{"id":13286,"date":"2022-07-12T06:13:03","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T06:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/?post_type=product&p=13286"},"modified":"2022-07-12T06:18:05","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T06:18:05","slug":"fevers-of-curiosity-charles-baudelaire-and-the-convalescent-flaneur","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/pt\/fevers-of-curiosity-charles-baudelaire-and-the-convalescent-flaneur\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cFevers of Curiosity\u201d Charles Baudelaire and the Convalescent Fl\u00e2neur"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire\u2019s birth, the French poet famous for his descriptions of the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>: a man of the crowd, who thrived in the metropolis\u2019 multitude. Following Baudelaire through 19th-century Paris, Matthew Beaumont discovers a parallel archetype \u2014 the convalescent hero of modernity \u2014 who emerges from the sickbed into city streets with a feverish curiosity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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We are used to thinking of Charles Baudelaire\u2019s<\/a> most famous archetype, the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>\u00a0who saunters through the metropolitan city, as a supremely self-confident inhabitant of the mid-nineteenth century streets \u2014 a \u201cpassionate spectator\u201d of their multifarious life-forms. The\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, after all, was a middle- or upper-middle class man who, fascinated by the multiplicity and variety of city life, freely resided \u201cin the heart of the multitude\u201d, as Baudelaire put it in \u201cThe Painter of Modern Life\u201d (1863), \u201camid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite\u201d. He could afford to savour its constant, contradictory stimuli not least because he stood, or strolled, at a slight distance from the hustle and bustle of its everyday life. Relishing its rhythms and rhymes, the Baudelairean\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em> read the metropolis as if it unfurled before him like an immense, complicated poem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The role Baudelaire ascribed to his \u201cpassionate spectator\u201d was to act as an exquisitely tuned instrument for monitoring but also conducting the contradictory energies of capitalist modernity. This phenomenon \u2014 capitalist modernity<\/a> \u2014 was a state of permanent social and existential transformation. In Paris, its experience had been decisively shaped by the urban reforms that Emperor Bonaparte and his prefect Baron Haussmann forcibly introduced in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. For, in \u201cblasting a vast network of boulevards through the heart of the old medieval city\u201d, as Marshall Berman<\/a> puts it, they turned it into a theatre both of military pageant and \u2014 in the context of the arcades and, later, the department stores \u2014 of consumerism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>\u00a0glorified by Baudelaire was never in fact the comfortable, complacent bourgeois stroller that had been so fashionable in the 1840s in those illustrations and journalistic sketches known as the\u00a0Physiologies<\/em>. As late as 1867, the French historian and journalist Victor Fournel was presenting\u00a0fl\u00e2nerie<\/em>, which he sketched in terms of \u201cdrifting along, with your nose in the wind, with both hands in your pockets, and with an umbrella under your arm, as befits any open-minded spirit\u201d, in positively seraphic terms.<\/p>\n

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In \u201cThe Painter of Modern Life\u201d, by contrast, Baudelaire was already emphasising the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/i>\u2019s restless, unsettled experience both in the metropolitan street and in his own skin. Baudelaire\u2019s often peripatetic life as a bohemian poet in Paris, shaped by privation, rebellion, and a taste for narcotic substances, lies behind his reconfiguration of the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>. This is neatly captured in a \u201cSelf-Portrait under the Influence of Hashish\u201d that he sketched in the early 1840s \u2014 for there, standing in the nocturnal city, a scruffily dressed Baudelaire stares suspiciously at us from beneath a cloud of intoxicating black smoke.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Baudelaire\u2019s famous metropolitan archetype, then, was far more haunted or even hunted than the one purveyed in the contemporary illustrated periodical press.\u00a0This can be glimpsed in a poem like \u201cLe Soleil\u201d, from the\u00a0Tableaux Parisiens<\/em>\u00a0section of the second edition of Baudelaire\u2019s\u00a0Les Fleurs du Mal<\/em>\u00a0(1861). There, the impoverished poet describes venturing out alone (\u201cJe vais m\u2019exercer seul\u201d) in search of the poetry of the city\u2019s streets: \u201cduelling in dark corners for a rhyme \/ and stumbling over words like cobblestones\u201d.\u00a0Like the French language, here the French capital is a distinctly hostile environment. So is the poet\u2019s own body. By this point, racked by debt, Baudelaire was addicted to laudanum; mentally and physically ill. The writer as walker has become an embattled, almost tragi-comic figure.<\/p>\n

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It is those pedestrians who, like the struggling poet of \u201cLe Soleil\u201d, find themselves damaged and discomfited as they negotiate the city\u2019s streets that interest me here. The frailer kind of\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, so to speak\u2026 In particular, I am concerned with one of those alternative archetypes useful for capturing the experience of metropolitan modernity with which Baudelaire complicates the\u00a0fl\u00e2neur<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 the convalescent. And my focus is on the moment when the urban convalescent, in spite of frail nerves, takes his first, reckless steps in the city from which he has been temporarily exiled, and experiences a sense of freedom at once tentative and abrupt. The streets \u2014 which he approaches cautiously, still a little feverishly, at first perhaps as an observer who must half-protect himself from the impact of the city \u2014 are the site of the convalescent\u2019s groping re-engagement with everyday life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"