs and take educational responsibility ‘to perfect social behavior.’[53] This approach was shared by both the bourgeoisie and the socialists, each advocating their own moral standards, but nevertheless, making literature and art the tool to publicize morality. And Baudelaire sees the French as particularly prone to wanting to moralize and politicize beauty. For the French, he observes, beauty is ‘easily digestible only if flavoured with political condiments’, and the utopian and communist ‘composition of all French brains allows France only one exclusive passion, that of social formulas’ that conspire against originality and ingenuity. [54]
To make art and literature mere tools of political propaganda was, for Baudelaire, to deprive humanity of its greatest power – the imagination, and hence also its greatest joys. If philosophers since the time of Plato have wanted clarity of ideas in order to assure a compliant population guided by virtuous souls, Baudelaire taps into the dimensions of life which are better evoked than defined, and better left untouched by the hands of the moralists.[55]
In contrast to philosophy which wants to know in order to make and do – poetry is its own making, its own doing, its own reward, its own purpose. This is its power and its solace. Poems are not scientific arguments, nor moral textbooks in disguise, but repositories of a distinct sphere of needs of the soul. The dandy and the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’ (a doctrine by no means unique to Baudelaire)[56], in other words, are essentially expressions of one and the same orientation: the former is simply the personal embodiment of the later; the latter is the projection of the same sensibility as the dandy onto the world at large.
An Aesthetics of Evil and the Devil
In Spleen (IV), all the images are dark and heavy: a sweaty cell, a frantic bat, rotting beams, heavy prison bars, disgusting spiders, lost and homeless souls, long corteges and a black flag; flowing in a continuous stream, they evoke disgust, making us squirm. They are relentless reminders of our spiritual restlessness. Yet these ugly and evil images with their terrifying and discomforting atmosphere perfectly illustrate Baudelaire’s aesthetic reconciliation of ugliness and beauty; the beauty of hell, the devil, death, and carcasses. While Baudelaire’s the Les Fleurs du Mal is the full expression of his aesthetic, it is neatly encapsulated in ‘Hymn to Beauty:’
Tu marches sur des morts, Beauté, dont tu te moques;
De tes bijoux l’Horreur n’est pas le moins charmant,
Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus chères breloques,
Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement.
(You, Beauty, walk on the dead, whom you mock;
Of your jewels, horror is not the least charming,
And, among your dearest charms, murder,
Amorously dances on your proud belly.)
And:
Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe,
Ô Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu!
Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte
D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu?
De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirène,
Qu’importe, si tu rends, — fée aux yeux de velours,
Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! —
L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?
(Whether you come from heaven or hell, of what importance,
O Beauty! Enormous monster, terrifying, ingenious!
If your eye, your smile, your foot can open the door for me
To an infinity that I love and have never known?
Of Satan or God, of what importance? Angel or Siren,
Of what importance, whether you return – few with eyes of velvet
Rhythm, perfume, glow, o my unique queen,
The universe is less hideous and the instant less heavy.)[57]
All dualisms are obliterated by this quasi-gnostic aesthetic reach for the infinite. Beguilement, death, and terror are ever with us, but beauty elevates us in the midst of our burdens. For the poet, to alchemize the only reality we have by giving beauty to it where we can, provides a brief transcendence that makes our lives bearable.
