Walter Benjamin The Writer of Modern Life Essays on Charles Baudelaire

I

Edited by Michael W. Jennings
Translated by Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott,
Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn

The Writer ol Modern Lile
Essays on tharles Baudelaire

Walter Benjamin
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Masschusetts, and London, England 2006

The Writer of Modern Life
Essays on Charles Baudelaire

WALTER BENJAMIN
Edited by Michael W Jennings
Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French
lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized
not just the way we think about Baudelaire,

but our understanding of modernity, modernism, and Benjamin. What propels these
writings is personal for Benjamin. In these
essays, he challenges the image of Baudelaire
as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead
the modern poet caught in a life-or-death
struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris
around 1850.
The Baudelaire who steps forth from these
pages is the flaneur who affixes images as
he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to
turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing
to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance
the modern artist forced to commodify his
literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it
stood with the poet: as a flaneur he went to
the market; to look it over, as he thought, but
in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals
Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first

(Contiuued

011

back.ffa.p)

The Writer ol Modern Lile

Copyright © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Additional copyright notices appear on page 307, which constitutes
an extension of the copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940.
[Essays. English. Selections]
The writer of modern life : essays on Charles Baudelaire I
Walter Benjamin ; edited by Michael W. Jennings.
p.cm.
Selected essays from Walter Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften.
Includes bilog~aphc

references and index.
· ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02287-4 (alk.J?aper)
ISBN-10: o-674-02287-4 (alk. paper)
1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867-Criticism and interpretation.
2. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867-Influence. I. Jennings, Michael
William. II. Title.
PQ2191.Z5B39713
841' .8-dc22

2006
2006043584

[ontents

Introduction, by Michael W. Jennings
Baudelaire

1

27

Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century
The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire
Central Park

134

On Some-Motifs in Baudelaire
Notes

213

Index

293

170

30

46

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The Writer ol Modern life

lntroduttion
By Michael W. Jennings

Walter Benjamin's essays on Charle~
Baudelaire from the 1930s accomplished nothing less than a wholesale reinvention of the great
French poet as the representative writer of urban capitalist modernity.' Before Benjamin's radical reorientation of our image of the
poet, .. Baudelaire had usually been considered in purely aesthetic
terms-as a late Romantic or as a forerunner of the' French Symbolists. For Benjamin, however, Baudelaire's greatness consisted precisely in his representativeness: in the manner in which his poetryoften against its express intent-laid open the structure and mechanisms of his age. Benjam~
was hardly alone among his contemporaries, of course, in his estimation of. Baudelaire as the first .fti11y ... ·"
modern writer. In England, Baudelaire was a touchstone for T. S.
Eliot, who translated Baudelaire into English and produced an important essay on Baudelaire's relation to modernity. 2 In Germany,
the great lyric poet Stefan George was an important link between

Baudelaire and modern German writing; George's translation of Les
Fleurs du mal is still in many ways unsurpassed. 3 Yet Eliot and
George saw in Baudelaire a writer very different from the one discovered by Benjam1n. 4 For Eliot, Baudelaire was the key to adequate
spiritual comprehension of modernity, an important predecessor in

Eliot's own quest to find a path informed by religion through the
modern wasteland; for George, Baudelaire's poetry opened onto a
vast, wholly aestheticized landscape that was proof against the indignities of the modern world. What is at stake in this comparison of
Benjamin and his contemporaries is more than merely Benjamin's
leftism versus the conservative-or, in the case of George, protofascist-politics of the other poets. If Eliot's Baudelaire was a key
voice in the spiritual constitution of modernity, and George's
Baudelaire the beacon of all genuinely modern aesthetic production, Benjamin made Baudelaire a complex object: a largely apolitical writer whose poetry we must nevertheless comprehend before
we can formulate any responsible cultural politics of modernity.
Benjamin resolutely refuses to attribute a single productive social
or political insight to Baudelaire himself; the achievement of Benjamin's essays is their ability to expose Les Fleurs du mal as uniquely,
scathingly, terrifyingly symptomatic of Baudelaire's era-and ours. 5
In late 1914 or early 1915, when Walter Benjamin was all of twentytwo, he began translating individual poems from Baudelaire's greatlyric cycle Les Fleurs du mal; he returned intermittently to the poems until the early 1920s, when his translation work became intensive. In 1923, Tableaux parisiens: Deutsche Obertragung mit einem
Vorwort iiber die Aufgabe des Obersetzers von Walter Benjamin (Tableaux parisiens: German Translation with a Foreword Concerning
the Task of the Translator, by Walter Benjamin), which included a
full translation of the central section of Les Fleurs du mal, appeared

