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CHAPTER 1

___________

“Partisans Inconnus”

Aesthetic Community and the Public Good in Baudelaire

Great damage has been caused to terrestrial togetherness

[l’association terrestre], for centuries, by conflating it with the

brutal mirage, the city, its governments, or the civil code.

—Stéphane Mallarmé, “La Musique et les lettres”

Le Salut public

Several months after the December 1851 coup d’état that launched Louis Napoleon into power and replaced the unstable French Second Republic with the veritable police state of the Second Empire, Baudelaire wrote in a letter to his trustee Narcisse Ancelle that recent events had left him “physically depoliticized [dépolitiqué].”¹ The Bonapartist coup has long been regarded as a crucial turning point in Baudelaire’s political development. In the years leading up to the Revolutions of 1848, Baudelaire was an enthusiastic partisan of socialist and republican political theorists such as Charles Fourier, Auguste Blanqui, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He participated actively in the street fighting in 1848, and, as Richard D. E. Burton has argued in his meticulously documented study Baudelaire and the Second Republic, never wholly gave up his commitment to the republican ideals of the French Revolution. After 1852, Baudelaire began to read widely in the works of conservative figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph de Maistre, precipitating a turn in his political views from the collectivist ideals of utopian socialism to an antidemocratic and theologically driven conservatism. But Baudelaire’s turn does not, as Burton writes and as other critics have assumed, entail a “withdrawal from the public world of politics into one of private reflection.”² Burton is right to note that, after 1852, Baudelaire largely gave up the public activism that marked his involvement in the 1848 revolutions, and adopted the apocalyptic voice and exotic imagery that defined his influence on the decadent movement. Despite his evident claim to the contrary in the letter to Ancelle, however, he never ceased conceptualizing aesthetic concepts in distinctly public and collective terms.

I argue in this chapter that a classically republican valorization of civic virtue runs like a red thread through Baudelaire’s work and fundamentally shapes his understanding of art and taste. Defining beauty as an endangered nexus for sociability and a means of imagining alternatives to the contemporary political order, Baudelaire looks to the tradition of civic humanism as an alternative to the privatization of aesthetic (and other) experience that marks bourgeois liberalism.³ He could not have been aware of the international decadent movement that arose in the years after his death, and his scattered self-identifications as a decadent are invariably ironic, but his account of the relationship between art and politics was a durable source of inspiration for later decadent writers and decisively shaped the themes and rhetoric that came to define the movement.

Baudelaire’s civic humanism is utopian rather than pragmatic, addressing an imaginary community of aesthetic outsiders rather than the broader public of mid-century France.⁴ Yet it is this community of outsiders, and not the ascendant bourgeoisie or its political representatives, that best understands and serves the public good. Looking back to the long tradition in Western thought of joining art and taste to the political order, Baudelaire argues that artistic beauty should serve the commonweal rather than the private pleasures of its citizens. It is a public good, not private property. Plato’s Republic is an obvious, if vexed, reference point for this project.⁵ More germane to Baudelaire’s historical moment, however, is the eighteenth-century aesthetic tradition of Lord Shaftesbury, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich von Schiller, which had made its way into French philosophy in the early nineteenth century.⁶ For this tradition, as for Baudelaire (albeit in a different key), the pleasures of beauty are a kind of embryonic politics, which form a bridge between the individual subject and the larger public. Judgments of taste, in Kant’s formulation, are subjectively universal, true for the subject who experiences them, and formulated in a manner that assumes their validity for everyone else, anticipating the objectively universal principles that govern moral and political judgments.

It is unclear how well Baudelaire knew this tradition, but he shares its understanding of art and taste as fundamentally social. From his earliest writings, he rigorously associates artistic production and reception not with the personal and individualistic, as one might expect, but with the public and collective. By contrast, the traditionally “political” concerns of the liberal tradition— laws, rights, and the social contract—come to seem matters of private interest.⁷ Baudelaire’s civic humanism casts the aesthetic community as a classically republican alternative to the modern (liberal) republicanism established by the French and American Revolutions. Classical republican historiography defines corruption—the hallmark of a republic in decline—as the substitution of private relationships for public debate and individual gain for the common good.⁸ Baudelaire analyzes the condition of modern art in terms of just this substitution, casting the artist and the critic as paragons of civic virtue doing battle against a tyrannical and decadent bourgeoisie whose universalizing constitutions and proclamations of abstract rights mask a corrupt self-interest.

Nowhere is Baudelaire’s reworking of the conventional oppositions between public and private, collective and individual, aesthetic and political more succinctly played out than in the prose poem “Le Miroir [The Mirror],” first published in 1864:

Un homme épouvantable entre et se regarde dans la glace.

“—Pourquoi vous regardez-vous au miroir, puisque vous ne pouvez vous y voir qu’avec déplaisir?”

L’homme épouvantable me répond: “—Monsieur, d’après les immortels principes de 89, tous les hommes sont égaux en droits; donc je possède le droit de me mirer; avec plaisir ou dépaisir, cela ne regarde que ma conscience.”

Au nom du bon sens, j’avais sans doute raison; mais, au point de vue de la loi, il n’avait pas tort.

[An appalling man enters and looks at himself in a glass.

“Why do you look at yourself in the mirror, since you can only look at yourself there with displeasure?”

The appalling man replies: “Sir, according to the immortal principles of ‘89, all men are equal before the law; therefore I have the right to look at myself in the glass; with pleasure or displeasure, that is an entirely personal matter.”

In respect of common sense, I was certainly right; but from the point of view of the law, he was not wrong.]

(OC I, 344; PS 83; trans. modified)

This prose poem is often read as an aestheticist repudiation of democratic ideals and bourgeois self-regard, in which the speaker confronts the appalling man’s claims to legal equality with the higher ideal of beauty. But the poem challenges the division between beauty and law it seems at first glance to enforce. For it is the appalling man, not the speaker, who assumes that aesthetic pleasure is “an entirely personal matter”; he insists upon an absolute division between formal political rights and private feelings. Baudelaire’s speaker, by contrast, assumes that beauty and pleasure should be debated in public—the poem is built around just such a debate—and that the public good relies on beauty as much as on legal equality. Aesthetic judgment is not merely an individual choice but a res publica in the most literal terms, as Baudelaire’s appeal to “bon sens” (good sense, common sense) makes clear. Beauty answers to the public good, while law only serves private interest and desire, despite the appalling man’s protestations to the contrary and the dismissive tone of the speaker.