This is the kind of transcendence that makes sense of Baudelaire response to the moralist, a response that may seem more conciliatory on the surface, but which draws out the meaning of ‘diamonds of the muse’ in his own practice: ‘I do not mean to say that poetry does not ennoble manners – that its final result is not to raise man above the level of squalid interests: that would clearly be absurd.’[58] The ennobling of manners requires an elevation to the occasion of the real, not a mere masking and suppression, with ‘interest’ losing its squalor in its aestheticization. For Baudelaire poetry is an alchemical process – it does not make us virtuous, but the aestheticization of evil draws evil into a ‘play space’ of the imagination. When Baudelaire addresses his hypocritical reader as his brother and ‘semblable’, he is addressing what he sees as a fundamental fact of human beings, that we are inexorably driven toward evil because there is something alluring about vice. To simply use poetry for moral purposes, for Baudelaire, is to avoid this truth about the power of evil. As he writes in Of Virtuous Plays and Novels:
“Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings in its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them. Study all the sores, like a doctor in the course of his hospital duties, and the good-sense school, the school dedicated exclusively to morality, will find nothing to bite on. Is crime always punished, virtue rewarded? No.”[59]
But Baudelaire does not simply expose the ‘peculiar moral maladies and suffering’, he also illustrates why the ‘maladies and suffering’ have their own aesthetic power and hence have the power to activate. Baudelaire’s aesthetic entwinement of social squalor, decadence and evil are lyrically and feverishly embraced by the poet whose incessant sibylline pronouncements are Dionysian affirmations of a world beyond morals and politics, or any other formation that the engineers and philosophers of morality have in mind.[60] The entanglement of joy and evil, of ugliness and beauty in Les Fleurs du Mal are no less real because they are dream-like and as morally elusive as they are defiant of the kind of compartmentalisations and dissections of the soul and body that are essential for any philosophical Enlightenment. Examples like the following abound: ‘Le succube verdâtre et le rose lutin/ T’ont-ils versé la peur et l’amour de leurs urnes? (The green succubus and rosy goblin,/ have they poured their fear and love from their urns on you?)’ (‘The Sick Muse’)[61]; ‘Une coupable joie et des fêtes étranges/ Pleines de baisers infernaux,/ Dont se réjouissait l’essaim des mauvais anges/ Nageant dans les plis des rideaux.’ (A guilty joy and strange feasts/ Full of infernal kisses/ In which the swarm of evil angels rejoiced/ Swimming in the folds of draperies)’[62] (‘A Martyr’); ‘Cependant des démons malsains dans l’atmosphère/ S’éveillent lourdement, comme des gens d’affaire,/ Et cognent en volant les volets et l’auvent. (Meanwhile unhealthy demons in the atmosphere/ slowly awaken, like men of affairs,/ and flying bump against the awnings and shutters)’[63] (‘Twilight’). Or take the sheer humanity of Baudelaire’s depiction of ‘Little Old Women’, with their ‘êtres singuliers, décrépits et charmants’ (singular being, decrepit and charming)’. ‘Ces monstres disloqués furent jadis des femmes (these dislocated monsters were formerly women’).[64] What could politics fix ‘Pour celui que l’austère Infortune allaita! (For those that austere Misfortune suckled!)’?
The political and moral may well indeed provide health care and a bed, but Baudelaire wants to be real about suffering and the pitiable nature of so much of the human condition. It is not that he is offering some cruel political program legitimating the travails of age or any other misfortune which ‘suckles us’, but he also has no part to play in offering false solace when it comes to ‘The Irreparable.’ For those who believe that (the) light (of morals and politics) will heal, Baudelaire responds:
Peut-on illuminer un ciel bourbeux et noir?
Peut-on déchirer des ténèbres
Plus denses que la poix, sans matin et sans soir,
Sans astres, sans éclairs funèbres?
Peut-on illuminer un ciel bourbeux et noir?
L’Espérance qui brille aux carreaux de l’Auberge
Est soufflée, est morte à jamais!
Sans lune et sans rayons, trouver où l’on héberge
Les martyrs d’un chemin mauvais!
Le Diable a tout éteint aux carreaux de l’Auberge!
(Can one illumine this muddy sky?
Can one tear from the darkness
More dense than pitch, without morning, without evening
Without stars, without funeral flares?
Can one illumine a muddy sky and night?
The hope that shines through the windows of the inn
Is extinguished, is dead forever!