in a luxury edition of five hundred. 6 Benjamin had submitted some
early translations to Ernst Blass, editor of the journal Die Argonauten, in 1920, and it was Blass who introduced him to the publisher Richard Weissbach, who eventually brought out the slender
volume. To Benjamin's great disappointment, neither the introduction-Benjamin's now-famous essay "The Task of the Translator"nor the translations themselves met with .:interest either from the
educated/public or from critics/ On March 15, 1922, as part of an
effort to publicize his book, Benjamin took part in an evening program dedicated to Baudelaire at the Reuss und Pollack bookshop on

MICHAEL W. JENNINGS

Berlin's Kurfurstendamm, delivering a talk on the poet and reading
from his own translations. Although he appears to have spoken from
memory or perhaps from notes, the two brief texts included here under the title "Baudelaire" (ll and III) are probably preliminary versions of his remarks.
Both of these texts focus on binary relations within Baudelaire's
works and "view of things." Much of "Baudelaire III" fixes on the
chiastic relations between the terms spleen and ideal in Les Fleurs du
mal. Some of the most memorable poetry in the volume is to be
found in the cycle of poems called "Spleen":
Pluviose, irrite contre Ia ville entiere,
De son urne a grands flots verse un ~oid
tenebreux
Aux pales habitants du voisin cimetiere

Et !a mortalite sur les faubourgs brumeux.
[February, peeved at Paris, pours
a gloomy torrent on the pale lessees
of the graveyard next door and a mortal chill
on tenants of the foggy suburbs too.]
("Spleen et ideal," LXXV: "Spleen I")

Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres-vieux,
Qui, de ses precepteurs meprisant.les courbettes,
S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres betes.
[I'm like the king of a rainy country, rich
but helpless, decrepit though still a young man
who scorns his fawning tutors, wastes his time
on dogs and other animals, and has no fun.]
("Spleen et ideal," LXXVII: "Spleen III") 8

Benjamin argues that the spleen we see projected here onto the
cityscape and the weather is never merely a generalized melancholynot merely the state of being splenetic-but has its source in "that

INTRODUCTION

3

./

fatally fbundering, doomed flight toward the ideal;' while the ideal
·itself rises from a ground of spleen: "it is -the images of melancholy
that kindle the spirit most brightly." This reversal, Benjamin is at
pains to point out, takes place neither in the realm of the emotions
nor in that of morals, but rather in that of perception. "What speaks
of [moral]
to us in his poetry is not the reprehensible con~si
judgment but the permissible reversal of perception." The poem
"Correspondances;' with its invocation of the figure of synaesthesia,
remains the primary evidence for such a claim; but others, such as
the lovely poem "L'Invitation au voyage," also ring changes on the
notion of perceptual reversal:
Mon enfant, rna soeur,
Songe a Ia douceur

D'aller la-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer aloisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressernble!
Les soleils rnouilles
De ces ciels brouilles
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mysterieux
De tes traitres yeux,
Brillant atravers leurs larmes.

La, tout-n'est qu'ordre et beaute,
Luxe, calrne et volupte.
[Imagine the magic
of living together
there, with all the time in the world
for loving each other,
for loving and dying
where even the landscape resembles you.
The suns dissolved

4

MICHAEL W. JENNINGS

in overcast skies
have the same mysterious charm for me
as your wayward eyes
through crystal tears,
my sister, my child!
All is order there, and elegance,
pleasure, peace, and opulence.] 9

