to Sartre’s view of his mother’s “abandonment” of him by marrying
Joseph Mancy – the parallel (seeEB 47 ) is striking, though less surpris-
ing in view of what had become a matter of methodological principle for
Sartre whenever the evidence was available.
Beauvoir claimed that Sartre’s favorite fantasy as a child and adoles-
cent was that of “thepoete maudit(misunderstood by all during his lifetime and struck by fame’s lightning only beyond the grave).”^9 In his introductory note to Sartre’s study, Michel Leiris, the editor in charge of poetry forLTM, calls Baudelaire “the quasi legendary proto- type of the ‘poete maudit.’”^10 But for our purposes, what matters is to
see how Sartre’s reading of the poet exhibits the newly fashioned
ontology/metaphysics ofBN, specifically the ontological conditions for
his basic category of disvalue which he called “bad faith.” We know that
the most common form of such self-deception consists in denying our
ontological make-up, our freedom and responsibility: that is, collapsing
our transcendence into our facticity, our existence into our being, in the
futile attempt to be what we are in the inert way that a stone is a stone.
George Bauer observes that “[Sartre’s] evaluation of Baudelaire’s life
and work is ferociously negative because he finds inLes Fleurs du Mal
a basis for his interpretation of the poet’s quest for permanency in the
myth of bronze and marble.”^11 Echoing Roquentin inNausea, Sartre’s
Baudelaire is seeking salvation from an anguished contingency in the
work of art, the irreal. In Baudelaire’s case, this occurs in the extreme:
making his life into a (physical) poem – an imaginary construct and a
style of life. This is the incarnation of the “futile passion” that defines
human reality inBN: Baudelaire chooses to be a “freedom-thing”(B 84 ).
This suggests Sartre’s remark inBN: “One puts oneself in bad faith
as one goes to sleep and one is in bad faith as one dreams” (BN 68 ;
EN 109 ). Here he insists that Baudelaire’s “bad faith is so deep that he
is no longer its master” (B 103 ) – no longer but, presumably, he once
was in charge, hence the bad faith. Still, this is but one of numerous
claims, increasing in frequency as “lived experience” (le ve ́cu) replaces
(^9) Beauvoir,Force of Circumstance, 41.
(^10) B 9. Ste ́phane Mallarme ́received “official” recognition by being one of three poets pre-
sented in the first edition of Paul Verlaine’sPoe`tes maudits( 1884 ) while Baudelaire was not
11 included until the next edition (^1888 ).
George Howard Bauer,Sartre and the Artist(University of Chicago Press, 1969 ), 166 ;
hereafter Bauer.
Baudelaire: an essay on bad faith 385