Poetic Practice and Historical Paradigm: Charles Baudelaire's Anti-Semitism

Abstract

Historians identify two principal strains of anti-Semitism in France: a traditional, religious variety rooted in medieval Catholic theology and a modern, racial variety that holds Jews responsible for the myriad of socioeconomic problems associated with the rise of mass-market capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century. This essay argues that Baudelaire exemplifies the historical transition between the two strains. The first, expressed in the poet's work in the late 1850s through the motifs of prostitution and hyper-Catholic self-martyrdom, resulted from his lifelong financial misery, his relationship with a Jewish prostitute, and his identification with Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph de Maistre. Over the course of the 1860s, largely in response to his dealings with the Jewish publisher Michel Lévy and to increasingly heavy financial and psychological pressure, Baudelaire's theological anti-Semitism turned into an aggressive, pernicious racism that culminated in his calling for “the extermination of the Jewish race.”