Baudelaire Against Photography: An Allegory of Old Age

Abstract

It is common critical practice to divide Baudelaire's life into two distinct phases: an optimistic youth and a premature, embittered old age. From a biographer's standpoint it is difficult to determine the moment of transition from one phase to the next, and many of Baudelaire's declarations create the impression that he experienced life as a perpetual verging on decrepitude: Je ne suis pas positivement vieux, he wrote at the age of thirty-four, mais je puis le devenir prochainement. For the critic who is strictly interested in Baudelaire's literary and critical production, however, an early and a late period can be easily distinguished. Between 1846 and 1857 Baudelaire developed his idiom, and certain of his attitudes-towards antiquity, the bourgeois reader, and the fate of the poet-are thoroughly revised. Whether this occurred for biographical reasons, or whether, as Paul Valery suggests, because Baudelaire discovered Poe and adopted the American writer's fatalism, the later work is increasingly querulous and seems to reveal an aging and discouraged author. Baudelaire's two major Salons, written in 1846 and 1859, fit nicely into this schema. The Salon de 1846 opens with a dedication Au bourgeois, and ends with the praise of modern life and its particular beauties. In between, Baudelaire pursues a definition of Romanticism as aesthetic modernism, thatis as l'expression la plus recente, la plus actuelle du beau. Although others in 1846 might consider Romanticism past its prime, Baudelaire thinks differently: s'il est reste peu de romantiques, c'est que peu d'entre