The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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rhetorical construction of an aesthetic elite united by taste and a devotion to beauty gives later writers a powerful heuristic for thinking about the political functions of artistic production and consumption. As we saw in the last chapter, Baudelaire argues that taste is a fundamentally political concept, evocative of the classical republican tradition of civic humanism. Beauty contributes to the life of the polis and provides new models of communal affiliation and political participation. Unlike the private interests that drive obviously public formations like laws and constitutions, beauty exists only for itself and thus serves the public good. Art is the true res publica of modernity. The decadent movement makes this claim about taste, beauty, and aesthetic sociability central to its reception of Baudelaire—no less so than it does his strikingly original poetic vision. Baudelaire, to adapt Nordau’s image, left behind a vast, ungovernable poetic territory, informed by a utopian vision of aesthetic community and sociality. Later writers developed this vision into an expansive critique of contemporary politics in large part by imitating and expressing admiration for Baudelaire himself.
No figure was more widely imitated by later decadent writers than Baudelaire. They refer to him as master, father, progenitor, precursor, “Our Baptist”; he is apostrophized, plagiarized, made the subject of fulsome tributes and numberless purple patches; writers of all stripes claim to have found themselves through reading him. As Patricia Clements has observed, Baudelaire’s influence readily crosses national boundaries, offering writers a potent alternative to native literary traditions.3 Beyond providing the decadent movement with many of its major themes and critical principles, Baudelaire also influences through his powerfully original relationship to the writers and artists who influenced him. He provides a model for being influenced, functioning as what Catherine Coquio calls an “accelerant,” whose expressions of appreciation allow other writers to find themselves in his works and in the works that influenced him, much as he found himself in the work of Poe.4 Declaring their discipleship to Baudelaire places his followers within a circle of admiration, a community of writers bound together by a chain of reciprocal influences. Writers who admire Baudelaire in turn admire Poe, Wagner, Gautier, and others, borrowing from them as well as from Baudelaire himself. The chain extends beyond those writers Baudelaire actually admired to those Baudelaire’s admirers admire, on the more or less explicit presumption that Baudelaire would have appreciated them were he alive to read their works.5
The two most important early admirers of Baudelaire were Gautier and Swinburne, and their epideictic strategies would help to define the rhetoric of decadence. This chapter documents the ways in which their major tributes published in the immediate wake of Baudelaire’s death—Gautier’s “Notice” to Les Fleurs du mal and Swinburne’s pastoral elegy “Ave atque Vale,” both from 1868—shape the reception of Baudelaire through appreciation. Defining him as at once a quintessential decadent poet and as a model for understanding the politics of taste, these tributes make Baudelaire legible for the incipient decadent movement in much the same way that Baudelaire made Poe legible as a model for his own project. Gautier and Swinburne first define decadence as a project, as a cultural and political stance organized around judgments of taste and expressions of appreciation. This project finds its origin not only in Baudelaire’s works but also in the complicated network of tribute and imitation that formed around them. The “Notice” and “Ave atque Vale” were written out of admiration for Baudelaire, but they are also manifestos that make admiration itself a central preoccupation for the decadent movement.
As we saw in the last chapter, Baudelaire casts Poe as a Mastrian sacrificial figure who suffered abuse and neglect from the public but produced works that spoke to a select few who were willing to listen. Rejected by his age, Poe was accepted by an elite (and elitist) “family” of sympathetic strangers. Both Gautier and Swinburne apply much the same paradigm in their reception of Baudelaire. Largely ignoring the specific political theories that motivated Baudelaire, they strategically adapt his critique of bourgeois liberalism and his evocations of civic humanism to the particular social and political contexts in which they found themselves. For both writers, Baudelaire is an avatar of classical republican ideals, a citizen-warrior whose writings serve not the patria but an emerging bohemian subculture of artistic, sexual, and intellectual outcasts—an aesthetic republic in exile from the decadent empire of mass modernity. Traditional republican historiography, as I noted in the last chapter, associates cultural decline with precisely those vices decadence celebrates: luxury, sexual dissidence, pleasure, and above all corruption. Decadence is a sign that the virtues of civic humanism have broken down.6 Nineteenth-century critics of decadence like Nisard and Bourget appeal to this historiography in their recurrent characterization of modern decadence as a fetishism of the detail that reflects the atomization of society. For Gautier and Swinburne, Baudelaire’s literary decadence is a source of political revival, a form of sacrifice that parallels the classical warrior ideal rather than epitomizing its decay.
The Poetics of Sacrifice
Théophile Gautier’s “Notice” to the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du mal is the single most important posthumous tribute to Baudelaire and, as P. E. Tennant writes, “was almost entirely responsible for Baudelaire’s reputation as the father-founder of decadence.”7 Most often cited for its seminal definition of decadent style, the “Notice” praises Baudelaire much as Baudelaire had praised Poe: as a martyr for literature and for the generation of writers and artists that emerges out of the ruins of the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. Gautier was asked to read the eulogy at Baudelaire’s funeral but was away from Paris when the poet was buried, leading to some grumbling among Baudelaire’s friends.8 The “Notice” serves as a belated substitute for this missed opportunity for appreciation. It is at once eulogy and critical study, and performs the important work of framing Baudelaire as a decadent writer, piecing together elements of his work and reversing traditional critical judgments to make decadence available as a purposive literary stance rather than a terminal condition. Gautier’s crucial innovation is to define Baudelaire as a loyalist, a warrior for the poetic ideal, who experienced the extremes of literary life not only out of devotion to his craft but also in the service of an emerging dissident community. In this regard, Gautier, not Baudelaire, is the John the Baptist of the decadent movement; and like the Baptist, his most recognizable gesture is pointing to the true messiah, the sacrificial lamb of the decadent communion. Baudelaire’s sacrificial rhetoric echoes throughout the piece, though with a significantly redirected political thrust.
Although the “Notice” seems on a first reading to be rather diffuse, personal, and rambling, it alludes with surprising rigor to the Athenian epideictic genre of the funeral oration, which, as Nicole Loraux notes in The Invention of Athens, was undergoing an important revival in the political rhetoric of the nineteenth century. The funeral oration is defined by the praise of patriotic sacrifice, and scholars and politicians of many stripes laid claim in the period to the republican lineage of idealized citizenship the genre both lauds and epitomizes.9 Gautier uses the familiar topoi of the funeral oration to treat Baudelaire’s life and work as a form of sacrifice, but he systematically overturns the expectations of the genre. For Gautier, Baudelaire’s sacrifice is literary, not military. He presents Baudelaire as a classically stoic warrior, whose fascination with death and sacrifice becomes a form of political critique that places the poet at the head of society. Baudelaire is a figure of internal exile, a critical witness to modernity, who fulfills the vision of outsider sociality he himself had discerned in Poe’s sad fate, and maintains in his artistic practice the civic virtues that have fallen into decay in the larger society. Drawing on the canonically republican tradition of the funeral oration, Gautier memorializes a community of outsiders and exceptions. This society is not the Athenian polis of the Periclean idiom but the bohemian counterculture, composed of the very figures Baudelaire identified as ill at ease in the nineteenth century: artists, dandies, writers, lovers, ragmen, and so forth. They form a polity apart—a decadent republic of letters—devoted at once to pleasure and to self-preservation.
Gautier’s idiosyncratic allusions to the funeral oration underlie the most significant rhetorical choices in the “Notice.” Although the piece was published more than six months after Baudelaire’s death, appeared serially before it was printed as the preface to Baudelaire’s collection, and is far too long to have been composed in one sitting, Gautier dates it