The Lost Halo

            The urban crowd is a phenomenon that continues to fascinate us even today. The notion of individuals coalescing into a singular, pulsating entity defies the human sacrosanct of individualism. Large populations crammed into small areas build massive buildings that canalize pedestrian traffic into a perpetual flow of humanity. Naturally, this tempest sweeps away individuals and assimilates them into an urban collective. Baudelaire took note of this menacing spectacle in The Flowers of Evil. His portrayal of this urban entity was so adroit; it would later attract the attention of Walter Benjamin. In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), Benjamin defines the connection between Baudelaire and the crowd as the catalyst for man “losing his halo” in the grime of the urban streets.

            Benjamin begins his essay with the introduction of Freud’s theory of shock. For Freud, the purpose of our consciousness is to serve as protection against stimuli or “shocks”. He feels that the “more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect”[1]. Shock effect is not just important to Baudelaire; rather it is “the very center of his work”[2]. Benjamin believes Baudelaire constantly strives to defend himself from the shocks of the city in an effort to separate himself from his surroundings and still maintain an unadulterated sense of individuality and clear perception of the world. While Baudelaire successfully parries most of the city’s onslaught, he fails to defend himself against one particular aspect: the urban crowd. Benjamin identifies that the haunting of the crowd’s menace within Baudelaire’s work is his attempt to defend against its massive traumatic shock.

            Oddly enough, Baudelaire never directly addresses the subject of the crowd in The Flowers of Evil.  “The masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his works,” Benjamin explains, “[Baudelaire’s] most important subjects are hardly ever encountered in descriptive form”[3]. By refusing to directly describe Parisians and the city, Baudelaire maintains the freedom to “invoke the ones in the form of the other”[4].  In the sonnet “A Une Passante”, Benjamin identifies a flawlessly example between the crowd and the city:

The deafening street was screaming all around me.

Tall, slender, in deep mourning—majestic grief—

A woman made her way; with fastidious hand Raising and swaying festoon and hem;

Agile and noble, with her statue's limbs.

And there was I, who drank, contorted like a madman,

Within her eyes—that livid sky where hurricane is born—

Gentleness that fascinates, pleasure that kills.

 A lightning-flash ... then night! —O fleeting beauty

Whose glance all of a sudden gave me new birth,

Shall I see you again only in eternity?

Far, far from here! Too late! or maybe, never?

For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go,

 O you I would have loved (o you who knew it too![5]

While Baudelaire does not overtly address the dangerous allure of the crowd, one can identify a palpable texture within the verse describing an inexorable force attempting to consume the viewer in a whirling cacophony.

            Benjamin moves to further define the crowd’s shock effect that tantalizes Baudelaire as a feeling of crushing isolation. True, one would cannot help note the paradox of feeling lonely while surrounded by people. However, Benjamin identifies a theme of exactly that consistency running rampant throughout The Flowers of Evil. Specifically, this theme focuses on the crowd overwhelming an individual’s senses via a gauntlet of bright lights, collisions with strangers, shouting merchants, and dangerous streets full of speeding carriages. Baudelaire refers to this individual as a “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”[6]. The city quickly overwhelms our sense of equilibrium and disconnects us from a once familiar reality. The constant flow of humanity almost becomes surreal in Baudelaire’s work. Often, they fight a losing battle and infuse descriptions of the macabre or profane in their descriptions of the world. This is exactly what Baudelaire is telling his reader: the crowd is the city’s apparatus for jostling you away from a comfortable sense of individuality and transplanting into a faceless collective.

             Once the city isolates us from our individuality, Benjamin identifies the next step in Baudelaire’s degeneration of humanity: mechanization. Naturally, man has relatively high level of access to technology in the city. Machines do a great number of tasks previously executed by humans. As Benjamin states, “The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism”[7]. Baudelaire’s notion of mechanization physically manifests in the form of gambling.

            Benjamin explains that the “shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker ‘experiences’ at his machine”[8]. Initially, a gambler and a machinist appear two different and incomparable occupations; however, Benjamin states mechanization forces both of them share a sense of “futility, the emptiness, and the inability to complete something”[9]. “Gambling,” Benjamin further explains, “contains the workman’s gesture that is produced by the automatic operation, for there can be no game without the quick movement of the hand by which the stake is put down or the card is picked up… the drudgery of the laborer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. The work of both is equally devoid of substance.[10]” Benjamin identifies that Baudelaire selected the gambler as his physical manifestation of the notion of mechanization produced by an urban environment for one important reason: the gambler serves as a conduit for vice and enables its proliferation to all those sharing a feeling of becoming more machine than human.

            Baudelaire’s gamblers embody the notion of abandoning morality when one no longer feels human. His work proposes the rhetorical question, “Why should we act like a human we no longer feel like one?” These gamblers consume narcotics that “submerge the consciousness that has delivered them to march of the second-hand”[11], ravage prostitutes, and dwell in a realm of filth and slime all the while mechanically playing games of chance. In “Gaming”, Baudelaire assumes the roll of an observer in a decrepit gambling hall. He describes the scene as one of:

“My heart takes fright to envy this poor lot

Who rush so fervently to the abyss,

And who, drunk on their blood, prefer in sum,

Suffering to death, and Hell to nothingness.”[12]

The gamblers are now machines that can no longer distinguish between the filthy squalor of their immediate surroundings and aspects of their former lives. Gambling dens are now their homes and whores, thieves, and perverts are their new neighbors. While games of chance reduced these men to machine, Baudelaire feels the city and the crowd reduces every other soul’s humanity. To him, we are no longer independent thinkers capable of mastering our own destiny; rather, we are brainwashed cattle mindlessly navigating the city streets.

            Benjamin compares Baudelaire’s struggle against the city and the crowd to a man “fighting the rain or the wind”. For Benjamin, the shocks created by the crowd overwhelm us and, as in the case of his lyrical poet, cause us to lose our halos in the rancid mud of the streets. He closes with an unpublished conversation written by Baudelaire. In it, one man asks his friend, a once stalwart, moral individual, why he is dwelling amongst places of ill repute. His friend responds that the “moving chaos in which death comes galloping at you from all sides at once” jostled him and knocked the halo off his head. Oddly enough, he rejoices, “ I said to myself, every cloud has a silver lining. Now I can go about incognito, do bad things, and indulge in vulgar behavior like ordinary mortals. So here I am, just like you!”[13]Regardless of our own desires, the crowd carries us all to the same location: a place populated by mindless denizens mechanically going about daily life and desperately clinging to vice as their only source of happiness. Clearly, Benjamin could not have better described the dominating texture of The Flowers of Evil.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1968), 186.

[2] Ibid.,189.

[3] Ibid.,195.

[4] Ibid.,195.

[5] Ibid.,196.

[6] Ibid.,203.

[7] Ibid.,203.

[8] Ibid.,205.

[9] Ibid.,205.

[10] Ibid.,205.

[11] Ibid.,208.

[12]Charles Baudelaire, “Gaming” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 197.

[13]Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1968), 221-222.