In 1848, Baudelaire helped to found a republican literary journal with the provocatively Jacobin title Le Salut public [Public Safety]. Even as he became disillusioned with socialism and moved from the radical left to the radical right, he continued to associate art and beauty with the public good. For Baudelaire, judgments of taste are political acts, ideally restricted to an elite yet crucial to the public good, even if the public (always and inevitably) does not realize it. It is the civic duty of this elite to remind the public of its debt to beauty and to underscore the false promises of laws and rights. Baudelaire’s early art criticism is quite explicit about this point. His first mature critical statement, the Salon de 1846, opens with a dedication entitled “Aux Bourgeois [To the Bourgeois],” that, anticipating “Le Miroir,” casts the aims of the review in terms of public policy.⁹ Having gained political power during the reign of Louis Philippe, the bourgeoisie now need to be educated in beauty: “The government of the city is in your hands, and that is just [juste], for you are the force. But you must also be capable of feeling beauty; for as not one of you today can do without power, so not one of you has the right [droit] to do without poetry” (OC II, 415; AIP 41). Baudelaire addresses his book to this new force as a kind of primer, which seeks to buttress the cultural authority of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy on the one hand, which claims a monopoly over taste, and the working-class republicans, self-proclaimed heirs of the French Revolution, on the other, who favor utility over beauty. It remains unclear whether this dedication is earnest or ironic.¹⁰ Regardless, Baudelaire insists that art and politics cannot be disentangled, and that the critic’s task is political—fundamentally concerned with the polis—even if he or she never takes a coherent political position.

Baudelaire read widely in the works of political theorists like Fourier and Blanqui during the 1840s, and their collectivist ideas ground his claims about the relationship between the critic and the public in the Salon de 1846.¹¹ Their influence comes across most powerfully in Baudelaire’s defense of artistic schools, which draws on socialist theories of association. The penultimate section of the review, entitled “Des écoles et des ouvriers [On Schools and Workers],” opens with a street scene that describes a literal clash between aesthetic theory and public policy:

If ever your idler’s curiosity has landed you in a street brawl [un émeute], perhaps you will have felt the same delight as I have often felt to see a protector of the public slumbers—a policeman or a municipal guard (the real army)—thumping a republican. And if so, like me, you will have said in your heart: “Thump on, thump a little harder, thump again, beloved constable! for at this supreme thumping, I adore thee and judge thee equal of Jupiter, the great dealer of justice [le grand justicier]! The man whom thou thumpest is an enemy of roses and perfume, and a maniac for utensils. He is the enemy of Watteau, the enemy of Raphael, the bitter enemy of luxury, of the fine arts and of literature, a sworn iconoclast and butcher of Venus and Apollo! He is no longer willing to help with the public roses and perfumes, as a humble and anonymous journeyman. He wants to be free, poor fool; but he is incapable of founding a factory for new flowers and new scents. Thump him devoutly across the shoulder-blades, the anarchist!

(OC II, 490; AIP 113–14)

Most recent critics have treated this apparent celebration of police power, like the opening celebration of bourgeois political power, as deeply ironic. Given that Baudelaire’s despised stepfather was a military man, who would lead his troops in defense of the public order in the streets of Paris during the Revolutions of 1848—on the other side of the barricades from Baudelaire—the ironic reading is entirely plausible. Here again, however, the question of Baudelaire’s specific political affiliation is less important than the underlying assertion that art and beauty are fundamentally public matters. Although the unlucky republican in this scene would seem to share Baudelaire’s devotion to civic virtue, he in fact represents liberal self-interest. Elevating individual rights (“He wants to be free”) over what Baudelaire takes to be the public good, he betrays the collective ideals embodied by art and beauty (Watteau, Raphael) and is punished accordingly. The pursuit of abstract rights is private and individualistic, however public and political the process of securing these rights may be. By contrast, the creation of beauty and pleasurable sensation (roses and perfumes) is collective (they are “public” and the products of a factory), serves the public good, and should be defended by the force of the state.

This street scene helps to establish Baudelaire’s broader critical point in the section: that the superficial artistic individualism of the journeymen painters who were flooding the market with their mediocre work has replaced the “sovereignty of genius” that once governed the collective labor of artistic schools (OC II, 490; AIP 114). There are still true masters among current painters, but their “pupils” are mostly unknown to them, and their doctrines, carried by impersonal networks of communication, extend their dominion beyond the studio to regions where they are not understood. Those closest to the master “preserve the purity of his doctrines”; those outside the “family circle” borrow illegitimately from the schools. Baudelaire calls this group the “artistic apes”: “a vast population of mediocrities— apes of different and mixed breeds [singes de races diverses et croisées], a floating race [nation] of half-castes who move each day from one country to the next” (OC II, 491; AIP 115). The result of this individualism and mindless eclecticism is “an exhausting and sterile freedom [liberté]” (OC II, 492; AIP 116). The artistic apes, Baudelaire concludes, are “the republicans of art,” who glorify the individual at the expense of the community. Against this model, Baudelaire argues for a return to the “collective originality” of the schools that surrounded the great masters in the Renaissance (OC II, 492; AIP 116).

Baudelaire’s terminology in this section, as I noted above, has its roots in utopian socialism, but one finds the same sentiments, and much the same political imagery, in later writings as well. In “Le Peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life]” (1863), for example, Baudelaire compares the struggle between the detail and structure in an artistic composition to a street battle: “An artist with a perfect sense of form but one accustomed to relying above all on his memory and imagination will find himself at the mercy of a riot [assailli par une émeute] of details all clamouring for justice with the fury of a mob in love with absolute equality [égalité absolue]. All justice is trampled underfoot; all harmony sacrificed and destroyed; many a trifle assumes vast proportions; many a triviality usurps the attention. The more our artist turns an impartial eye on detail, the greater is the state of anarchy. Whether he be long-sighted or short-sighted, all hierarchy and all subordination vanishes” (OC II, 698–99; PML 16). Here again, Baudelaire associates the demand for formal political equality with lost artistic integrity and a threat to the public good, even using the same word (“émeute”) to describe the resulting disorder. Maintaining an impartial eye—the blind eye of justice, or the formal equality of the bourgeois nation-state—sacrifices the collective good to individual whim, and the entire community suffers. By contrast with the socialist vocabulary of “Des écoles et des ouvriers,” Baudelaire now speaks the authoritarian language of the right (hierarchy, subordination, the mob). But the analogy underlying both street scenes is the same: the artistic and the public good are ill served by the tradition of liberal individualism, with its elevation of the atomistic monad over the collective social body.

“Mon Semblable,—Mon Frère!”

