16 - Baudelaire: the streets of Paris

Summary

All around me howled the deafening street.

– Baudelaire, ‘To a Passer-by’

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) occupies a key position in the development of modern writing, not just as the author of the most celebrated collection of verse in the history of modern French poetry, The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857), but as the proponent, in his critical writings, of a new aesthetic based on the experience of city life. According to the Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Baudelaire, by being the first poet of the city, was the first poet of modernity; he was the first writer to recognize in the transformation of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70) a radical transformation of society itself, and to perceive the impact the new social reality would have on the creative artist. He is seen as the very embodiment of a sensibility and consciousness we regard as modern.

Modernity and the city

In December 1848 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected president of the Second Republic (1848–51), which had been born out of a revolution in February of the same year. On 2 December 1851 he staged a coup d'état that gave him dictatorial powers. A year later he proclaimed the Second Empire. He was now Emperor Napoleon III. To establish his authority, and acquire a kind of legitimacy, he pursued a policy of modernization and ‘progress’. He determined to make Paris clean and safe, and above all ‘modern’, and would do this through a vast scheme of urban redevelopment. He entrusted the project to Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91), whom he appointed Prefect of the Seine. The ‘Haussmannization’ of the city was social planning on a spectacular scale, glorifying Louis-Napoleon's empire as if it were a new Augustan Rome. Haussmann's overriding aim, however, was to advance the bourgeoisie's business interests by creating a more efficient transport network – by creating a city that would allow the rapid circulation not only of troops but also of goods, people and money.