Prose Constructions: Nerval, Baudelaire, and the Louvre

Abstract

This article examines the destruction of the bohemian neighborhood known as Le Doyenné found within the wings of the Louvre during Napoleon III’s remodeling of national politics and Parisian space. The razing of this quartier by Second Empire authorities simultaneously effaced from view artists and the poor. Gérard de Nerval’s two nostalgic works about the time he lived in the Doyenné neighborhood, La Bohême galante and Petits châteaux de Bohême: Prose et poésie along with Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose form the aesthetic response to this political, spatial, and semiotic crisis through their writing of poetry into prose.