Beginning with his praise of the artistic schools, Baudelaire speaks to and for a literary and artistic elite that abides within the modern world but operates according to its own laws and institutions. It is a self-selected community within the broader society, a decadent republic of letters. As Walter Benjamin recognized, Baudelaire was the first poet to understand the nature of the modern literary public; he writes “to whose who are like him.”¹² Benjamin here refers to the shrinking audience for lyric poetry, but the point applies to Baudelaire’s other audiences as well. Baudelaire appeals to the aesthetic elite as “friends” and “unknown sympathizers [partisans inconnus]” (OC II, 779; PML 111), and characterizes this elite as an aristocracy. “I think,” he writes in the Salon de 1859, that “artistic affairs should only be discussed between aristocrats, and … that it is the scarcity of the elect that makes a paradise” (OC II, 633; AIP 168). Perpetually impoverished and a product of the stolid middle class, Baudelaire by no means saw himself as a part of any actually existing sociopolitical aristocracy. Rather, and in a manner that would influence the often deceptive class politics of later decadent writers (who were overwhelmingly drawn in both France and England from the provincial middle classes), he maps the traditional prerogatives of aristocratic life—its leisure, its history of artistic patronage, and, crucially, its perceived sense of responsibility for the commonweal—onto the ideal of an artistic life. The marginality of nineteenth-century artists mimics the leisure that enabled aristocrats in earlier republics to serve the public good. Creating beauty and exercising the faculty of taste are acts of civic virtue, a contribution to the betterment of the polis.

Gesturing toward the hereditary nature of aristocratic rule, Baudelaire defines his elite as a kind of family. The language of kinship, with its weight of nature and familial obligation, might seem to sit uncomfortably with Baudelaire’s civic humanist ideal, but it is in fact essential to it: artistic genius is a birthright, like aristocratic blood. Membership in Baudelaire’s elite is wholly elective, however. It is necessary yet chosen, at once natural and constructed. The language of kinship also underscores the bonds of sympathy that unite the members of the elite. They are an unnatural family, kindred spirits born into membership and bound by artistic affiliation, not by blood; the only lineage they recognize is artistic tradition, with the relationship between master and disciple supplanting that of parent and child, and recasting the republican virtue of universal fraternity. In the Salon de 1846, I noted above, Baudelaire contrasts the “family circle” of an artist’s true disciples with the “artistic apes,” who borrow from any and every master. The most authentic family is brought together by theory and the faculty of taste; the “artistic apes,” by contrast, are a “race,” their artistic failure figured as biological inferiority.

Baudelaire’s family of taste is set apart from the masses and often opposed to the ruling order, but it is by no means divorced from the life of the nation. It is a vanguard, paradoxically bound all the more closely to the polis by its alienation from the mainstream. The members of this family are highly sensitive to political changes, living out the effects of historical transitions to which the rest of the nation remains oblivious. At the end of his 1863 obituary essay on Delacroix, Baudelaire ascribes a macropolitical function to his aesthetic elite. Noting that the death of great artists can have a powerfully depressive effect on mood of a country, he describes the passing of Delacroix as a “great national sorrow” that engenders in the populace a “sensation of growing solitude,” “a lowering of the general vitality; a clouding of the intellect” (OC II, 769; PML 68). The aesthetic elite experiences the sense of national loss before the nation as a whole does: “I believe however that this impression is chiefly confined to those proud anchorites [hautains solitaires] who can only make themselves a family by means of intellectual relations. As for the rest of the community [autres citoyens], it is only gradually that they most of them learn to realize the full extent of their country’s loss in losing its great man, and to appreciate what an empty space he has left behind. And yet it is only right to warn them” (OC II, 769; PML 68). An influential line of political thought from Plato to Hegel and Marx opposes familial and political bonds. Family is natural, involuntary, private, and insular, while citizenship is cultural, elective, communal, and outward turning.¹³ Baudelaire follows Aristotle in placing the family at the very heart of the political order, but this family is not the oikos of the Politics—a natural monarchy governed by the father. Rather, it is a “headless” household organized by shared taste, and by ideas alone. Significantly scrambling the traditional opposition between familial and public life, Baudelaire’s intellectual family of “proud anchorites” has a keen sense of political change. The ostensibly public community of “other citizens” remains unaware of its national loss, while the proud anchorites feel the loss out of proportion to the rest of the nation. The intellectual family Baudelaire describes is not opposed to the political world. Indeed, the community of anchorites takes upon itself the responsibility of warning the public of a tragedy it does not recognize. The solitude of artists and writers is not a threat to community but a crucial element of it.

Baudelaire uses kinship terms in surprising contexts to describe such voluntary or countercultural communities and, in particular, to characterize those “heroic” figures—the flâneur, the lesbian, the poet, and the dandy— that Benjamin recognized as central to his account of modernity. The artistic schools idealized in the Salon de 1846, which Baudelaire describes in familial terms, are an important instance of this idea. In the prose poem “Les Foules [Crowds],” first published in 1861, Baudelaire compares the “refined” pleasure of wandering in urban crowds to the creation of spiritual or intellectual “families”: “The founders of colonies, the shepherds of people, missionary priests exiled to the end of the world, doubtless know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius [au sein de la vaste famille que leur genie s’est faite], they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives” (OC I, 291–92; PS 20–21). The “art” of city walking is akin to the formation of new communities. From a position of figurative exile, the artistic flâneur creates a virtual family by thinking himself into the anonymous lives that surround him, much as the colonial and missionary figures the poem evokes create a new social body from the outcasts of another. In both cases, imagination (“genius”) creates a family where there was not one before. William Olmsted has noted the way Baudelaire’s poetic lists and groups often constitute “subversive taxonomies,” which posit open-ended communities of outsiders and thereby demonstrate the “solidarity of a large group whose actual connections may be nonexistent.”¹⁴ Baudelaire often designates such solidarity with kinship terms, as in his ambivalent appeal to the reader as “frère” in “Au Lecteur,” or his address to the isolated community of lesbians in “Femmes damnées” as “Pauvres soeurs [poor sisters]” (OC I, 114; FE 247). In the 1864 prose poem “Les Vocations” Baudelaire’s speaker overhears four boys talking about some gypsy musicians to whose itinerant artistic life one of them was deeply attracted. The speaker feels an immediate bond of sympathy with this boy and develops “the strange idea that I might, unknown to me, have a brother [un frère à moi-même inconnu]” (OC I, 335; PS 71). Here, too, Baudelaire figures countercultural artistic life as a form of kinship without blood ties.