Without moon and without rays, to find where one may take in
The martyrs of a bad path
The devil has completely shrouded the windows of the inn).[65]
This is indeed a dark view of the world – but for many it is a true view. And it is in the context of this hopeless truth that we can understand why Baudelaire believes that the allure of vice has more aesthetic value than virtue. For vice opens us to the darkness of the human spirit – or rather to those human spirits who form the constellation of modern lost souls. To poetically depict this darkness in its truth and power and potential is at the heart of Baudelaire’s poetics. In what is perhaps his most synoptic formulation of himself as an artist he writes in ‘Un Fantôme’ (‘A Phantom’): ‘Je suis comme un peintre qu’un Dieu moqueur Condamne à peindre, hélas! sur les ténèbres (I am like a painter that a mocking God condemns to paint, alas! On the darkness.)’ [66]
Concomitantly, The Flowers of Evil embraces the ugly as part of a larger aesthetic with evil no longer the contrary of beauty, but an indispensable adjunct and, frequently, dominant feature of something’s beauty. Max Dessoir puts it well:
“There are things which we cannot like, and yet they keep drawing the eye to themselves. This ugliness has the attractive power of the abyss. Even in common life the distortion of the ugly, the revolting, can actually fascinate us, not only as a stroke of the lash for our aroused sensitivity, but also as a painful stimulation of our life as a whole.”[67]
As an aesthete, the task is not to blind ourselves to ugliness, but to really look at it, and thereby dig out the beauty from it. Again Dessoir:
“as the dark from which the radiant light is set off, as the marshy ground in which wonderfully bright and fragrant flowers flourish, or as the sinister power with which the good struggles. Still more important is the ability of the ugly to extract aesthetic values from itself.”[68]
As with ugliness, so with evil. Friedrich Schlegel had succinctly observed in 1797 the ‘tendency of modern poetry to Satanism,’[69] and some two centuries later Daniel Bell argued that:
“The shift to release occurs with the breakup of religious authority in the mid-nineteenth century. In effect, the culture —particularly modernist culture —took over the relation with the demonic. But instead of taming it, as religion tried to do, the secular culture (art and literature) began to accept it, explore it, and revel in it, coming to see it as a source of creativity.”[70]
Baudelaire did indeed embrace the trope of the demonic but, somewhat contrary to Bell, Baudelaire thinks that most of his contemporaries are too enlightened to believe in the devil – thus falling for what he says, in the prose poem ‘The Generous Gambler’, is the devil’s greatest ruse: the belief that he does not exist. But before discussing that, let us note that Baudelaire’s position is both pre-Enlightenment and modern (so that a century later, as popular music became the soundscape for a great new style revolution, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was one of its anthems). While the enlightened could countenance God, so long as he was non-denominational and, as Kant would put it, an ‘idea’ of reason, the devil was beyond the pale. While the enlightened philosophers did not deny the existence of evil – and Kant would even argue for radical evil as a fundamental problem that human beings had to confront – ultimately the problem was one that had to be rationally ‘solved’. But such a solution is indicative of the failure to understand the problem. For Baudelaire, the devil is not a fabrication of reason or its misuse, but a power, a ubiquitous presence, which is better disclosed by the use of our imagination than through analysis. Thus, Baudelaire, without embarrassment or concession to the age of reason, launches us into the Flowers of Evil by declaring:
La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,
Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,
Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.
Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;
Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,
Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux,
Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches.
Sur l’oreiller du mal c’est Satan Trismégiste
Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,
Et le riche métal de notre volonté
Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.
C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!
Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;
Chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas,
Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.
(Nonsense, error, sin, stinginess
Occupy our spirits and work our bodies,
and feed our lovely remorse
as beggars nourish their lice.
Our sins are stubborn, our repentance feeble;
We make ourselves pay with grating confession
We happily return to the muddy path
Believing all our stains are washed away by cheap tears.
On the bed of evil it is Satan Trismegistus
Who enduringly cradles our bewitched spirit
And the previous metal of our will
is all vaporized by this knowing chemist.
It is the devil who holds the strings that stir us
We find lures in repugnant objects;
Each day we descend step by step into hell,
without horror, and traverse the putrid darkness.)[71]
Much of the Flowers of Evil is one great litany of sin, a confirmation of ‘the secret all know’, that ‘Vivre est un mal (to live is an evil)’[72] filled with carnal desires, greed, prurience, laziness, extravagance, indolent leechlike existence, indifference towards the weak and the poor, lack of charity and mercy, selfishness, and so on. Our brains literally are aflame with evil:
Un matin nous partons, le cerveau plein de flamme,
Le coeur gros de rancune et de désirs amers,
Et nous allons, suivant le rythme de la lame,
Berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers:
(One morning we depart, the brain full of flames,
The heart full of rancor and bitter desires;
And we proceed, following the rhythms of the swell,
Our infinity quaking on the finite seas.)[73]
Acknowledging the ubiquitous presence of evil is, for Baudelaire, simply part of the reality we have to deal with. There is no political solution, no political salvation that will defeat the devil. But people, nevertheless, manage to find joy in the squalor of their world. Baudelaire’s poetic devotion is to beauty, and thus amidst the squalor he identifies and sings the momentary transcendences of the crushed and the broken: for that is the only redemption available to them, and therein lies their own beauty. Thus, of the rag-pickers he writes:
Oui, ces gens harcelés de chagrins de ménage
Moulus par le travail et tourmentés par l’âge
Ereintés et pliant sous un tas de débris,
Vomissement confus de l’énorme Paris.
