In
The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire
describes a Paris causing its population to rot both physically and morally.
Specifically, two of the chapters in The
Flowers of Evil, “Paris Spleen” and “Parisian Scenes”, deconstruct humans
into skeletal automatons and majestic urban spaces into dilapidated squalor. He
attributes this decay to an almost vindictive feeling of ennui that desensitizes
the city’s populace to the moral degeneration flourishing amongst the ruins of
a once great city. Differently put, Baudelaire feels the city is a caustic
environment that slowly liquefies our bodies into a faceless mass of humanity
while at the same time eroding our moral credos into a universal sense of
debauchery.
The
interaction between the environment and one’s self is of paramount importance
to Baudelaire. His city affects its citizens to such a degree that it gains an
aspect of control over their perception of their world and influences their
moral decisions. In his poem “Correspondences”, Baudelaire intertwines every sensual
effect of the environment into a single interaction with the viewer:
“As the long echoes,
shadowy, profound,
Heard from afar,
blend in a unity,
Vast as the night, as
sunlight’s clarity,
So perfumes, colors
may correspond.”[1]
The poem’s title suggests that we
are in perpetual dialogue, or correspondence, with our surroundings. This
potent conversation is a crucial element in his later poems and serves as the
crux of his investigation of how people undergo a polar shift of morality and
physically erode by simply moving to the city.
Uncertainty and
confusion are two of the most affecting attributes of Baudelaire’s Paris. In
“Paris Spleen” and “Parisian Scenes”, he blurs the lines between reality and
fantasy, distorts the boundaries of night and day, and even fails to
distinguish between the living and the dead. The frustration associated with
this occlusion of reality allows Paris’ citizens to morally validate their
malaise and thus seek visceral remedies. One can argue that “Spleen” defines
the environment while “Parisian Scenes” portrays its effect. Specifically, the themes of skeletons
and lost souls aimlessly wondering through fog and drizzle permeate the poem. Baudelaire provides a palpable
description of the city by stating:
“When
earth is changed into a sweaty cell,
In
which Hope, captured, like a frantic bat,
Batters
the walls with her enfeebled wing,
Striking
her head against the rotting beams;
When
steady rain trailing its giant train
Descends
on us like heavy prison bars,
And
when a silent multitude of spiders
Spins
its disgusting threads deep in our brains,
Bells
all at once jump out with all their force,
And
hurl about a mad cacophony
As
if they were those lost and homeless souls
Who send dogged whining to the skies.”[2]
In a mere three verses, Baudelaire
transforms Paris into a crowded, dank, and sweaty prison of souls aimlessly
lamenting in the black emptiness of oblivion. Also, he maintains his motif of
confusion by both afflicting these lost spirits with both stifling heat and
freezing rain. This bewilderment entraps and facilitates the delivery of the
poem’s quintessential allusion: the transformation of Hope into a bat, a
creature that dwells in subterranean darkness, and then condemns the animal to
strike her head upon a rotting landscape.
Baudelaire
describes humanity’s reaction to the city in two distinct responses: a frustrating
feeling of entrapment and a violet hour in which morality becomes a polar
inverse of its previous self. With respect to gaining a firm understanding of
our environment and clearly defining a proper interaction, Baudelaire
unequivocally dismisses the possibility of such reconciliation. In fact, he believes
that the city changes from an inorganic landscape to a self-realized entity
capable of rearanging its form in accordance with its own designs thus
preventing humanity from gaining a higher degree of understanding beyond an
evanescent visual response to very temporary physical surroundings. In his poem
“The Blind”, Baudelaire describes people as “peculiar, terrible somnambulists”[3]
groping their way along the streets and alleyways in a dreamy malaise while the
city mockingly rearranges itself thus trapping them in an unending maze.
Baudelaire explains:
“Thus they traverse
the blackness of their days,
Kin to the silence of
eternity.
O city! While you
laugh and roar and play,
Mad with your lusts
to the point of cruelty,
Look at me! Dragging,
dazed more than their kind.