Although the members of Baudelaire’s aristocracy of taste belong to, and even perform a vital service for, their respective nations, they also speak to a broader community of sympathetic outsiders across national borders. In the theoretical introduction to his review of the 1855 Exposition universelle, Baudelaire contrasts what he calls the “divine grace of cosmopolitanism” with the distorting effects of cultural nationalism on artistic judgment (OC II, 576; API 122). Establishment critics, he writes, will come to an international exhibition ready to denounce any foreign works as inherently suspect.¹⁵ Such a critic remains “locked up within the blinding fortress of his system … and under the influence of his fanaticism, be it Greek, Italian, or Parisian, he would prohibit that insolent race from enjoying, from dreaming or from thinking in any other ways but his very own” (OC II, 577; AIP 123). Theoretical systems are akin to nationalist prejudices, imprisoning the critic in a kind of colonial outpost and sealing beauty within existing national borders. The best critics, by contrast, are akin to “those solitary wanderers [voyageurs solitaires] who have lived for years in the heart of forests, in the midst of illimitable prairies, with no other companion but their gun—contemplating, dissecting, writing” (OC II, 576; API 122). Aesthetic response is a frontier experience where every encounter is new and potentially dangerous. Only loosely tied to a national tradition, the cosmopolitan wanderer is also a writer, who shares his or her impressions with other sympathizers.

The figure of the dandy might seem to cut conspicuously against the grain of the collective ideals Baudelaire promotes in his criticism. Defined above all by his (exclusively, for Baudelaire) aggressively individual elegance and his aristocratic disdain for the multitude, the dandy fashions a cult of the self. Yet Baudelaire’s dandies also stand in much the same relationship to the larger national life that the proud anchorites in the essay on Delacroix do. In 1860, Baudelaire announced that he would publish a book on literary dandyism, featuring chapters on Chateaubriand, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and others. The book was never completed, but the title he gave the project in this instance is telling: Famille des Dandies.¹⁶ Baudelaire here and elsewhere characterizes dandyism in notably collective terms. In his canonical statement on the type in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” for example, he describes the dandy as a creature defined by laws and rules: “Dandyism, an institution beyond the laws, itself has rigorous laws which all its subjects must strictly obey, whatever their natural impetuosity and independence of character” (OC II, 709; PML 26). Institutions, laws, subjects: all of these terms point to collectivities that govern individuals and define their place. Dandies form a “school of tyrants,” “an unwritten institution,” a “haughty caste” (OC II, 710; PML 27; trans. modified). They are an intellectual family, a collective unit made up of solitary outsiders who define themselves through taste.

Like the other members of the aesthetic elite Baudelaire describes in his writings, the family of dandies is highly sensitive to political change. Devoted to a culte de soi-même and defined by their spirit of “opposition and revolt,” dandies also belong to their proper nations (OC II, 705; PML 23). There are national traditions of dandyism; in some nations, like England, dandies find a natural home, while in others they are a passing fad. Regardless of their national origins, however, all dandies stand at the vanguard of the historical and political transitions that shape the larger community: “Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, politically and financially ill at ease [quelques hommes déclassés, dégoûtés, désoeuvrés] but are all rich in native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter as it is will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow. Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence [le dernier éclat d’héroïsme dans les decadences]” (OC II, 711; PML 28). Heroism is a collective ideal, as is the notion of a “new kind of aristocracy” defined by taste and talent, and made up of outsiders, marginal men “ill at ease” in their sociopolitical context, who would seem to be isolated by political change. Baudelaire’s adjectives, with their repeated use of the prefix “de,” connote more powerfully than the English translation the sense of removal and displacement that underlies the condition of dandyism, and verbally suggest the association of this condition with historical decadence. The dandy’s sense of exile from the mainstream gives him a crucial vantage point, however. Like the speaker in “Le Miroir” and the proud anchorites in the Delacroix essay, Baudelaire’s dandies embody the necessary function of beauty in political life—a function that mass democracy, as the late Baudelaire never tired of reminding his readers, inevitably fails to appreciate.

“A Brotherhood Based on Contempt”

The writings on Poe constitute Baudelaire’s most detailed vision of aesthetic community and the public good of art, turning the vocabulary of civic humanism into an unremitting attack on fundamental hostility of bourgeois liberalism to beauty. Baudelaire first encountered Poe’s tales in 1847, and between 1852 and 1865 he published three long critical essays on Poe and five volumes of translations, well over fifteen hundred pages altogether.¹⁷ In both bulk and seriousness, this encounter is almost unprecedented in modern literature, even more so given the extent to which Baudelaire’s translations and critical advocacy gave Poe a status in France out of proportion to his then-marginal place in the American tradition. Baudelaire’s letters reveal a long-running obsession with gathering information about Poe and popularizing his work in France. Baudelaire hunted down volumes of Poe’s writings, hounded visiting Americans to question them on nuances of translation, and encouraged his friends and literary contacts to promote Poe’s work in print.

Critics have tended to read this obsession psychologically, and many of Baudelaire’s comments on Poe do indeed point to a kind of autobiographical labor. In a letter to his mother, from 8 March 1854, Baudelaire remarks on the “close resemblance … between my own poems and those of this man,” a resemblance he describes as “rather strange [singulier]” (C 1, 269; SL 66). Baudelaire took the title for his unfinished autobiographical notes, Mon cœur mis à nu [My Heart Laid Bare], from an entry in Poe’s Marginalia.¹⁸ The autobiographical reading of this obsession, however, tends to downplay the otherwise unmistakable political thrust of Baudelaire’s writings on his American double. Baudelaire first encountered Poe’s writing in the Fourierist journal La Démocratie pacifique, which published a translation of “The Black Cat” in 1847. The unsigned editorial headnote to the translation suggests that the story is evidence of just how far reactionaries will go to defend their belief in the “natural perversity” of humanity (OC II, 1200). Baudelaire would come to reject socialism’s own vision of human nature after 1852, but he never ceased to regard Poe’s work as politically significant. The Poe essays epitomize Baudelaire’s civic humanism, at once establishing a bond of sympathy with an “unknown sympathizer” and finding in that writer’s life a political lesson for the scattered family of “proud anchorites” Baudelaire addresses.

