Notes on Baudelaire's Parisian Tableaux (1939)

Walter Benjamin's largely forgotten paper “Notes on Baudelaire's Parisian Tableaux,” written originally in French and translated into English for the first time here, was delivered at the Abbaye de Pontigny in May of 1939. It is a probable candidate for what he would have presented to the College of Sociology, organized by Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois in Paris, if the war had not cut things short. In this essay, Benjamin slightly diverges from his other work on Charles Baudelaire's poetry, focusing on allusions to the big city and its ethical, political, and social effects on modern subjectivity, as distilled by the Parisian Tableaux cycle in The Flowers of Evil and the Little Poems in Prose and Flares. He considers most notably how the writer's social role is called into question once the work ethic of bourgeois society establishes hegemony. If Baudelaire becomes the emblem of the modern writer who is deprived of identity and condemned to solitude, “désœuvré,” or “out of work,” as Benjamin puts it in a turn of phrase that resonates with Bataille and later Maurice Blanchot, then it is because he draws the material of his verse from this experience of social isolation and abandonment as a flaneur in the midst of the crowd. Benjamin proposes that Baudelaire's images of the crowd, in showing how the modern city dweller is subjected to cruel and dehumanizing mechanisms of homogenization under capitalism, anticipate the governmental management, formation, and control of mass populations by dictators and fascist regimes leading up to the Second World War

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