The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
you in a street brawl [un émeute], perhaps you will have felt the same delight as I have often felt to see a protector of the public slumbers—a policeman or a municipal guard (the real army)—thumping a republican. And if so, like me, you will have said in your heart: “Thump on, thump a little harder, thump again, beloved constable! for at this supreme thumping, I adore thee and judge thee equal of Jupiter, the great dealer of justice [le grand justicier]! The man whom thou thumpest is an enemy of roses and perfume, and a maniac for utensils. He is the enemy of Watteau, the enemy of Raphael, the bitter enemy of luxury, of the fine arts and of literature, a sworn iconoclast and butcher of Venus and Apollo! He is no longer willing to help with the public roses and perfumes, as a humble and anonymous journeyman. He wants to be free, poor fool; but he is incapable of founding a factory for new flowers and new scents. Thump him devoutly across the shoulder-blades, the anarchist!
(OC II, 490; AIP 113–14)
Most recent critics have treated this apparent celebration of police power, like the opening celebration of bourgeois political power, as deeply ironic. Given that Baudelaire’s despised stepfather was a military man, who would lead his troops in defense of the public order in the streets of Paris during the Revolutions of 1848—on the other side of the barricades from Baudelaire—the ironic reading is entirely plausible. Here again, however, the question of Baudelaire’s specific political affiliation is less important than the underlying assertion that art and beauty are fundamentally public matters. Although the unlucky republican in this scene would seem to share Baudelaire’s devotion to civic virtue, he in fact represents liberal self-interest. Elevating individual rights (“He wants to be free”) over what Baudelaire takes to be the public good, he betrays the collective ideals embodied by art and beauty (Watteau, Raphael) and is punished accordingly. The pursuit of abstract rights is private and individualistic, however public and political the process of securing these rights may be. By contrast, the creation of beauty and pleasurable sensation (roses and perfumes) is collective (they are “public” and the products of a factory), serves the public good, and should be defended by the force of the state.
This street scene helps to establish Baudelaire’s broader critical point in the section: that the superficial artistic individualism of the journeymen painters who were flooding the market with their mediocre work has replaced the “sovereignty of genius” that once governed the collective labor of artistic schools (OC II, 490; AIP 114). There are still true masters among current painters, but their “pupils” are mostly unknown to them, and their doctrines, carried by impersonal networks of communication, extend their dominion beyond the studio to regions where they are not understood. Those closest to the master “preserve the purity of his doctrines”; those outside the “family circle” borrow illegitimately from the schools. Baudelaire calls this group the “artistic apes”: “a vast population of mediocrities— apes of different and mixed breeds [singes de races diverses et croisées], a floating race [nation] of half-castes who move each day from one country to the next” (OC II, 491; AIP 115). The result of this individualism and mindless eclecticism is “an exhausting and sterile freedom [liberté]” (OC II, 492; AIP 116). The artistic apes, Baudelaire concludes, are “the republicans of art,” who glorify the individual at the expense of the community. Against this model, Baudelaire argues for a return to the “collective originality” of the schools that surrounded the great masters in the Renaissance (OC II, 492; AIP 116).
Baudelaire’s terminology in this section, as I noted above, has its roots in utopian socialism, but one finds the same sentiments, and much the same political imagery, in later writings as well. In “Le Peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life]” (1863), for example, Baudelaire compares the struggle between the detail and structure in an artistic composition to a street battle: “An artist with a perfect sense of form but one accustomed to relying above all on his memory and imagination will find himself at the mercy of a riot [assailli par une émeute] of details all clamouring for justice with the fury of a mob in love with absolute equality [égalité absolue]. All justice is trampled underfoot; all harmony sacrificed and destroyed; many a trifle assumes vast proportions; many a triviality usurps the attention. The more our artist turns an impartial eye on detail, the greater is the state of anarchy. Whether he be long-sighted or short-sighted, all hierarchy and all subordination vanishes” (OC II, 698–99; PML 16). Here again, Baudelaire associates the demand for formal political equality with lost artistic integrity and a threat to the public good, even using the same word (“émeute”) to describe the resulting disorder. Maintaining an impartial eye—the blind eye of justice, or the formal equality of the bourgeois nation-state—sacrifices the collective good to individual whim, and the entire community suffers. By contrast with the socialist vocabulary of “Des écoles et des ouvriers,” Baudelaire now speaks the authoritarian language of the right (hierarchy, subordination, the mob). But the analogy underlying both street scenes is the same: the artistic and the public good are ill served by the tradition of liberal individualism, with its elevation of the atomistic monad over the collective social body.
“Mon Semblable,—Mon Frère!”
Beginning with his praise of the artistic schools, Baudelaire speaks to and for a literary and artistic elite that abides within the modern world but operates according to its own laws and institutions. It is a self-selected community within the broader society, a decadent republic of letters. As Walter Benjamin recognized, Baudelaire was the first poet to understand the nature of the modern literary public; he writes “to whose who are like him.”12 Benjamin here refers to the shrinking audience for lyric poetry, but the point applies to Baudelaire’s other audiences as well. Baudelaire appeals to the aesthetic elite as “friends” and “unknown sympathizers [partisans inconnus]” (OC II, 779; PML 111), and characterizes this elite as an aristocracy. “I think,” he writes in the Salon de 1859, that “artistic affairs should only be discussed between aristocrats, and … that it is the scarcity of the elect that makes a paradise” (OC II, 633; AIP 168). Perpetually impoverished and a product of the stolid middle class, Baudelaire by no means saw himself as a part of any actually existing sociopolitical aristocracy. Rather, and in a manner that would influence the often deceptive class politics of later decadent writers (who were overwhelmingly drawn in both France and England from the provincial middle classes), he maps the traditional prerogatives of aristocratic life—its leisure, its history of artistic patronage, and, crucially, its perceived sense of responsibility for the commonweal—onto the ideal of an artistic life. The marginality of nineteenth-century artists mimics the leisure that enabled aristocrats in earlier republics to serve the public good. Creating beauty and exercising the faculty of taste are acts of civic virtue, a contribution to the betterment of the polis.
Gesturing toward the hereditary nature of aristocratic rule, Baudelaire defines his elite as a kind of family. The language of kinship, with its weight of nature and familial obligation, might seem to sit uncomfortably with Baudelaire’s civic humanist ideal, but it is in fact essential to it: artistic genius is a birthright, like aristocratic blood. Membership in Baudelaire’s elite is wholly elective, however. It is necessary yet chosen, at once natural and constructed. The language of kinship also underscores the bonds of sympathy that unite the members of the elite. They are an unnatural family, kindred spirits born into membership and bound by artistic affiliation, not by blood; the only lineage they recognize is artistic tradition, with the relationship between master and disciple supplanting that of parent and child, and recasting the republican virtue of universal fraternity. In the Salon de 1846, I noted above, Baudelaire contrasts the “family circle” of an artist’s true disciples with the “artistic apes,” who borrow from any and every master. The most authentic family is brought together by theory and the faculty of taste; the “artistic apes,” by contrast, are a “race,” their artistic failure figured as biological inferiority.
Baudelaire’s family of taste is set apart from the masses and often opposed to the ruling order, but it is by no means divorced from the life of the nation. It is a vanguard, paradoxically bound all the more closely to the polis by its alienation from the mainstream. The members of this family are highly sensitive to political changes, living out the effects of historical transitions to which the rest of the nation remains oblivious. At the end of his 1863 obituary essay on Delacroix, Baudelaire ascribes a macropolitical function to his aesthetic elite. Noting that the death of great artists