It is often noted that Baudelaire defines Poe as a seminal poète maudit, driven, somewhat like Baudelaire himself, by a philistine public into drunkenness, poverty, and despair. More precisely, however, Baudelaire defines Poe as a writer deeply hostile to his political context. As Jonathan Culler has noted, “It is clearly important to Baudelaire that Poe is a foreigner, not only a stranger to France but a stranger in his own country.”¹⁹ Poe’s sense of his estrangement from American culture is a running theme in Baudelaire’s writings on the topic. America, for Poe, was “a vast prison,” an “antipathetic atmosphere” marked by childishness, bad taste, and an all-consuming obsession with money (OC II, 297; PML 70–71). Poe is an exotic in his native land, going through life “as if through a Sahara desert” and changing his residence “like an Arab” (OC II, 271; BOP 63). Devoted to beauty and the supernatural, scornful of democracy, human goodness, and the belief in progress, Poe lives his life as “an admirable protest”; he is “like a slave determined to make his master blush” (OC II, 321; PML 95). The only national traits Baudelaire attributes to Poe are faults. In a letter to Sainte-Beuve, for example, he claims that Poe is “American only insofar as he is a charlatan [jongleur]” (C 1, 345; SL 84). Elsewhere, he notes the “altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute” that Poe gave to drinking (OC II, 314; PML 88).²⁰

Reflecting more than just a bad fit between the writer and his context, Poe’s work arises from the writer’s opposition to his native land and to modern conditions of literary production: “this man found himself singularly alone in America” (OC II, 299; PML 73). Although Baudelaire laments this solitude, he also sees in it a model for aesthetic community. An outcast in America, Poe is exemplary in his determination, against all odds, to seek out community through writing and discussion. Baudelaire’s first extended engagement with Poe’s work, an essay entitled “Edgar Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages [Edgar Poe: His Life and Works],” which appeared in two installments in the Revue de Paris in 1852, was a selective translation, largely unacknowledged, of two obituary pieces on Poe by the American critics John M. Daniel and John R. Thompson.²¹ The passages original to Baudelaire incongruously characterize Poe as a victim of changes in literary sociability brought about by the French Revolution. In one original passage, for example, Baudelaire describes the changing relationship among drinking, sociability, and literary creativity before and after the Revolution. He contrasts the joyous and sociable drinking in the seventeenth-century circle of Marc-Antoine de Saint-Amant with its increasingly melancholy circumstances in subsequent centuries. The eighteenth-century school of Rétif de La Bretonne drank together, but as if in anticipation of the Revolution, “it was already a group of pariahs, a clandestine society [un école de parias, un monde souterrain],” increasingly alienated from the broader populace. Postrevolutionary writers drink alone, and their drunkenness has “a somber and sinister character” (OC II, 272; BOP 64). “There is no longer a special class,” writes Baudelaire, “which takes pride in associating with men of letters.” Modern writers have only their own fearful visions, recovered through intoxication, for “companions [conaissances]” (OC II, 272; BOP 65).

When Baudelaire revised the 1852 essay in 1856 under the new title “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres [Edgar Poe, His Life and Works],” and published it as the introduction to his first volume of translations from Poe, Histoires Extraordinaires, he cut or condensed the passages about lost traditions of literary sociality, but the specter of postrevolutionary literary life continues to shape his depiction of Poe. In the 1852 essay, the baleful effect of the Revolution on writers—the loss of aristocratic patronage and the rise of market competition among artists—were felt as a loss of traditional forms of sociability. In the 1856 essay, Baudelaire’s Poe seeks in vain to recover or reimagine some version of that sociality. He is one of those “classless beings [êtres déclassés]” who can breathe only in the world of letters (OC II, 302; PML 76), but he does not want to live there alone. Having lost his position at the Southern Literary Messenger, for example, Poe continues to dream of “a Magazine of his own, he wanted to feel at home,” to have “a haven for his thought” (OC II, 304; PML 78). Poe equates home not simply with writing but with publication, sharing his work with like-minded, if unknown, readers. Baudelaire also puts a striking emphasis in his informal canon of Poe’s writings—those he translates and names in his essays—on the hoaxes and dialogues. A relatively small part of Poe’s collected writings, these literary forms have an outsized place in Baudelaire’s discussion of Poe because they explicitly describe or depend on literary sociality. Baudelaire’s Poe is a trickster who engaged his audience no less through his editorial work than through the hoaxes he concocted to fool the credulous American public. Baudelaire translated most of the notable hoaxes, as well as all Poe’s most significant dialogues: the three “angelic dialogues” (“The Power of Words,” The Colloquy of Monas and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), the two mesmeric dialogues (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “Mesmeric Revelation”), and “Some Words with a Mummy.” He also translated Poe’s work of speculative cosmology, Eureka, and quotes these lines from its dedication in his third major essay on Poe, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe [Further Notes on Edgar Poe]” (1857): “I offer this Book to those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities” (OC II, 321; PML 95).

As his interest in the dialogues and hoaxes suggests, Baudelaire saw something inherently social in Poe, a “singular” sense of sympathy to which the letters attest, and which suffuses the tales. He is, for Baudelaire, the supreme poet of social bonds put under pressure, of sociality rendered uncanny. Poe’s murderers seek out auditors for their stories, and his detectives solve cases by reading minds rather than gathering material evidence. Like such famous tales as “Ligea” and “Morella,” the dialogues Baudelaire translated all concern the extension of sympathy after death. Baudelaire even construes Poe’s notorious drunkenness as a form of outsider sociality. Reworking his history of literary drunkenness from the 1852 essay, Baudelaire suggests in the 1856 essay that drinking is for Poe not a vice but a means of literary production: “Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes. He could not resist the desire to return to the marvelous or terrifying visions, the subtle conceptions, which he had encountered in a previous storm; they were old acquaintances [conaissances] which peremptorily called to him, and in order to renew relations with them, he took the most perilous but straightest road” (OC II, 315; PML 89).

This passage subtly assimilates Poe’s drinking at once to writing and to social engagement, and describes the private decisions of the writer as forms of engagement with the public. Poe drinks in much the same way a diligent writer uses notes: as a mnemonic device to recover valuable impressions, ideas, or quotations. This act of recovery is always social, a means of renewing relations with “old acquaintances.” In much the same way, Poe’s ability to a dazzle an audience with his drunken monologues becomes exemplary of the relationship between great writers and their audiences. Commenting on his “lack of delicacy in the matter of a public” while drinking, Baudelaire compares Poe with “other great and original minds for whom any company was good company.” The relationship between artist and audience, in this regard, is “a kind of brotherhood [fraternité] based on contempt” (OC II, 313; PML 87).

