Reminiscences of a Conference and the Ubiquity of Baudelaire

Baudelaire’s images of the city in his poetry are so romantic, even as they are also critical of urbanization. It is easy to understand why they have become so ubiquitous, somehow sidling their way into nearly every conversation I have on urban literature. I can’t blame people for always having recourse to him, though perhaps we can blame Walter Benjamin just a little for so perfectly capturing and reigniting Baudelaire’s seductive writing in his writing on Baudelaire in The Arcades Project.

I want to set the scene for you. I’ve just completed my talk on a panel at a historical conference on global urbanism on a glorious spring day in Leicester, England. The sun is brightly shining through the conference venue windows, and a small audience is politely listening to myself and another presenter on the subject of Latin American cities, reflective of the way in which Latin American cities often do not receive much attention.

It is time for the Q&A and the panel chair (a substitute because the original panel chair was unable to make it) opens the floor to questions. I’m a bit of a fish out of water here, trying to figure out how to present about literature to a history audience, and having dropped some requests for exactly the kind of historical research I’m hoping my fellow conference attendees will be able to point me toward moving forward in my writing on Argentine novelist Eugenio Cambaceres’s Sin rumbo and its representation of the urbanization occurring in Buenos Aires at the time.

In the back an audience member eagerly raises his hand and inquires if I can speak about Charles Baudelaire’s representation of urbanism and how different it seems to be from the representation in Sin rumbo. In that moment he gives me a frustrating gift. I am, of course, just drafting and brainstorming these blog posts about Baudelaire and to shift from presenting a close reading of urban representation in an Argentine novel to Baudelaire is perfectly demonstrative of why I began my library building series with this author. Love him or hate him, part of establishing my own scholarly ethos as someone working on literary urban studies means I have to know Baudelaire in order to be able to respond to these types of questions, which absolutely will come up regardless of my subject matter. For those of you interested in establishing a shared knowledge of French literature, literary urban studies, or canonical literature broadly conceived, Baudelaire is a solid starting point for exactly the same reasons.

Baudelaire is a reference point amongst scholars writing on urbanism across the disciplines: urban geography (David Harvey), city literature (Marshall Berman and Andreas Huyssen), Philosophy (Walter Benjamin, who has played a large role in Baudelaire’s ubiquity), and now global urban history. He sits at the nexus of writing on urban modernity and literature so that, if a person knows nothing else, they will know that Baudelaire is the Patriarch of literary urban modernity.

Things to know about Baudelaire in this regard include that he could be critical of urban modernity, as in The Flowers of Evil, or laudatory as we find in The Painter of Modern Life, and perhaps it is this flexibilityy that makes him so enduring. There is a Baudelaire for everyone. At the same time, it is Baudelaire’s contrasting of the ancient and the modern that often makes him an ideal example for so many scholars because he does the work of articulating the contrast or large scale shifts in social milieus that were created by large scale transformation of the built environment.

However, while Baudelaire’s writing is undoubtedly rich, enchanting, and wonderful to read, and while reading him may give you a point of reference the next time you are talking to someone about urbanism in literature, it is important to also realize Baudelaire’s over-emphasis creates some problems. For example, while a focus on Baudelaire tends to make Paris seem more than important to urban modernity—its very cradle in fact—it has been argued elsewhere (Ian Watt and Raymond Williams) that London was equally modern in the same time period if not before. Setting aside European nationalist contests for who is the origin of urban modernity we should also remember that modern building practices like wholesale urban planning and construction were tested in the early colonies long before they were implemented in the metropole, so, properly speaking, there is no origin point for urban modernity. It was a complex process.

In short: do know Baudelaire but don’t emphasize him to the point of becoming a broken record as urban studies across the disciplines is at times guilty of doing. Let’s put Baudelaire back on the shelf, for now.