(Yes, these people harassed by domestic distress
Molded by work and tormented by age
Worn out and bending under the pile of debris
The embarrassing vomit of enormous Paris).[74]
The rag-pickers have their own ‘glorieux projets (glorious projects)’, and ‘des splendeurs de sa proper vertu (splendours of his own virtue)’, their stimulants and their ‘magie (magic)’, their ‘lumineuse orgie (luminous orgy)’ – their fraternity and celebration: ‘Ils apportent la glorie au people ivre d’amour (they bring glory to the people drunk with love).’ The drunken ragpickers are oblivious to the fact that some sneaks or informers (mouchards) think that they are akin to the poets in their own staggering and joyful release from their burdens.
The best commentary on the poem comes from Baudelaire himself in Artificial Paradises where he writes: ‘I have sometimes thought with horror that there were labors that brought no joy, labors that brought no pleasure, worries without comfort, sorrows without recompense.’[75] He then describes the rag-picker sifting through ‘the daily debris of the capital’ with a sense of prideful purpose who, having battled through the day, has ‘his back and thighs…scraped raw by the weight of his basket,’ finds solace in drink at night. For ‘the unnamed masses of people who, even in the calm of sleep, can find no respite from their sorrow…wine composes songs and poems’.[76]
In his depiction of the suffering and joy of the rag-pickers, Baudelaire is not arguing over the merits or demerits of an economic system, he simply sees how people deal with their suffering. He is a ‘witness to human life’, as Marcel Ruff puts it,[77] and he detects how they find their own transcendence. For him, they are not that different to the poet. It is the common condition of humanity that captures Baudelaire’s heart. He depicts the pitiable nature of the condition, but he would rather celebrate the rag-pickers in their joyous moments of solidarity than simply objectify them with his pity. The ragpickers are not just misery incarnate, he living souls capable who manage to find their moments of bliss within their condition. Baudelaire entices the reader to share the wine (‘Les baumes pénétrants (the penetrating balms)’[78] of the despairing. It is not even that Baudelaire is fighting others who want to find social solutions to social problems – that is something for others. He is dealing with raw experience and its momentary transcendence here and now. Although we will leave our discussion of Benjamin’s view of the ragpicker to a later chapter, the one thing we must say here is that Benjamin’s claim that ‘Baudelaire unites the poverty of the ragpicker with the scorn of the cadger and the despair of the parasite’ is neither accurate, nor fair.[79]
Aware of the pathos of sickness (for evil is, as we retain it in English, a malady, an affliction of souls) he is more than ‘forgiving’ of such ‘sin’; and we are all afflicted in some ways, if we but have the courage to admit it. For Baudelaire, decadence is an everyday feature of the real, not something to be locked away and hidden. It is also to be aware of the drives and torment that are behind it all, drives which do not simply disappear because they are shut out of the idealized aesthetic ideas of morality. The bourgeois wanted its world and its pure conscience; the latter required keeping hidden what the poet finds in plain sight. Baudelaire interrupts the ‘game’ by not only failing to denounce, but depicting in detail and care in such a way that one can see exactly why the ‘sins’ occur, why the maladies won’t disappear, why humans do what they do – from the most wretched and squalid to the most refined and cultivated. With Baudelaire, culture was no longer a means of dissemblance to protect the moral high-ground; it opened up the veil of the beautiful low-lands.
While we have emphasized throughout that Baudelaire’s work is not political, it is revolutionary: revolutionary in terms of taste and social expectation, wanting to topple the entire aesthetic edifice of the society and indeed the hypocritical rationality that holds its ethos together. As Camus remarked of the dandy in general: ‘The dandy is by occupation, always in opposition’. [80] To present his opposition in the most outrageous way he proclaims a demonic revolt, thereby outraging those so enlightened that they trust their own ‘natural light’. Whereas the German romantics of Hegel’s generation were wrestling with the problem of faith and knowledge (and Hegel would write a book with this title arguing against the tack of so many of his contemporaries to make faith a kind of ‘leap’, as Jacobi would put it, or ‘rational faith’ [Kant] beyond the limits of knowledge), Baudelaire depicts the dead ends of the soul’s modern labyrinths. Descartes’ great promise in the sixth part of the Discourse on Method was that his method (and modern science generally),[81] once freed from the constraints of ancient error, would deliver a world of comfort in which the burdens of labour would be replaced by machines and we could look forward to staving off illness, possibly even death. Subsequently, the dramaturgy of the soul caught between good and evil was more and more displaced by the desire for power and domination over natural and (after Rousseau) social forces. As the trilogy of poems of ‘Revolt’ (‘The Denial of Saint Peter’, ‘Abel and Cain’, and the ‘Litanies of Satan’) illustrate, the drive for mastery in modernity is seen by Baudelaire as a demonic quest.
