The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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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