The ‘Virus of Prose’: Decadent Style and the Modernist Novel

Abstract

Twelve years after The Flowers of Evil, and two years after his death in 1867, a work of Baudelaire’s was published that in its own way would be just as important as its predecessor for the development of modernist notions of style. Le Spleen de Paris (1869) not only reinforced the idea, established in The Flowers of Evil, that the locus of modern life was the big city — of which Paris was the exemplar par excellence — it also sought to bring together the two competing forms of poetry and prose (as its alternative name, Petits poemes en prose, suggests). Through his brief, lyrical vignettes of modern life in the streets of Paris, Baudelaire took a decisive step towards the Flaubertian dream of giving ‘prose the rhythm of verse’.