The Legend of Poe

In an undated entry in his Journaux intimes, Baudelaire writes: “De Maistre and Edgar Poe taught me how to think [m’ont appris à raisonner]” (OC I, 669; IJ 57; trans. modified). This passage is often quoted as evidence of Baudelaire’s increasing devotion after 1852 to the reactionary political views of Maistre, views that Baudelaire frequently compares to Poe’s. The opening sections of “Notes nouvelles” are in large part a compendium of antidemocratic and anti-American aphorisms from Poe’s Marginalia and other prose, which Baudelaire claims Maistre would have admired. As Burton notes, however, Baudelaire writes that Maistre and Poe taught him how to think, not what to think.²² All three, that is, share a reactionary disdain for democracy and mass modernity, but the lesson Baudelaire learns from his mentors cannot be reduced to identifiable political positions. He borrows concepts from Maistre that help him define the political underpinnings of modern literary culture, but he is by no means slavishly devoted to his reactionary defense of throne and altar. Rather, he yokes Poe and Maistre to conceptualize the political origins of the postrevolutionary malaise from which artists and writers suffer. Poe becomes a kind of Maistrian hero, whose fate reveals the important relationship between modern literary production and modern political systems.

Both the 1852 essay and the 1856 essay quote admiringly from Maistre’s 1821 work Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg [St. Petersburg Evenings], but it is in the revised version that Baudelaire brings out the full implications of Maistre’s theories for his account of Poe. As I noted above, the 1856 essay drops the explicit references to the Revolution that make up most of the original passages in the 1852 text, instead emphasizing a new paradigm for understanding Poe’s republican virtue that was merely implicit in the first essay, and which leads directly back to Maistre: martyrdom. Baudelaire casts Poe as a kind of literary saint, “canonizes” him as writer and quasi-religious icon at one and the same time: “I am adding a new saint to the martyrology” (OC II, 297; PML 70). Comparing America to the decadent Roman Empire, he describes Poe as one of the “sacrificial souls” whom Providence hurls “into hostile surroundings, like Christian martyrs into the circus” (OC II, 296; PML 69). He draws on the narrative resources of hagiography, calling Poe’s life a “legend,” detailing his persecution, first by American public opinion, and then, post-humously, by his Judas-like literary executor, Rufus Griswold, and casting his miserable death as a willing self-sacrifice.²³ Baudelaire insists that Poe’s legend is exemplary. He offers him not as a model for imitation but, again in the tradition of Christian hagiography, as a source of comfort for the community and a motivation for good conduct. Poe sacrifices himself for beauty, putting the collective good above the individual life. And as with the original Christian martyrs, his sacrifice demonstrates both the saint’s devotion and the cruelty and hypocrisy of the tyrant who torments him.

Baudelaire’s allusions to the tradition of hagiography draw on Maistre’s theory of sacrificial substitution or “reversibility [réversibilité],” which applies to modern politics the Christian principle that the death of one innocent can save an entire community.²⁴ Maistre devotes the ninth dialogue of the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg to this doctrine. Given the imprint of original sin, he explains, there is no wholly innocent human being, and all worldly suffering is justified in the eyes of God. Human life is properly and necessarily soaked in blood, but the public perception of suffering can have important effects for the community. While the punishment of the obviously guilty person will satisfy the community’s sense of justice, the suffering of the apparently good one can have a redemptive quality: “When one reflects that these sufferings are not only useful for the just but that they can by religious acceptance be turned to the profit of the guilty, and that in suffering they really sacrifice for all men, one will agree that in fact it is impossible to imagine a sight more worthy of the divinity.”²⁵ Salvation through blood is integral to the order of Providence in human history, and Maistre insists upon the contemporary political significance of the theory. His first major work, Considerations sur la France [Considerations on France] (1797), which Baudelaire also read, interprets the French Revolution as a providential intervention in human affairs, designed to strengthen the monarchy and punish the advocates of republican rule. Reproducing Christ’s death on the cross in the context of modern politics, the public execution of the great “innocent” Louis XVI offers proof of the guiding hand of Providence in human affairs and, by demonstrating the tyrannous bloodlust of his executioners, provides the downtrodden aristocrats and their sympathizers with a powerful martyr to rally around.²⁶

Baudelaire does not argue for Poe’s Christ-like innocence, but he casts the legend of the American writer’s life in terms that clearly resonate with Maistre’s doctrine of reversibility. He repeatedly associates Poe with the divine. From an early age, and despite his poverty, Poe is exceptional: “He was truly marked by Nature, like those occasional figures in the street which rivet the observer’s eye and haunt his memory” (OC II, 309; PML 83). Singularly beautiful and graceful, he has an intense devotion to the eternal, to beauty, and to the supernatural order that goes conspicuously against the grain of the pursuit of material goods that defines his sociopolitical context. In “Notes nouvelles,” Baudelaire presents Poe as a teacher who argues for the divinity of beauty. Summarizing Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle,” he suggests that the desire for beauty is akin to the desire for the afterlife: “It is this admirable and immortal instinct for Beauty that makes us consider the Earth and its shows as a glimpse, a correspondence of Heaven…. It is at once by means of and through poetry, by means of and through music, that the soul gets an inkling of the glories that lie beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem melts us to tears, those tears are not the proof of an excess of pleasure, but rather evidence of a certain petulant, impatient sorrow—of a nervous postulation—of a nature exiled amid the imperfect, and eager to seize immediately, on this very earth, upon a revealed paradise” (OC II, 334; PML 107–8). Attended in life and mourned after death, like Christ, by his beloved “mother” (actually his mother-in-law, the serendipitously named Maria Clemm), Poe suffers for the glory of divine Beauty. At the end of the 1852 essay, Baudelaire compares Poe explicitly to Christ: “I should willingly say of him and of a special class of men what the catechism says of our Lord: ‘He has suffered much for us’ ” (OC II, 288; BOP 85). In Mon coeur mis à nu, he reports that he prays every day “to God, source of all power and justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe, as intercessors” (OC I, 673; IJ 61).

The cruel tyrant that martyrs Poe is public opinion, a phenomenon Baudelaire traces to the individualism inherent in the democratic order.²⁷ Public opinion threatens the liberty of artists by pressing its (false) claims of equality. Even more than legal equality, American democracy valorizes equality of opinion—a position fundamentally at odds with Baudelaire’s belief in an aristocracy of taste—and in so doing effectively undermines the very liberties modern republics like America claim to secure for their citizens. Baudelaire’s account of American literary culture appeals directly to the traditional republican conception of political decadence as a substitution of private interest for the public good. America is a nation that “begins with decadence and starts off where the others leave off,” where the public never ceases speaking and therefore never allows the best work a chance to be heard. “At once young and old,” writes Baudelaire, “America chatters and gabbles on [bavarde et radote] with an astonishing volubility. Who could number her poets? they are countless. Her blue-stockings? they overwhelm the reviews.” The nation is a “ferment of mediocrities,” swarming with “compilers galore, literary parrots, plagiarists of plagiaries, and critics of critics” (OC II, 320–21; PML 94). America’s political decadence here lies in its anarchic literary activity and its literary decadence in its political principles, which elevate the chattering and self-interested individual over the needs of the collective. Poe’s frequent lamentation that America lacks an aristocracy is, for Baudelaire, an attack on American literary culture as much as on its political system.