Baudelaire’s shock tactic is in the honesty of his blasphemy. His repeated supplication to Satan to take pity on his misery serves as a mirror to ‘his reader’, his hypocritical brother, of what is really happening in the world as the race of Cain (the murderous founder of cities) whose ‘besogne/ N’est past faite suffisamment’ (work/ does not yet suffice)’ and who would ‘au ciel mounte/ Et sur la terre jette Dieu! (mount the skies/ to throw God down to earth.)’ What follows the poems of demonic revolt are the poems of ‘Death,’ lending support to D’Aurevilly’s claim that Les Fleurs du Mal had a ‘secret architecture’.
Jonathan Culler has rightly pointed out that when confronted with the ‘Baudelaire who invokes demons and the Devil’, ‘most critics today pass over this in silence, but even those who explicitly address this Baudelaire seem to find him an embarrassment.’[82] This is indeed symptomatic of the modern enlightened bourgeois sensibility that Baudelaire’s poems savagely attack.
Baudelaire’s revolt, as we have emphasized throughout, is not for any strictly moral or political purpose, but, through the power of art, to help human beings move beyond their ennui. Lyric poetry was ever the most intimate of communicative forms – the form in which Bruno Snell saw the discovery of the interiority of the ‘I’.[83] Marxists have inevitably tried to eliminate the intimate and private, as if they were the bulwarks of bourgeois individualism and capitalism. This is an historical myth; the moment Sappho or Archilochus honestly and intimately conveyed their deepest desires to a listener or reader who could identify with these sentiments, a new sensorium had been discovered. Baudelaire was a witness and voice for the gamut of passions and behaviours that we enact out of our loneliness and desperation. His poetry is one of tremendous sympathy for the human condition.
But Baudelaire does not want to ‘save’ humanity from itself. The twentieth century would demonstrate that such a task inevitably turns the world into a gulag or concentration camp. The Flower of Evil ultimately saves and sublimates art, and gives art a new meaning, a meaning that does what all great art does: it spawns other artists in the knowledge that artistry is one of the precious things that makes life lovable. But to do this we must make some sort of peace with evil, an aesthetic peace, and acknowledge the devil’s place in the world.
Notes
[1] The Writer of Modern Life,130.
[2] Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osbourne, (London: Verso, 2003), 36.
[3] Ibid., 29.
[4] When asked to assess Benjamin’s writings, Hans Heinz Schaeder wrote to Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, deploring what he saw as Benjamin’s ‘Pseudoplatonism’: ‘the most dangerous malady that can befall anyone who deals with historical matters ex professo or out of his own inclination.’ And, ‘he does not present his subject, does not even wish to do so, but instead seeks to grasp the ideational content of the subject, eliminating the historical hic et nunc.’ Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, 148.
[5] Origin of German Tragic Drama, 47-48.
[6] Ibid., 45-46.
[7] Ibid., 46.
[8] Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 4, 3.
[9] Benjamin cites Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Review of Adolphe Chenu, Les Conspirateurs (Paris, 1850), and of Lucien de La Hodde, ‘La Naissance de la Republique en fevrier 1848,’ (Paris, 1850); quoted from Die neue Zeit, 4 (1886): 555.
[10] Ibid., 261. As Jennings points out, this is a note by Benjamin appended to his essay ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,’ in Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 3.
[11] Charles Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by T.R. Smith, (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 211.
[12] Debarati Sanyal’s, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
[13] Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[14] T. J. Clarke, The Absolute Bourgeoisie: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 178.
[15] Graham Chesters, ‘A Political Reading of Baudelaire’s “L’Artiste inconnu’” in The Modern Language Review. Volume 79, No. 1 (January, 1984), 64-76.
[16] J. M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 45.
