The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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“a lowering of the general vitality; a clouding of the intellect” (OC II, 769; PML 68). The aesthetic elite experiences the sense of national loss before the nation as a whole does: “I believe however that this impression is chiefly confined to those proud anchorites [hautains solitaires] who can only make themselves a family by means of intellectual relations. As for the rest of the community [autres citoyens], it is only gradually that they most of them learn to realize the full extent of their country’s loss in losing its great man, and to appreciate what an empty space he has left behind. And yet it is only right to warn them” (OC II, 769; PML 68). An influential line of political thought from Plato to Hegel and Marx opposes familial and political bonds. Family is natural, involuntary, private, and insular, while citizenship is cultural, elective, communal, and outward turning.13 Baudelaire follows Aristotle in placing the family at the very heart of the political order, but this family is not the oikos of the Politics—a natural monarchy governed by the father. Rather, it is a “headless” household organized by shared taste, and by ideas alone. Significantly scrambling the traditional opposition between familial and public life, Baudelaire’s intellectual family of “proud anchorites” has a keen sense of political change. The ostensibly public community of “other citizens” remains unaware of its national loss, while the proud anchorites feel the loss out of proportion to the rest of the nation. The intellectual family Baudelaire describes is not opposed to the political world. Indeed, the community of anchorites takes upon itself the responsibility of warning the public of a tragedy it does not recognize. The solitude of artists and writers is not a threat to community but a crucial element of it.
Baudelaire uses kinship terms in surprising contexts to describe such voluntary or countercultural communities and, in particular, to characterize those “heroic” figures—the flâneur, the lesbian, the poet, and the dandy— that Benjamin recognized as central to his account of modernity. The artistic schools idealized in the Salon de 1846, which Baudelaire describes in familial terms, are an important instance of this idea. In the prose poem “Les Foules [Crowds],” first published in 1861, Baudelaire compares the “refined” pleasure of wandering in urban crowds to the creation of spiritual or intellectual “families”: “The founders of colonies, the shepherds of people, missionary priests exiled to the end of the world, doubtless know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius [au sein de la vaste famille que leur genie s’est faite], they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives” (OC I, 291–92; PS 20–21). The “art” of city walking is akin to the formation of new communities. From a position of figurative exile, the artistic flâneur creates a virtual family by thinking himself into the anonymous lives that surround him, much as the colonial and missionary figures the poem evokes create a new social body from the outcasts of another. In both cases, imagination (“genius”) creates a family where there was not one before. William Olmsted has noted the way Baudelaire’s poetic lists and groups often constitute “subversive taxonomies,” which posit open-ended communities of outsiders and thereby demonstrate the “solidarity of a large group whose actual connections may be nonexistent.”14 Baudelaire often designates such solidarity with kinship terms, as in his ambivalent appeal to the reader as “frère” in “Au Lecteur,” or his address to the isolated community of lesbians in “Femmes damnées” as “Pauvres soeurs [poor sisters]” (OC I, 114; FE 247). In the 1864 prose poem “Les Vocations” Baudelaire’s speaker overhears four boys talking about some gypsy musicians to whose itinerant artistic life one of them was deeply attracted. The speaker feels an immediate bond of sympathy with this boy and develops “the strange idea that I might, unknown to me, have a brother [un frère à moi-même inconnu]” (OC I, 335; PS 71). Here, too, Baudelaire figures countercultural artistic life as a form of kinship without blood ties.
Although the members of Baudelaire’s aristocracy of taste belong to, and even perform a vital service for, their respective nations, they also speak to a broader community of sympathetic outsiders across national borders. In the theoretical introduction to his review of the 1855 Exposition universelle, Baudelaire contrasts what he calls the “divine grace of cosmopolitanism” with the distorting effects of cultural nationalism on artistic judgment (OC II, 576; API 122). Establishment critics, he writes, will come to an international exhibition ready to denounce any foreign works as inherently suspect.15 Such a critic remains “locked up within the blinding fortress of his system … and under the influence of his fanaticism, be it Greek, Italian, or Parisian, he would prohibit that insolent race from enjoying, from dreaming or from thinking in any other ways but his very own” (OC II, 577; AIP 123). Theoretical systems are akin to nationalist prejudices, imprisoning the critic in a kind of colonial outpost and sealing beauty within existing national borders. The best critics, by contrast, are akin to “those solitary wanderers [voyageurs solitaires] who have lived for years in the heart of forests, in the midst of illimitable prairies, with no other companion but their gun—contemplating, dissecting, writing” (OC II, 576; API 122). Aesthetic response is a frontier experience where every encounter is new and potentially dangerous. Only loosely tied to a national tradition, the cosmopolitan wanderer is also a writer, who shares his or her impressions with other sympathizers.
The figure of the dandy might seem to cut conspicuously against the grain of the collective ideals Baudelaire promotes in his criticism. Defined above all by his (exclusively, for Baudelaire) aggressively individual elegance and his aristocratic disdain for the multitude, the dandy fashions a cult of the self. Yet Baudelaire’s dandies also stand in much the same relationship to the larger national life that the proud anchorites in the essay on Delacroix do. In 1860, Baudelaire announced that he would publish a book on literary dandyism, featuring chapters on Chateaubriand, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and others. The book was never completed, but the title he gave the project in this instance is telling: Famille des Dandies.16 Baudelaire here and elsewhere characterizes dandyism in notably collective terms. In his canonical statement on the type in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” for example, he describes the dandy as a creature defined by laws and rules: “Dandyism, an institution beyond the laws, itself has rigorous laws which all its subjects must strictly obey, whatever their natural impetuosity and independence of character” (OC II, 709; PML 26). Institutions, laws, subjects: all of these terms point to collectivities that govern individuals and define their place. Dandies form a “school of tyrants,” “an unwritten institution,” a “haughty caste” (OC II, 710; PML 27; trans. modified). They are an intellectual family, a collective unit made up of solitary outsiders who define themselves through taste.
Like the other members of the aesthetic elite Baudelaire describes in his writings, the family of dandies is highly sensitive to political change. Devoted to a culte de soi-même and defined by their spirit of “opposition and revolt,” dandies also belong to their proper nations (OC II, 705; PML 23). There are national traditions of dandyism; in some nations, like England, dandies find a natural home, while in others they are a passing fad. Regardless of their national origins, however, all dandies stand at the vanguard of the historical and political transitions that shape the larger community: “Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, politically and financially ill at ease [quelques hommes déclassés, dégoûtés, désoeuvrés] but are all rich in native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter as it is will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow. Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence [le dernier éclat d’héroïsme dans les decadences]” (OC II, 711; PML 28). Heroism is a collective ideal, as is the notion of a “new kind of aristocracy” defined by taste and talent, and made up of outsiders, marginal men “ill at ease” in their sociopolitical context, who would seem to be isolated by political change. Baudelaire’s adjectives, with their repeated use of the prefix “de,” connote more powerfully than the English translation the sense of removal and displacement that underlies the condition of dandyism, and verbally suggest the association of this condition with historical decadence. The dandy’s sense of exile from the mainstream gives him a crucial vantage point, however. Like the speaker in “Le Miroir” and the proud anchorites