Difficult as it is for the true poet to be heard in the chaos of American literary culture, there is no worse fate under the regime of public opinion, writes Baudelaire in “Notes nouvelles,” than becoming a target of critical judgment. Publishing is the prelude to literary-critical violence: “What is difficult enough in a benevolent monarchy or a regular republic becomes well-nigh impossible in a kind of nightmare chaos in which everyone is a police-constable of opinion, and keeps order on behalf of his vices—or of his virtues, it is all one” (OC II, 327; PML 101). The imagery in this passage recalls the scene of street violence in the Salon de 1846, in which the police are praised for beating the “republicans of art,” who put their individual concerns ahead of the public good of beauty. As in the Salon de 1846, Baudelaire criticizes the ostensible enforcers of the public good for serving only their private interests. By contrast with the earlier street scene, however, Baudelaire here claims public opinion is allied with state violence, battering the true artists who struggle to be heard over the din. Although public opinion might seem to be democratic and collective, it really represents private individuals deputizing themselves to enforce their prejudices in the public sphere, with the tacit backing of the state. A fundamental perversion of democratic principles, public opinion threatens literature both by making the writer endlessly answerable to this public and by refusing to discriminate the legitimate from the illegitimate claim.

Baudelaire’s critique of public opinion recalls any number of snobbish dismissals of mass literacy and democratic politics from the period, but its association of American literary culture with state violence is grounded on Maistre’s claim that democratic institutions necessarily undermine the very freedoms they try to secure for their citizens.²⁸ According to Maistre, social contract theory relies on the false premise that political authority can be generated by unaided human reason. For social contract theorists, sovereignty belongs originally to each individual, who sacrifices some portion of it upon entering society in exchange for safety and companionship; written constitutions are intended to preserve the remaining share of natural right against the potential encroachments of the government or a tyrannous majority. For Maistre, by contrast, authority flows from God alone and passes to the people through hereditary lineage and ecclesiastical institutions. In his most explicit account of this contrast between divine and contractual authority, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques [Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions] (1809), which Baudelaire praises in his correspondence, Maistre takes the fact that modern constitutions are invariably written as an emblem of their illusory authority. Unlike the divine rights “written in the heart”—and unlike, we might note, the “unwritten” laws that govern “institutions” like dandyism—those rights inscribed on paper cannot provide security for a fallen humanity. Drawing upon Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus, Maistre describes written constitutions as weak and subject to the predations of tyrannous usurpers like Robespierre: “He who believes himself able by writing alone to establish a clear and lasting doctrine is a great fool. If he really possessed the seeds of truth, he could never believe that a little black liquid and a pen could germinate them in the world, protect them from harsh weather, and make them sufficiently effective.”²⁹ Authority can have no worldly origin, and relies for its continuation on this sense of mystery. The postrevolutionary proliferation of written laws—apparently fixed but in fact open to endless interpretation—is a sign that order has already broken down. “The more nearly perfect an institution is,” Maistre claims, “the less it writes.”³⁰ His political ideal is the English constitution, a traditional balance of power defined by key parliamentary acts, common law rights, judicial precedents, royal prerogative, and international treaties, but never formally written down like modern constitutions. The French Revolution, by contrast, is a “frightful book.”³¹

Baudelaire regards Poe’s sacrifice at the hands of public opinion as dramatic evidence of Maistre’s thesis. The freedom of speech guaranteed in writing by the American constitution crushes the freedom of those outside of the mediocre majority. Public opinion threatens political order by making individual prejudice sovereign, and denying beauty its proper role as a supreme collective good. In the 1856 Poe essay, Baudelaire draws upon classical political theory to characterize the way public opinion subverts the very political order that gives it life: “What a pitiless dictatorship is that of opinion in a democratic society! Ask of it neither charity nor indulgence, nor any sort of flexibility in the application of its laws to the multiple and complex issues of the moral life. You might think that the impious love of liberty had given birth to a new tyranny, a bestial tyranny, or zoocracy, whose savage insensibility recalls the idol of Juggernaut” (OC II, 297–98; PML 71). With the 1851 coup d’état lurking in the shadows, this passage traces the same nightmarish historical trajectory predicted by Maistre’s critique of social contract theory. Dictators were figures elevated by the Roman Republic to absolute power in times of emergency, who had the authority to suspend the constitution but were expected to step down after the danger had passed, and were forbidden to serve more than six months. Modern public opinion, for Baudelaire, entails a similar suspension in liberal democracies. Exercised out of individual interest rather than for the collective good, it destroys the very liberty of expression that authorizes it and that it would seem to epitomize. Liberty leads to the destruction of liberty, precisely as Maistre predicts in his account of written constitutions. Public opinion becomes a tyrant, the name given by Greek political theory to usurpers who would dispense entirely with the constitution of a city and rule as despots until they were overthrown. Governed by this tyrannous principle, America descends into the kind of human sacrifice Baudelaire finds in the legend of Poe. An avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, the idol of Juggernaut was, according to legend, carried on a cart whose wheels would ritually crush the worshippers helping to pull it.

Baudelaire regards Poe’s literary martyrdom as something more than a metaphor for lack of literary success. His sacrifice demonstrates the inextricability of modern literary production from modern politics. Public opinion is the nightmarish uncanny double of the civic humanist virtue epitomized by the “proud anchorites,” crushing art through the very means by which the aesthetic elite hopes to nurture it: literary production and consumption. Seen from this perspective, Baudelaire’s accusation against America is not merely a snobbish dismissal of the new world but a reasoned and deeply troubling critique, influenced by Maistre’s political theory, of the tendency of democratic institutions to undermine the very freedoms they try to secure for their citizens. Here again, the artist recognizes a public good that the larger populace, driven by private interest that it cannot recognize, cedes for an illusory equality. Baudelaire writes as a proud anchorite, recognizing in Poe’s lonely existence a warning for all modern artists.