[17] Richard D. E. Burton, Baudelaire and the Agony of the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
[18] Eugène Crépet, Baudelaire: Étude Biographique, (Paris: Messein, 1907), and W.T. Bandy ‘New Light on Baudelaire’s Role in the Revolution of 1848’. Paper Read Before French VI Section of the MLA, New Orleans, December 1939. From the W. T. Bandy Centre for Baudelaire Studies in Vanderbilt University.
[19] Jules Mouquet and W.T. Bandy, Baudelaire en 1848: La tribune nationale, (Paris: Emile-Paul Freres, 1946).
[20] Eugène Crépet, Baudelaire: Étude Biographique, 76-77.
[21] W.T. Bandy ‘New Light on Baudelaire’s Role in the Revolution of 1848.’ Read Before French VI Section of the MLA, New Orleans, December 1939, 3. From the W. T. Bandy Centre for Baudelaire Studies in Vanderbilt University.
[22] Ibid., 4.
[23] Ibid., 5
[24] Ibid., 6-7.
[25] Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, 67.
[26] Ibid., 67.
[27] Ibid., 68.
[28] Ibid., 67.
[29] Eugène Crépet, Baudelaire: Étude Biographique, 87.
[30] Intimate Journals, 68.
[31] This is a core argument of Alexis Tocqueville, The Old Regime and Revolution, translated by John Bonner, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856).
[32] Rosemary Lloyd, Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude, (The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 170.
[33] Lois Boe Hyslop does, however, make a convincing case that Baudelaire did have a lingering affection for Proudhon. See her ‘Baudelaire, Proudhon, and “Le Reniement de Saint Pierre”’ in French Studies, Volume XXX, Issue 3, July 1976, 273-286. We recall that Marx’s assessment of Proudhon, driven home with typical polemical verve in The Poverty of Philosophy, was that Proudhon ‘sees things upside down, if he sees them at all’. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon, (Moscow: Progress, 1955), 62. In his letter to Johann Baptist Schweitzer of January 24, 1865, he would liken Proudhon to Rousseau and Voltaire and Louis Bonaparte to Napoleon. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx/ Engels Selected Correspondence, (Moscow: Progress, 1955), 142-148.
[34] Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, 230-231.
[35] For Baudelaire, Rousseau was a ‘sentimental and vile author,’ and as Virginia Swaine sums up, ‘a liar who claims that he puts truth above life.’ Virginia Swain, Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau and the Aesthetics of Modernity, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 2004), 1-2. Indeed, for Baudelaire, Rousseau is a symptom and representative of modern abstractness, a man whose sentimental dreams and nostalgia for purity bear little relationship to the reality moderns inhabit.
[36] Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, (translated and introduction by Stacy Diamond, (New York: Citadel, 1996), 7.
[37] At least since Max Beerbohm’s essay of 1896, ‘Dandies and Dandies’ in The Works of Max Beerbohm, (London: John Lane, 1896), a number of scholars have focused upon Baudelaire’s dandyism and its relationship to his aesthetics. Moreover, dandyism was a ‘movement’ not an invention of Baudelaire, with some literary figures, such as George Brummel, being key players in it. Nevertheless, for Beerbohm, Baudelaire is unique in that he endows Brummell’s dandy spirit with modern aesthetic meaning, defining it as an anti-mediocre spiritual form resisting the vulgarized and materialized society. There is also an excellent discussion of the history of dandyism by Rhonda Garelick in her Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1998). She explores the evolution of dandyism in the 19th century through three key texts: Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s essay on Brummell, and Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life. In addition, she connects the decadent movement with dandyism, claiming that the decadent movement crystallized certain concepts of dandyism. Bernard Howells, in Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History, (Oxford: Legenda,
European Humanities Research Centre, 1996), looks at intellectual dandyism through a textual analysis of Baudelaire’s individualism, cynicism and decadence. Another useful biographical history of the dandy can be found in Richard Pine, The Dandy and the Herald: Mind, Manners, and Morals from Brummell to Durrell, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
[38] Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, translated by Susan Emanuel, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992), 64.
[39] Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artist, translated by P.E. Charvet, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 397.
[40] Ibid., 402.
[41] Albert Camus, The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 49.
[42] Charles Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, 223-224. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 315.