If the central motifs of this reading are still grounded in the categories through which Baudelaire had traditionally been received,
the other little essay, "Baudelaire II," breaks new ground and indeed
anticipates some of the most important motifs of Benjamin's work
in the 1930s. In that piece, Baudelaire emerges as a privileged reader
of a special body of photographic work: time itself is portrayed as a
photographer capturing the "essence of things" on a photograpl'fic · •
plate. These plates, of course, are negatives, and "no one can deduce
from the negative ... the true essence of things as they really are." In
a remarkable attempt to evoke the originality of the poet's vision,
Benjamin attributes to Baudelaire not the ability to develop such a
negative, but rather a "presentiment of its real picture"-that is, a vision of it in its negative state. In "Baudelaire n;· his earliest reading
of the poet, Benjamin attempts to account for a number of aspects
of his vision-such as Baudelaire's insight deep into the nature of
things, in a poem such as "Le Solei!":
Quand, ainsi qu'u!! poete, il descend dans les villes,
II ennoblit le sort des chases les plus viles,
Et s'introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets,
Dans tous les hopitaux et dans tous les palais.
[When, with a poet's will, the sun descends
into the cities like a king incognito,
impartially visiting palace and hospital,
the fate of all things vile is glorified.]

INTRODUCTION

5

.... ,.

.. Or, 'to take another example, Baudelaire's figuration of history as a
multiple exposure in "Le Cygne":
Andromaque, je pense avous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir ou jadis resplendit
L'immense majeste de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simois menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,
A feconde soudain rna memoire fertile,
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
[Andromache, I think of you!
That stream, the sometime witness to your widowhood's
enormous majesty of mourning-that
mimic Simoi:s salted by your tears
suddenly inundates my memory
as I cross the new Place du Carrousel.]
Or, to take yet another example, Baudelaire's fundamental se11_se.of·
the negative-as the transient and always irreversible-in "Une
Charogne":
Oui! Telle que vous ser~,
6 Ia i:eine des gi:aces,
Apres les derniers sacraments,
Quand vous irez, sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses,
Moisir parmi les ossements.
Alors, 6 rna beaute! Dites a Ia vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Qui j'ai gard~
Ia forme et !'essence divine
De mes amours decomposes!
[Yes, you will come to this, my queen,
after the sacraments,
when you rot underground among
the bones already there.
But as their kisses eat you up,

'

MICHAEL W. JENNINGS

my Beauty, tell the worms
I've kept the sacred essence, saved
the form of my rotted loves!] 10
And Benjamin finds in Baudelaire a capability analogous to the one
he attributes to Kafka in his great essay of 1934: an intimate knowledge of humanity's "mythical prehistory." 11 It is no doubt this knowledge of primordial good and evil that opens the "true nature" of the
photographic negative to Baudelaire's "infinite mental efforts."
The centrality of the photographic metaphor, and indeed of the
figure of the photographic negative, in Benjamin's first critical ehgagement with Baudelaire is anything but an accident. By late 1921,
Benjamin was moving in the orbit of the "G Group;' a cenade of
avant-garde artists centered in Berlin. The great Hungarian artist
Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy was part of the earliest formations of the group,
and Benjamin came to know him. as early as the autumn of 1921.
Moholy's theories of artistic production-and especially his important essay "Production-Reproduction;' published in the avant-garde
jour~f"De
Stijl in July 1922-would preoccupy Benjamin for years to
come; but in 1921 and 1922, it is clear that Moholy's photographic
practice, which then consisted of experimentation with the photogram (a cameraless photograph that, to the uninitiated, appears to
be a negative), played a role in Benjamin's first interpretation of
Baudelaire. From the very beginnings of his critical engagement with
Baudelaire's work, then, Benjamin was considering Baudelaire's poetry in conjunction with key categories of modernity and especially
of the technologized cultural production that is characteristic of urban commodity capitalism.
After Benjamin's bookstore talk in 1922, Baudelaire became a subterranean presence in his work for the next thirteen years. This was a
time of radical change in the orientation and practice of Benjamin's
criticism. In the years prior to 1924 and the completion of The Origin
of German Trauerspiel, his great study of the German Baroque play
of mourning, Benjamin had been intent on a reevaluation of German Romanticism, and the development of a theory of criticism
I

'

