The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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“Notice,” and its implicit address to a community. Gautier strays most notably from the model of the funeral oration, which always praised the dead as a group, in his focus on a single individual. In other respects, he sticks closely to the conventions of the genre: the piece enumerates the poet’s major achievements, casts his death as a sacrifice for the community, and toward its conclusion seeks to console those left behind: “It is sorrowful, for the survivors, to see so fine and fruitful an intelligence pass away, to lose in a more and more deserted path of life a companion of youth” (F 164; E 86). He slyly plays on the traditional oratorical promise of the city to care for war orphans by closing his essay with a discussion of the prose poems, Baudelaire’s orphan texts, which were first collected in the same complete works edition for which the “Notice” was commissioned. The only prose poem Gautier discusses at any length, “Les Bienfaits de la lune [The Moon’s Favors],” tells of a sleeping child visited at night by the moon, as if by “a mother’s careful tenderness,” and brought under its influence.10 The moon becomes a foster parent, much like the city in ancient Athens.
Gautier also follows the form of the funeral oration by defining Baudelaire’s artistic achievement in terms of violence and sacrifice. The essay lingers on images of death and loss, reading the themes of Baudelaire’s poetry as evidence of the poet’s warrior spirit. Gautier’s description of Baudelaire as a young man is especially telling. With black hair and prominent white brow, his head resembles a “Saracen helmet” (F 113–14; E 2–3). This idiosyncratic martial trait foreshadows Baudelaire’s destiny. The literary life is a kind of violence done to self and others in pursuit of beauty, a “sad, precarious, and miserable” existence, made up of bloody “battles [luttes]” to achieve an ideal from which most writers never return intact; in effect, the writer “no longer lives” (F 121; E 13). Even successful poets die as martyrs, “crowned with glory” and sinking into the “breast of their ideal” (F 121; E 14). When Gautier describes Baudelaire’s appearance as a mature man—the poet wore only black after 1851, as I noted in the last chapter—the warrior becomes a kind of saint, reinforcing the connection between poetry and martyrdom. His hair is now white, and his face “thin and spiritualized.” His lips “were closed mysteriously, and seemed to guard ironical secrets”; he has overall “an almost sacerdotal appearance” (F 120; E 12).
Gautier’s comparison of writing and warfare is not wholly fanciful. Although the essay does not explicitly mention the Revolutions of 1848, the event shadows its account of Baudelaire’s legend. Here again, the use of dates in the essay is significant. Gautier claims that he first met Baudelaire in 1849, when the latter was still unpublished and obscure, though clearly marked for greatness. This chronology is almost certainly incorrect: by 1849, Baudelaire had published two Salons, several critical articles, Le Fanfarlo, his first Poe translation, and numerous individual poems. His talent, if not his lasting fame, was well established, at least in the literary circles Gautier frequented, where the various pseudonyms under which Baudelaire published his early works would not have been a mystery. It is more likely that Gautier first met Baudelaire in 1845.11 Gautier’s apparent error in dating is best understood not as a mistake but as a creative elaboration, which traces Baudelaire’s influence on his generation to the Revolution of 1848 and its chaotic aftermath: the fleeting establishment of the Second Republic and the conservative counterrevolution that culminated in Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851. Gautier does not mention Baudelaire’s revolutionary activity—he surely knew of it— but it is suggested throughout the “Notice” in his characterization of the poet’s work and influence. Writing during the waning days of the Second Empire, Gautier reads Baudelaire’s poetry as an anticipatory response to the disorder that Louis Napoleon sought to contain with the virtual police state he instituted soon after assuming power. Baudelaire is an avatar of classical republican virtue in an age of political chaos who documents the underbelly of a decadent modern empire.
Gautier’s famous definition of decadent style should be read in the light of this historical context. Decadence, as Gautier describes it, is a self-conscious stance, which historicizes decay rather than celebrating it. Baudelaire challenges the nineteenth-century’s claims of progress by challenging its choice of historical analogies.12 Praising Baudelaire in the language of the classical funeral oration, Gautier appropriates the republican imaginary of classical Athens and the Roman Republic for the modern poet; the Second Empire with its social controls and displays of wealth and power resembles the decadent Roman Empire. Gautier discerns in Baudelaire a taste for social fragmentation and political disorder, and this taste allows him to document the aftermath of 1848 in ways unavailable to other writers:
The poet of Les Fleurs du mal loved what is inaccurately called the style of decadence, which is nothing more than art arrived at that point of extreme maturity induced by the slanting suns of civilizations that have grown old. It is an ingenious style, complicated, wise, full of nuances and research, always pushing back the frontiers of speech [reculant … les bornes de la langue], taking color from every palette, notes from all keyboards, forcing itself to the expression of the most elusive thoughts, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, confessions of senile passions becoming depraved and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness. This style of decadence is the last word on the Word [le dernier mot du Verbe], summoned to express all and push to the utmost extreme. One can recall, à propos of him, language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savoring the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek art fallen into deliquescence. (F 124–25; E 19–20; trans. modified)
Gautier borrows from and radically transforms the prevailing nineteenth-century definition of decadent style. Like Nisard and other neoclassical critics, who saw in decadent style the evidence of social and political breakdown, Gautier associates Baudelaire’s love of decadence with the end of empire. Yet the poet is a witness to decadence, not a victim of it—a researcher or explorer, who pushes back the boundaries of language and draws deliberately from the other arts and sciences to describe his political moment. Gautier plays on the language and imagery of extremes. From the Latin exter, meaning outward, foreign, or strange, the word names both spatial (as in the French extrême Orient, Far East) and conceptual limits. Decadence is an index of extreme maturity, extremes of language, of imperial dominion in extremis. But the word also describes Baudelaire’s stance as an outsider, an observer, and a translator.13 He is closer in spirit to the barbarians and Christians who take down the Roman Empire than to its doomed citizens. Gautier notes that Baudelaire’s favorite Latin writers are not high imperial figures like Horace and Virgil but social and territorial outsiders, whose language “has the black radiance of ebony”: the African Apuleius; the satirist Juvenal; and the provincial Christians Augustine and Tertullian, both also Africans (F 125; E 21). Rather than succumbing to decadence, Baudelaire is an outsider stoically anatomizing the fall of the empire.
Gautier was by no means a political radical—quite the contrary, in fact, by 1868. Although he became famous for his flamboyant advocacy of l’art pour l’art in the 1830s and the sexual daring of novels such as Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), he disdained the revolutionary acts of 1848 and made himself comfortable in the Second Empire. Much to the chagrin of younger writers who admired his works, he was employed by the regime’s official newspaper, Le Moniteur universel, and later served as the librarian for Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Louis Napoleon. He remained critical of the bourgeois Philistinism that marked the Second Empire, but he never seriously challenged the legitimacy of the regime, and there is little reason to believe that he sympathized with or genuinely comprehended either Baudelaire’s early radicalism or his later turn to the work of Maistre. Indeed, the invocation of 1848 in the “Notice” arguably depoliticizes Baudelaire’s work by reducing revolution to a signifier for generalized social disorder. And yet Gautier’s use of the funeral oration deliberately connects Baudelaire and the revolutions with the idealized political model of Periclean Athens, an example radically at odds in its valorization of active citizenship with the purely formal manner of political participation afforded the populace during the Second Empire. Baudelaire here is at once an artistic and a political model, the epitome of the decadent poet and an avatar of republican virtue in the midst of what Gautier clearly perceived was a declining empire. Gautier’s dating of his first meeting with Baudelaire