The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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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