INTRODUCTION

7

with deep roots in that very body of work. During those years,
Benjamin had written precisely one essay on twentieth-century literature, an unpublished piece on Paul Scheerbart, author of utopian
science fiction. Beginning in 1924, however, he turned his attention
and his energies in precipitously new directions: toward contemporary European culture, Marxist politics, and a career as a journalist
and wide-ranging cultural critic. By 1926 Benjamin was embarkeq on
a program of study and writing that would, he hoped, make him
Germany's most widely respected voice on the modernist and avantgarde cultural production of France and the Soviet Union. His frequent visits. to Paris inspired a series of brilliant essays on Paul
Valery, Andre Gide, Julien Green, and Marcel Proust, as well as influential presentations and analyses of the French historical avantgarde. The essay "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1929) presents the provisional results of his analysis of
French modernism. Baudelaire, as the progenitor of French modernism, of course haunts this work, but Benjamin consistently avoided
direct engagement with the poet in this period.
Reflection on Baudelaire reentered his writing in the late 1920s as
Benjamin began to collect material and ideas for The Arcades Projed
(Das Passagen- Werk), his great history of_the~!.c
of ].!!ban
c?~ty_.apilsmo5Q
The study took its working title from the proliferation of mercantile galleries, ~-il_
mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin fastens on these structures
as an organizing-metaphor because they are at once a historically
spe'cific artifact and a particularly concentrated symbol of the mercantile capitalism of the period-indeed, "a world in minature."~
~oth-si:e!_nd
interior, market and amusement pal~,
a~!i
thus reflect the ambiguity Benjamin finds characteristic of the
bS1~-;go
oftii'iit...ex:!lA-le locates the decisiv;hlstorical
,;f:hift to the modern era, then, not so much in large-scale modificaV1 ions in the socie.tal totality but rather in changes in concrete societal
artifacts and ~n the way they are experienced and understood. As he
put it in a draft version of the conclusion to the essay, the creations and forms of life determined by commodity production "pre-

--

8

MICHAEL W. TENNINGS

sent themselves as a phantasmagoria.
The world that is domi~
nated by these phantasmagorias is-in a key word found for it b
Baudelaire-the 'Modern."' 12
Benjamin worked on this enormous project until the end of his
life, never bringing it to completion; in the years of his exile from
fascist Germany after 1933, much of the work was supported by stipends from the Institute for Social Research. In 1935, Fritz Pollack,
the co-director of the institute, suggested that Benjamin produce an
expose of the project that could be shown to potential sponsors.
The text "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (included in
this volume) was in fact that expose; it thus represents Benjamin's
first attempt to describe the scope and focus of The Arcades Project. Baudelaire would, at this stage of the project, have played a
key, though not central role: the utopian socialist Charles Fourier,
the photographer Louis Jacques Daguerre, the caricaturist Grandville (Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard), the·constitutional monarch Louis
Philippe, and the city planner Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann
would have appeared alongside Baudelaire in leading roles in the
drama of modernity played out amid the arcades, panoramas, world
exhibitions, and barricades of Paris. The pages given over to Baudelaire are perhaps the densest in the essay: Benjamin:· presents, in dizzying abbreviature, a number of the central motifs of his critique of
modernity: the flaneur who strolls through the urban crowd as prosthetic vehicle of a new vision; the department store as phantasmagoric space of display and consumption; the commercialization and
final alienation of the intelligentsia; the prostitute as concatenated
image-of death and W(}man, "seller and sold in one"; the gradual
denaturing of art as it is subsumed by commodification and fashion;
and the replacement of experience by the new concept of information. These are among the central categories that will inform the'
great essays on Baudelaire to come.
As Benjamin continued to amass material for his study of the arcades, and to develop a theory adequate to that material, his friends
at the Institute for Social Research became increasingly eager to see
some part of the project in print. In 1937,- at the urging of Max

