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9. Baudelaire’s Impure Transfers: Allegory, Translation, Prostitution, Correspondence This chapter arose from the challenge of presenting a difficult author in lucid, clear text for a standard reference work. Light annotation has been added for this revision. In focusing on the complexities in Baudelaire’s experience , criticism, and poetry, I elaborate his lexicon of impurity, the terms that chart the process of making connections by breaking bounds. The Life Charles Baudelaire lived in a world even more aware than our own of rapid transformations in every aspect of life. The very term ‘‘modernity,’’ which figures importantly in his writings, only came into the French language during his youth. By the time he published Les fleurs du mal, in 1857, he had already lived under four political regimes. He was born in 1821 under the Bourbon monarchy, which the allies had restored to the rule of France after they defeated Napoleon in 1815. In 1830 a revolution brought in a constitutional monarchy under the Orleanist Louis-Philippe. This bourgeois monarchy yielded in 1848 to further revolutionary activity, and the Second Republic (the first had been under the Revolution, 1792–1804) was instituted , only to succumb to the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, nephew of Bonaparte, on December 2, 1851, which brought in the Second Empire. Titles like ‘‘restoration,’’ ‘‘second’’ republic, and ‘‘second’’ empire suggest repetitiveness; the term ‘‘revolution’’ originally characterized the planets’ movements in their orbits. In contrast to these political cycles, the social and economic innovations showed no signs of return. Baudelaire’s contemporaries understood that there had occurred a change from an aristocratic to a bourgeois society, from a domination of landed wealth to the predominance of commercial and industrial interests. A more democratic polity and more dynamic economy made available for writers vastly greater means of publication , particularly in the newly flourishing periodical press, yet it was not clear that the dominant bourgeoisie cared for the literary enterprises that 125 126 Language and Reality in the Age of the Novel writers might undertake. Baudelaire and his contemporaries therefore both cast nostalgic glances back to aristocracy and also empathized with the new workers’ movements—for both represented alternatives to the bourgeoisie.1 All this change could seem the falling away from a valued past, or progress toward an ever-improved future. One’s status in life was no longer fixed. The government official François Guizot, faced with complaints about the property qualification that limited voting rights under LouisPhilippe , could answer simply, ‘‘Make yourselves more money’’ (‘‘Enrichissez -vous’’). The power of money in a world of increasingly free markets, in which not only goods but also ‘‘free labor’’ were sold, destroyed traditional values. The Communist Manifesto (1848) characterized the bourgeois age as one in which ‘‘all that is solid melts into air.’’2 After 1849, the great capital city of Paris itself dramatically exemplified this mobile fluidity. Under the direction of Baron Haussmann, old quarters of the city were torn up— especially those that had been rebellious—and wide new avenues regulated and accelerated the flow of traffic, while facilitating also free lines of fire and rapid deployment for troops against an uprising. Baudelaire’s own family offers a vivid emblem of this messy historical layering. His father was an old man, born in 1758, under Louis XV. His life had been shattered and remade by history: He studied in a seminary and was ordained a priest, but during the Revolution he left the Church. His connections included intellectually liberal aristocrats (such as the Marquis de Condorcet, a great visionary of humanity’s future, who died in the Terror), and he finally held a sinecure at the Senate under Napoleon’s Empire. Baudelaire looked back to his father as a cultured man, who had practiced both poetry and painting. Baudelaire’s mother was born in 1793 in London, where many French families emigrated during the Revolution. In his later life Baudelaire recalled the brief period he had enjoyed alone with his mother, after his father’s death in early 1827 and before her remarriage in late 1828. The transitions—from life with an elderly father to life alone with his mother to life with a stepfather—must have been startling. His stepfather , Jacques Aupick, born in 1789, the year of the Revolution, was over thirty years younger than his father. Having begun his career with Napoleon ’s army, Aupick managed to flourish under the newer regimes. He became head of the garrison...

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