Armed Neutrality

Baudelaire uses Maistre’s notion of sacrificial “reversibility” and his critique of social contract theory to unearth the political currents that shape the legend of Poe. These currents are suggested as well by another allusion in the Poe essays, one that indicates a way out of the tyranny from which Poe and other modern writers suffer. In the 1852 and the 1856 essays, Baudelaire frames his analysis with reference to Alfred de Vigny’s novel Stello (1832). The 1856 essay is explicit: “A well-known writer of our times has published a book to show that there can be no proper place for the poet either in a democratic or an aristocratic society, no more in a republic than in an absolute or tempered monarchy. And has anyone been able to answer him decisively? Today I offer a new legend in support of this thesis” (OC II, 297; PML 70). Poe’s life and death are proof that poets have no place in the “zoocracy” of modern bourgeois society. This passage is the only mention Baudelaire makes of Vigny in the essays (in the 1856 version, he does not name him), but Stello provides a telling context for Baudelaire’s treatment of Poe. Vigny, one of Baudelaire’s favorite poets from the previous generation of Romantics, was the original inspiration for Sainte-Beuve’s coining of the term “ivory tower.”³² Baudelaire’s brief description of Stello might confirm the superficial applicability of the coinage to the novel, but Vigny’s account of the relationship between poetry and politics is complex, and highly significant for Baudelaire’s purpose.

Vigny’s novel is a dialogue in which the fictional Romantic poet Stello, suffering from a deep depression, is “treated” over the course of an evening by the so-called Doctor Noir. Quite unlike Poe, who, Baudelaire argues, labors under the sign of a tormenting ill fortune, Stello was born “under the most auspicious star in heaven.”³³ Nevertheless, he suffers spells of melancholy, during which only the “comfort of a human voice” protects him against severe attacks (F 4; E 4). When Doctor Noir finds him, Stello has isolated himself and is contemplating, “out of sheer despair,” writing a treatise “on behalf of a sublime form of government” (F 8; E 7). Doctor Noir is so alarmed that he offers to cure him through the “homeopathic” method (F 9; E 8) of telling him three stories about poets—Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert, Thomas Chatterton, and André Chénier—who die, in Vigny’s telling, as a result of the governmental forms under which they live: absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and republicanism, respectively. He offers the death of the poets as evidence that political ambitions are fundamentally at odds with Stello’s poetic vocation. In the course of the stories, we learn that Doctor Noir has tended to these poets, and intervenes on their behalf with the ruling authorities of each political order. The three rulers all refuse aid, and all speak candidly to Doctor Noir about their disdain for poets and poetry.³⁴

Vigny insists that the hostility of the rulers to poets is not specific to the three forms of government the doctor encounters but is fundamental to the relationship between art and political power. Doctor Noir tells Stello that “the essence of Power is irreconcilable with your poetic essence, and … one cannot expect it to do anything but try to destroy what conflicts with it” (F 197; E 173). The poets are “eternal pariahs” (F 188; E 165), their history “an unbroken chain of glorious exiles” (F 193; E 169). Doctor Noir’s “prescription” follows from this observation: he orders Stello to “separate the poetic life from the political life” (F 205; E 179). Although the doctor’s orders might seem to counsel a stereotypically aestheticist turn from reality to art, the judgment is pragmatic and does not require the poet entirely to sever the tie between art and politics. The crucial emphasis, for Vigny, is on the word “life.” Poets need solitude, while politics demands engagement in the public square. The poet should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” allow politicians to “play their role,” and shun explicit political activity, as well as the lure of celebrity, literary schools, and academic associations, in favor of a solitary life devoted to the poetic craft (F 205; E 179). Retreat is the poet’s only answer to the depredations of power, regardless of the political theories that power serves.

As Doctor Noir’s allusion to the theatricality of politics suggests, this turn away from active engagement in the public square is more complicated than it initially seems to be. Doctor Noir, much like Baudelaire—who, in symbolic mourning for the Second Republic, took to wearing only black after Louis Napoleon’s coup—defines the poet’s solitude in political terms. The poet, Vigny argues, should stand above the political fray but still intervene when necessary: “The solitary thinker observes an armed neutrality that mobilizes at need. It is he who puts his finger on the scale and decides the balance, now urging on, now restraining, the spirit of nations; he inspires public actions or protests against them, in accordance with what his foresight reveals to him. What matter if his own head be endangered in the sudden advance or retreat?” (F 207; E 180–81). Doctor Noir’s prescription finds its echo in Baudelaire’s account of the relationship between the solitary dandy or the proud anchorite and the nation as a whole. As a practical matter, the poet cannot help but be engaged with politics; the most cunning poets do so only when necessary, and only on their own terms, preserving their hard-won artistic autonomy in all other instances. Recognizing a crucial distinction between genuine politics and the quotidian play of power, poets maintain an internal distance from the clamor of the public square. They speak to the “spirit” of the nation, avoiding direct competition with the status quo. The fact that even the most cautious poet’s head may be endangered by such engagement is a crucial reminder that poetry can never separate itself completely from public affairs.

Vigny’s depiction of political power in Stello is deeply satirical; the rulers Doctor Noir encounters are invariably vain and duplicitous, and much of the novel’s irony comes from the fact that these rulers are unknowingly on the brink of their demise. Like the America that torments Poe, they are real embodiments of political decadence. The only answer to the corruption and falsehood that attends political power, Vigny suggests, is a return to an older ideal of association. “The Republic of letters,” Doctor Noir tells Stello, “is the only one whose citizens are truly free [la seule qui puisse jamais être composée de citoyens vraiment libre], for it is composed of isolated thinkers, often unknown [inconnu] even to each other” (F 206; E 180). Coming on the heels of the story of Chénier’s death under the Terror, Doctor Noir’s reference to the republic of letters is highly charged, suggesting that the political form of the republic can transcend the lure of power that makes poetry a potentially fatal occupation. Vigny’s republic is composed of individuals who never meet, never even know one another, and who share only their devotion to beauty and a desire to ensure its dissemination. It is precisely this kind of republic that Baudelaire seeks to define in his essays on Poe, and evokes in the list of journal titles I discussed in the opening pages of this book, as well as in the recurrent evocations of an elite family of taste that arise elsewhere in his writings. Adding Poe’s legend to the stories of Gilbert, Chatterton, and Chénier, Baudelaire takes on the role of Doctor Noir, updating his prescription for a greatly changed political context. Later decadent writers build upon this lesson, adapting it to their own political contexts and varying relationships to the public. Decadent writers fashion themselves as contributing members of an international republic of letters. Observing the “armed neutrality” Doctor Noir counsels, they continue to speak to and for a body of “unknown sympathizers” who understand reading and writing as deeply political acts—a signal contribution to the public good, however invisible this contribution may remain to a ruling order that lacks ears to hear.