From “Notes on Baudelaire’s Parisian Tableaux,” which was published for the first time in English in the Fall 2024 issue of October. Translated from the French by Michael Krimper.

Baudelaire was solitary in the most terrible sense of the word. “Sentiment of solitude since my childhood. Despite family, and in the company of friends, especially—sentiment of a destiny forever solitary.” This sentiment bears a social imprint beyond its individual meaning. A digression will briefly clarify it.

In feudal society, enjoying leisure—exemption from work—constituted a privilege. Privilege not only de facto but by law. Things are no longer like that in bourgeois society. Feudal society could all the more easily recognize the privilege of leisure in some of its members because it had the means to ennoble this attitude and even to transfigure it. The life of the court and contemplative life were two models in which the leisure of the lord, the prelate, and the warrior could function. These attitudes, that of representation as well as that of devotion, suited this society’s poet, and his work justified them. In writing, the poet stays in contact, at least indirectly, with religion or the court, or even with them both. (Voltaire, the first of the men of letters in question who deliberately breaks with the church, took refuge with the king of Prussia.)

In feudal society, the poet’s leisure is a recognized privilege. By contrast, once the bourgeoisie takes power, the poet is put out of work and becomes le désœuvré, “the idler” par excellence. This situation did not occur without provoking notable confusion. There were numerous attempts to escape it. The talents who seemed to be well at ease in their vocation as poet thrived the most: Lamartine, Victor Hugo felt like they were invested with a new dignity. They were in a certain way the secular priests of the bourgeoisie. Others—Béranger, Pierre Dupont—were content to rely on catchy melodies to ensure their popularity. Others still, such as Barbier, made the cause of the fourth estate their own. Others finally—Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle—found their place in art for art’s sake.

Baudelaire did not know how to take any of these paths. This is what Valéry said so well in his famous Situation of Baudelaire, where we read:

Baudelaire’s problem has to be formulated thus: to be a great poet, but to be neither Lamartine, nor Hugo, nor Musset. I am not saying that this aim was conscious, but it was necessarily in Baudelaire—and even essentially Baudelaire. It was his raison d’état.

One could say that in the face of this problem Baudelaire decided to flaunt it before the public. He resolved to show off his idle existence, deprived of social identity; he turned himself into a sign of social isolation; he became a flâneur. Here, as for all of Baudelaire’s essential attitudes, it seems impossible and vain to distinguish between what had been contingent or necessary, chosen or endured, artificial or natural. In this case, such an entanglement is due to Baudelaire’s elevation of idleness to the rank of a working method, of his very own method. We know that in many periods of his life he was not acquainted with, as it were, any worktable. It was by drifting that he fashioned and above all that he incessantly rearranged his verse.