A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Cultural Ferment 799

one of the dominant values of Western culture. The notion of an avant­

garde, a term taken from military tactics, implies a small group of people
who see themselves in the forefront of artistic expression and achievement.
Intellectuals and artists began to insist on the irrational basis of human
nature, their work reflecting both uncertainty and cultural rebellion.

Realism

Influenced by the widening interest in science and the quickening pace of

social change, some writers had in the middle decades of the century broken

with literary traditions. Realism had emerged as the dominant European cul­

tural style during the 1850s and 1860s. Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867)

once described himself as the poet of modern life. Best known for his volume

of poems Les Fleurs du Mai (1857; The Flowers of Evil), Baudelaire believed

that art had to be the product of an exchange between the individual artist

and contemporary society. The artist s own experience and self-discovery

became critical in the emergence of modern literature. Baudelaire was fined

in 1857 for “obscene and immoral passages or expressions.” Les Fleurs du

Mai became even more popular as his decadence and overt eroticism—he

died of syphilis in 1867—angered officials and critics alike. Baudelaire was

the consummate dandy and “flaneur” the observer of modern urban life.

Dressed in what modest elegance his small inheritance permitted, the flaneur

strolled through Paris, finding beauty in its modern boulevards but also gaz­

ing at its hideous, even frightening aspects with objective detachment, both

reacting to and reflecting modern

urban life. Baudelaire rebelled

against bourgeois culture and con­

ventional assumptions about artistic

subjects and style. Rejecting the

notion that absolute aesthetic val­

ues exist, Baudelaire was a crucial

figure in the emergence of modern

culture in the middle of the century.

In the 1850s, the Barbizon

painters—so called because they

gathered in a village of that name

southeast of Paris—emphasized

the painting of peasants, harvests,

animals, and other symbols of vil­

lage life. In doing so, they broke

sharply with many of the long­

accepted styles of painting, includ­

ing romanticism. The development

of photography during the 1840s Charles Baudelaire, “the poet of modern

may have contributed to the inter- life,” in a photograph by Felix Nadar.