{"id":33637,"date":"2020-04-28T21:01:18","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T19:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=33637"},"modified":"2023-06-07T12:53:02","modified_gmt":"2023-06-07T10:53:02","slug":"baudelaires-journalistic-spleen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/literature\/baudelaires-journalistic-spleen\/","title":{"rendered":"Baudelaire's journalistic spleen"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the collection of prose poems The Spleen of Paris<\/em>, published posthumously, Charles Baudelaire enriched his work dedicated to melancholy with a new dimension: its anchorage in the city and everyday life. In a radically new form, the Baudelairean subject is understood as a chronicler of his own atrabilious mirror. To the point of making Spleen of Paris<\/em> the counterpart of Fleurs du Mal<\/em> - in other words, its equal.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Less well known than Visit<\/em> Fleurs du Mal<\/em>, The Spleen of Paris<\/em> is a major work by Baudelaire, and also his last. It is a posthumous collection of prose poems, edited by Charles Asselineau and Th\u00e9odore de Banville, and first published in 1869 in the fourth volume of the Complete works<\/em> by Baudelaire from publisher Michel L\u00e9vy. The fifty prose poems in the collection were written between 1855 and 1864. Some forty of these fifty prose poems were published during Baudelaire's lifetime in the magazine The Artist<\/em>, directed by Ars\u00e8ne Houssaye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalistic poems<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Houssaye is a friend. Baudelaire dedicates a dedication to him at the beginning of the book. The link between this work and the world of journalism is therefore not insignificant. And with good reason, it appears at more or less regular intervals throughout the collection. Baudelaire's depiction of Parisian spleen seems to offer a reflection on everyday writing, on journalistic writing. It's not unimportant to note that the author, as was customary at the time, published his writings in the form of serials, with episodes appearing in newspapers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The context in which the Spleen of Paris<\/em> is reflected in its content. The poem \u00abAt one o'clock in the morning\u00bb<\/a>, Baudelaire's \u00abhorrible vie! horrible ville\u00bb (horrible life! horrible city!) expresses a strong sense of boredom, culminating in a form of anger, against the pretense of modernity, the city and everyday life. The phrase \"horrible life! horrible city!\" speaks volumes about Baudelaire's association between modernity and the city. Paris alone brings together all the elements of modernity that Baudelaire reviles: the crowd, hypocrisy, the development of the bourgeoisie, progress. The poet sees in others and in himself a double being, doomed to spleen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversely, the ideal seems to lie in writing. And it's interesting to note that Baudelaire writes in the clausule: \u00abLord my God! grant me the grace to produce a few beautiful verses that prove to myself that I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those I despise!\u00bb. With this sentence, we come to the interesting opposition between people who don't know melancholy and geniuses affected by it. We can confirm that Baudelaire despises the former.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among Baudelaire's depiction of the deep malaise of the crowd, the bourgeoisie, the noise, the day, the daily grind, appears the question of journalists and journalism. Baudelaire turns his prose poem into a reflexive text, which in what it describes reflects his daily writing. The title \u00abA une heure du matin\u00bb (At one o'clock in the morning) supports this idea of daily anchoring; it contains no date, and aims to generalize his repetitive experience of city life and writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban melancholy<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

With this journalistic dimension, The Spleen of Paris<\/em> can be considered the \u00abcounterpart\u00bb of the collection Les Fleurs du Mal<\/em>. Claude Pichois, in his Complete works<\/em>, writes that this word appears at least six times in Baudelaire's correspondence between December 1863 and January 1866. There are many similarities between the two works, including the duality of spleen and ideal; reflections on art; the desire to paint modernity, the City (\u00abTableaux parisiens\u00bb); and the imaginary dream, particularly exotic. However, the prose poem allows for a different treatment of these themes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The correspondences established by the metaphors in Les Fleurs du Mal <\/em>We move from a mythical verticality to a prosaic horizontality, which perhaps more transcendentally embraces the reality of the City. In fact, Baudelaire explicitly sets the spleen in an urban context. We see this in the very title of the work: it's not about spleen, but the spleen of Paris, which is an extremely important nuance in comparison with the \u00abSpleen\u00bb of the Fleurs du Mal<\/em>. Baudelaire, and this is his great strength in this collection, has sensed what is specific to urban melancholy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n