Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris

Abstract

IN GIVING the title of Parisiens to an outstanding group of poems in the Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire played them off against the background of a genre which has been, with the exception of Walter Benjamin, more or less entirely neglected by critics of Baudelaire. Whereas Baudelaire could be sure that the contemporary reader of his poetry would be familiar with this background, the intertextual relation, established with the title of Parisiens, was no longer perceived when the prestige of the genre of tableau de Paris as a popular form of local literature had faded. The great histories of French literature of the nineteenth century do not treat it as a genre of its own; indeed, they do not even mention it. The tableau de Paris as a subliterary genre of feuilletonistic literature did not produce literary works which have become part of the literary tradition. It remained one of those elementary or even trivial forms of spontaneous and time-bound literary communication, which nevertheless are often a fertile soil from which great and lasting literary productions spring. Even the classical works of literature which have become part of our tradition have deep and often unknown relations to that body of anonymous literary work which responds to the necessities of the moment. Baudelaire's Parisiens are an example for innovation in high literature through adaptation and transformation of nonliterary or subliterary forms of communication. In order to understand the particular quality of innovation in Baudelaire's Tableaux we have to examine the particular relationship between the genre of tableau de Paris and its secondary use in the context of lyric poetry. The history of the genre of tableau de Paris, which came to an astonishing prosperity during the first part of the nineteenth century,