[43] The North American rendering of Nietzsche’s politics, if not driven by his post-structuralist reception, generally repeats Walter Kaufmann’s deeply misleading existentialist reading of the relationship between Nietzsche and Nazism (according to Kaufmann the Nazi’s completely misread everything), which suppresses or simply twists beyond recognition Nietzsche’s litany of references to physiology (always treated as metaphor by Kaufmann). Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Deleuze and Derrida completely downplay the actual Nazi reception of Nietzsche and, given Nietzsche’s anti-feminism, anti-socialism, and general antipathy to democracy and the masses, Derrida’s democratization of Nietzsche is simply breathtaking. See Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, edited, translated and Introduction by Elizabeth Rottenberg, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 234-235. For a more historically accurate and thorough discussion of Nietzsche and fascism, see Bernhard Taureck, Nietzsche und der Faschismus: Ein Politikum, (Leipzig: Reklam, 2000).
[44] ‘The Old Montebank’ in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, 66.
[45] Letter to Alphonse Toussenel, January 21, 1856, in Charles Baudelaire, Lettres 1841-1866, (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1906), 84.
[46] Intimate Journals, 107. For Baudelaire’s high esteem for de Maistre, see Kathryn Oliver Mills, ‘Baudelaire’s Teacher: Joseph de Maistre’s Teacher and Le Spleen de Paris,’ Romance Quarterly, 50:3, 177-185, (2003), 178. Also, Daniel Vouga, Baudelaire et Joseph de Maistre, (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1957).
[47] Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artist, 421.
[48] Ibid., 287.
[49] Baudelaire, Ibid.
[50] Ellen Moers in The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm, (London: Secker & Walburg, 1960) claims, that dandyism ‘as a pose and as an attitude … came to serve a social need’ under the monarch in France, working positively to protect the artists’ ‘social superiority without reference to wealth and power’, 121-122. The dandy sought refuge in the revolt and non-reproducible aesthetic attitude, according to Moers, becoming ‘a pose for the intellectual in revolt’, 124.
[51] Intimate Journals, 93.
[52] Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, 279.
[53] Ibid., 266.
[54] Ibid., 280.
[55] Ibid.267.
[56] In Poe and Ruskin, for example, see R. V. Johnson, Aestheticism, (London: Methuen & Co., 1969), 51, and Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature 1830-1880, volume 1, (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1927), 232.
[57] ‘Hymne à la Beauté’, Les Fleurs du Mal, XXII.
[58] Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, 267.
[59] Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artist, 112.
[60] Baudelaire anticipates much in Nietzsche, but their temperaments and sensibilities are worlds apart. Nietzsche’s dream of the supermen and a higher table of values would, from Baudelaire’s point of view, be just another philosophical delusion.
[61] Les Fleurs du Mal, VII.
[62] Ibid., CXXXV.
[63] Ibid, CXIX.
[64] Ibid, CXV.
[65] Ibid, LIII.
[66] Ibid., XXXIX.
[67] Max Dessoir, Aesthetics and Theory of Art, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970, 168.
[68] Dessoir, Aesthetics and Theory of Art, 169.
[69] Notebook entry of 1797 by Friedrich Schlegel, KritischeFriedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, edited by E. Behler with J.J. Anstett and Hans Eichner, (Munich, 1958), 18-24.
[70] Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, (Basic Books, 1973), 19.
[71] Les Fleurs du Mal, Préface, ‘Au lectuer,’ lxxvii-iii.
[72] Ibid., ‘Semper Eadem,’ XLI.
[73] Ibid., CLI.
[74] Ibid., CXXIX.
[75] Artificial Paradises, 7-8.
[76] Ibid., 7-8.
[77] Marcel Ruff, Baudelaire, translated by Agnes Kertesz, (London: University of London Press, 1966), 90.
[78] Les Fleurs du Mal, CXXXI.
[79] Arcades Project, 375.
[80] Camus, The Rebel, 47.
[81] Similar promises were made by Bacon in his New Atlantis.
[82] Jonathan Culler, ‘Baudelaire’s Satanic Verses’, in Diacritics, Vol. 28, No. 3, Doing French Studies (Autumn, 1998), 86-100, 86. By contrast, Arthur Symons had rightly understood that a core part of Baudelaire’s satanical genius lay in his ‘vision of satan.’ Arthur Symons, Charles Baudelaire: A Study, (London: Elkin Matthews, 1920), 29. ‘He sees the germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass before him the world’s drama,’ 37.
[83] See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), 42-70.
This excerpt is from Baudelaire Contra Benjamin: A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism. Our review of the book is here.
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