Baudelaire: Un Demi-Siècle de lectures des Fleurs du mal (1855-1905) (review)

In the preface to his voluminous collection Baudelaire: Un Demi-Siècle de lectures des Fleurs du mal (1855–1905), André Guyaux recounts the story of how Baudelaire aimed to thank Swinburne for a favorable review. In a letter he entrusted Nadar to deliver in London, Baudelaire writes:

Un jour, M.R. Wagner m'a sauté au cou, pour me remercier d'une brochure que j'avais faite sur Tannhäuser, et m'a dit: "Je n'aurais jamais cru qu'un littérateur français pût comprendre si facilement tant de choses." N'étant pas exclusivement patriote, j'ai pris de son compliment tout ce qu'il avait de gracieux.

Permettez-moi, à mon tour, de vous dire: "Je n'aurai jamais cru qu'un littérateur anglais pût si bien pénétrer la beauté française, les intentions françaises et la prosodie française." Mais après la lecture des vers imprimés dans le même numéro (August) et pénétrés d'un sentiment à la fois si réel et si subtil, je n'ai plus été étonné du tout; il n'y a que les poètes pour bien comprendre les poètes.

(137)

Sadly, we learn through Guyaux that this note did not find its way to Swinburne as Nadar forgot his charge and, on a subsequent trip the Englishman makes to Paris, Baudelaire is absent. Swinburne will thus never read these lines, written with such warmth, by one poet to another.

And yet this is precisely the kind of precious insight that Guyaux offers the reader in his extraordinary contribution to Baudelaire studies. His lengthy preface alone reads like a who's who of men of letters in nineteenth-century France, from Hugo to Mallarmé. Each of them is on display in the book's vast assemblage of reviews, personal correspondence, statements pertaining to the legal case brought against Baudelaire for indecency, encyclopedia entries, elegies, prefaces to his literary works, homages and other material that surfaced in the fifty years following the publication of Les Fleurs du mal. Guyaux focuses primarily on reactions to this poetry collection, grouping them chronologically, and he aims to render "l'effet d'un dialogue entre les différents lecteurs, . . . et l'émergence . . . d'une flamme que les premiers lecteurs . . . transmettent à la génération qui suit . . ." (8). He believes that his contribution to the study of Baudelaire criticism is modest in its chronological scope, for example. And yet from the release of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 and the drama that ensued, to the poet's death ten years later, the publication of his posthumous works in 1887 and finally, the contentious debate regarding the plan for a statue memorializing him in 1892, the book spans a number of important milestones.

Despite certain crucial studies over the years, Guyaux contends that much remains to be done on the study of the early reception of Baudelaire. His book sets out to remedy this situation, in part by showing how divergent views on Baudelaire were during the time in question. It is this point – "[l]e cas de Baudelaire offre un exemple sans équivalent de revirement de fortune" (11) – first raised by Crépet, that Guyaux sets out to prove. Indeed, Swinburne remarks that "[c]omme tous les bons livres, et comme toute oeuvre d'un goût et d'une puissance originales, il fera longtemps l'objet d'un débat, il sera attaqué avec véhémence et défendu avec ardeur" (360). Guyaux's collection shows precisely how that prophecy took shape in the space of a half-century.

Baudelaire's detractors are well-represented. The first review, by Louis Goudall and published in the Figaro of 4 November 1855, is a good example. Goudall's main critiques appear to be the sheer "absence...