What in the Skies can
these men hope to find?”[4]
He
goes further to identify another form of entrapment: the relegation of all
common citizens into one faceless and uniform social class. Baudelaire feels
the irreconcilable difference between our desire for familiarity and the city’s
perpetual metamorphosis denies the possible of establishing a sense of
individuality. Differently stated, if we are unable to define our surroundings,
we can never come to understand ourselves. In “The Little Old Women”, Baudelaire
observes a parade of old, broken women so transformed by the city that they all
appear to be the same person. The virtuous slowly become profane while strong
get week. Eventually, all that remains is a degenerate crowd of cattle.
Baudelaire recognizes their devolution by stating:
“ So you trudge on,
stoic, without complaint,
Through the chaotic city’s
teeming waste,
Saints, courtesans,
mothers of bleeding hearts,
Whose names in times
past, everyone had known.
You glorious ones,
you who were full of grace,
No one remembers you!
“[5]
Clearly, Baudelaire’s city
compresses its citizens into one uniform, faceless mass blindly attempting to
navigate along streets that constantly rearranged themselves at the will of the
city. Understandably, this sense of entrapment justifies a reaction that
Baudelaire finds absolutely delicious. He feels that once we assume our place
in the pulsating mass of the crowd, we abandon all moral codes.
“Dusk”
describes the violet hour between an understanding of the world based upon diligent
hard work and that of a realm filled with “corrupting demons of the air slowly
[waking] up men of great affairs”[6].
In this ethereal world, the city transforms from an industrious realm of
hardworking people laying their weary heads upon their pillows to a realm
limned by streets full of prostitutes and other denizens of immorality. Let us
further define this transition by comparing an excerpt from the early portion
of the poem to one following the world’s moral evolution. Prior to transferring
control to the forces of vice, Baudelaire describes Paris as a place where:
“Honest, weary arms
can say: We’ve done
Our work today! The
night will bring relief
To spirits who
consume themselves with grief,
The scholar who is
bowed with heavy head,
The broken worker
falling into bed.”[7]
However, instead of providing a
restful nights sleep to those who toil in the hot sun, the city elects to
become a buzzing hive of malevolent activity. As dark falls, we witness the
conception of such a scene:
“The tables at the
inns where gamesmen sport
Are full of
swindlers, sluts, and all their sort.
Robbers who show no
pity to their prey
Get ready for their
nightly work-a-day
Of cracking safes and
deftly forcing doors,
To live a few more
days and dress their whores.”[8]
This juxtaposition demonstrates the
moral decline facilitated by the palpable angst of Paris’ citizens. Each day,
they toil until they are exhausted and look forward to getting a good night’s
sleep. However, the cacophony of vice wrenches them from their sleep each
night. This cycle continues until resolves are broken and moralities are
abandoned. Simply put, Baudelaire feels that prolonged exposure to the city’s
debauchery eventually breaks the resistance of every occupant.
Baudelaire’s Paris
strips humanity of all individuality and morality by physically entrapping it
in a constantly evolving environment and making it wade through a sea of vice
on a daily basis. He feels that
the will and moral code of the city is vastly superior to that of our own. It
is as if the city is changing so rapidly, it must ensure its population is
complicit and unwilling to impede its evolution. In order to ensure humanity’s obedience,
the city rewards us with treats of sex, alcohol, gambling and other sensual
delights. Similar to his sentiments regarding beauty in “The Painter of Modern
Life”, Baudelaire feels we don’t have a choice regarding this submission. It
does not matter how strong our bodies and morals are. The city will always be
stronger.
[1] Charles
Baudelaire, “Correspondences” in The
Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press),
29.
[2] Charles
Baudelaire, “Spleen (IV)” in The Flowers
of Evil, trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press), 149.
[3] Charles
Baudelaire, “The Blind” in The Flowers of
Evil, trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press), 187.
[4] Ibid,
187-188.
[5] Charles
Baudelaire, “The Little Old Women” in The
Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press),
185.
[6] Charles
Baudelaire, “Dusk” in The Flowers of Evil,
trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press), 193.
[7] Ibid, 193.
[8] Ibid, 193.
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