April 7, 2022 29His Nemesis Was Stupidity
Ange Mlinko
Late Fragments:
Flares, My Heart Laid Bare,
Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed
by Charles Baudelaire,
translated from the French
and edited by Richard Sieburth.
Yale University Press, 427 pp., $30.00
(to be published in May)The Flowers of Evil
(Les Fleurs du mal)
by Charles Baudelaire,
translated from the French
by Aaron Poochigian, with an
introduction by Dana Gioia and
an afterword by Daniel Handler.
Liveright, 343 pp., $27.95The Salon of 1846
by Charles Baudelaire,
translated from the French
by Jonathan Mayne, with an
introduction by Michael Fried.
David Zwirner, 159 pp., $12.95 (paper)Last year was the two hundredth anni-
versary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth.
We now have new translations of his
poetry and prose, and a reissue of the
essays that revolutionized art criticism.
This trio of works leapfrogs from The
Salon of 1846 to the first and second
editions of Les Fleurs du mal (1857–
1861), to the frightening, unpublishable
prose fragments from the last five years
of his life. Among these late writings
we find a letter Baudelaire wrote to
the editor of Le Figaro raging against
the celebration of Shakespeare’s three
hundredth birthday: he accused the
organizers of using the occasion for
political purposes, to gild their own
reputations and dishonestly recast the
Bard as a prototype of the egalitarian,
humanitarian, proletarian artist.
No such apologia can be made for
Baudelaire, who was nonetheless the
greatest poet- critic of his time and who
will remain a titan for as long as there is
literature. Defending Les Fleurs du mal
from the charge of immorality brought
against it in criminal court, Baudelaire
argued that his poetry was not corrupt-
ing, but that even if it were, the scope
of its influence would be limited by the
perfection of his verse, which sailed
over the heads of the masses.
Indeed, the trial in 1857 brought him
closer to fame, or rather infamy, than
his art did: indebted to his publishers,
shunned by the Académie française,
self- exiled in 1864 to Belgium, which
he loathed, debilitated by addiction and
syphilis, and left aphasic by a stroke, in
1867 he died utterly wretched, in rela-
tive obscurity, at the age of forty- six.
What would he make now of Dana
Gioia’s inventory, in his introduction to
Aaron Poochigian’s translation of Les
Fleurs du mal, of “Baudelaire coffee
mugs, T- shirts, and caps... posters, pil-
lowcases, corsets, hoodies, socks, and
beach towels... plaques, statues, rings,
and medallions”? Not to mention the
shot glass bearing his exhortation to
enivrez- vous sans cesse!
The answer likely would not be flat-
tering to the consumer. “Merch” is
not in any aesthete’s vocabulary, and
Baudelaire was a devoted acolyte of
lart pour lart. He is likely to have clas-
sified all that as chic and poncif, thetwo damning words he defines in The
Salon of 1846:The word “chic”—a dreadful word
of modern invention, which I do
not even know how to spell cor-
rectly, but which I am obliged to
use, because it has been sanctioned
by artists in order to describe a
modern monstrosity—the word
“chic” means a total neglect of the
model and of nature....
The meaning of the word “pon-
cif” has much in common with that
of the word “chic.”...
When a singer places his hand
upon his heart, this commonly
means “I shall love her always!”
If he clenches his fists and scowls
at the boards or at the prompter, it
means “Death to him, the traitor!”
That is the “poncif” for you.We could substitute “meme” for poncif.
Baudelaire’s nemesis was stupidity, la
bêtise, cognate with bête, beast, and red-
olent of cattle: the herd. “God, I thank
thee for not having granted me the bê-
tise of Victor Hugo,” he wrote of his
wildly popular, populist contemporary.Baudelaire was a Romantic: Ro-
manticism, he declared, “is precisely
situated... in a mode of feeling.” As
Michael Fried points out in his in-troduction to The Salon of 1846, Ro-
manticism was old news; realism à
la Courbet was about to overturn it
when the twenty- five- year- old poet
came charging at the art world full
tilt, extolling Delacroix (twenty years
his senior) and declaring that a paint-
er’s work should have the quality of
“naïveté and the sincere expression
of his temperament,” while criticism
should “be partial, passionate, and po-
litical.” The eighteen treatises that bear
out his critique of establishment art are
frequently ecstatic reveries: on color,
on the erotic, on models and portrai-
ture, vividly aphoristic (“A portrait is a
model complicated by an artist”). The
artist is heroic in service of an ideal:
“Drawing is a struggle between nature
and the artist.”
The critic, too, is in service of an
idea l. It fol low s t hat to love st rong ly one
must also hate strongly, and the paeans
to Baudelaire’s loves are accompanied,
dialectically, by excoriations of his
hates: after defining the chic and the
poncif, he offers us a taste of brimstone
in his takedown of M. Horace Vernet,
whose roughly sixteen- by- thirty- four-
foot painting of the Battle of Isly (where
French troops routed the Moroccans in
1844) gives him fits:M. Horace Vernet is a soldier who
practices painting. Now I hate
an art which is improvised to theroll of the drum, I hate canvases
splashed over at the gallop, I hate
painting manufactured to the
sound of pistol shots, since I hate
the army, the police force—every-
thing, in fact, that trails its noisy
arms in a peaceful place.Baudelaire doesn’t just hate Vernet’s
painting; he hates that Vernet is a na-
tionalist and that he is popular. It is an
indictment of the French that they can
enjoy this stuff:Who knows better than he the cor-
rect number of buttons on each
uniform, or the anatomy of a gai-
ter or a boot which is the worse for
innumerable days’ marching, or
the exact spot on a soldier’s gear
where the copper of his small arms
deposits its verdigris?If realism is not yet in Baudelaire’s
vocabulary, literalism, at least, is
anathema: mindless and petty—mere
journalism.
This impatience with his countrymen
is the focal point of his sardonic pref-
ace to the Salon, “To the Bourgeois”:
“You, the bourgeois—be you king, law-
giver, or businessman—have founded
collections, museums, and galleries.”
They, naturally, are looking for divi-
dends from their investments—Baude-
laire mocks their language with relish:Charles Baudelaire; illustration by Henning WagenbrethMlinko 29 31 .indd 29 3 / 9 / 22 2 : 05 PM