j

/

INTRODUCTION

9

Horkheimer, the i~stue'
director, Benjamin reconceptualized the
project as a study of Baudelaire that would draw on the central concerns of The Arcades Project as a whole. 13 He produced a detailed
outline that organized excerpts from his notes under section and
chapter headings. 14 The book project, which bore the working title
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, would
have had three parts: (1) "Baudelaire as Allegorist"; (2) "The Paris of
the Second Empire in Baudelaire"; and (3) "The Commodity as Poetic Object." Working feverishly throughout the summer and fall of
1938 in Skovsbostrand, Denmark, where he was a guest of his friend
the great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht,)3enjamin completed the
middle third of the Baudelaire book and submitted this text as an essay entitled "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" to the
Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research) in New
York.
Benjamin's first major work on Baudelaire is one of the greatdt
essays of literary criticism from the twentieth century; it is also one
of the most demanding of its reader, requiring not merely inordinate
contributions of imagination and analysis, but a thorough knowledge of Benjamin's other work. The essay begins, disconcertingly, not
with a,consideration of Baudelaire's poetry, or even of Baudelaire
"'m~self,
but with the evocation 'Of a particular "intellectual physiognomy": that of the conspiratorial face of the boheme. For Benjamin,
the bohemians were not primarily artistes starving in garrets-think
of Rodolfo and Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme-but a motley collection of amateur and professional conspirators who imagined the
overthrow of the regime of Napoleon III, France's self-elected emperor. In the opening pages of the essay, Benjamin establishes relays
between the tactics employed by these figures and the aesthetic strategies that characterize Baudelaire's poetic production. If "surprising
proclamations and mystery-mongering, sudden sallies, and impenetrable irony were part of the ra·ison d'etai of the Second Empire,"
Benjamin says, Baudelaire's poetry is likewise driven by "the enigmatic stuff of allegory" and "the mystery-mongering of the conspirator." This physiognomic evocation of Baudelaire leads not to·a-read10

MICHAEL W. JENNINGS

ing of a poem where such a physiognomy flashes up at the readerone might think of "Satan's Litanies;' with its evocation of a "Prince
of exiles, exiled Prince who, wronged I yet rises ever stronger from
defeat, I Satan, take pity on my sore distress!" 15-but rather to an
analysis of the poem "Ragpicker's Wine," chosen because of its own
evocation of the milieu in which the conspirators operated, a series
of cheap taverns outside the city gates. T!!i.s montage of various as-·pe~f_Q!
...i_!lte~E.1£hysognm
within the spaces in whicQjt
arises is cent~l.!
. ~l\i!tmu'.sehodnJ_wr:kp
BaJ.g}elaire. In
th~C.-eragpi
we fi.ud..a....h.ighly C.QDf~!: chaged
"From the litterateur to the professional conspirator, everyone who
belonged to the boheme could recognize a bit of himself in tpe
ragpicker. Each person was in a: more or le~s
blunted state of revolt
against society and faced a more or less precarious future." As this
quotation from "The Paris of the Second Empire" suggests, the ragpicker was a recognizable social type. Yet the ragpicker is also a figure
for Baudelaire, for the poet who draws on the detritus of the society through which he moves, seizing that which seems useful in part
because society has found. it usel~
And finally, the ragpicker is
a figure for Benjamin himself, for the critic who assembles his critical montage from inconspicuous images wrested forcefully from
the seeming coherence of Baudelaire's poems. Here and throughout
Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire, we find a powerful identification
with the poet: with his social isolation, with the .relative failure of his
work, and in particular with the fathomless melancholy that suffuses
every page.
Benjamin concludes this first constellati_on by contrasting Baudelaire with Pierre Dupont, an avowed social poet, whose work strives
for a direct, indeed simple and tendentious engagement wit}l the political events of the day. In contrasting Baudelaire with Dupont,
Benjamin reveals a "profound duplicity" at the heart of Baudelaire's
poetry-which, he contends, is less a statement of support for the
cause of the oppressed, than a violent unveiling of their illusions. As
Benjamin wrote in his notes to the essay, "It would be an almost
complete waste of time to attempt to draw the position of a Baude-

INTRODUCTION

11

laire into the network of the most advanced positions in the struggle
for human liberation. From the outset, it-seems more promising to
investigate his machinations where he was undoubtedly at home:
in the enemy camp.
. Baudelaire was a secret agent-an agent of
the secret discontent of his class with its own rule." 16 Although this
is not the place for a full analysis of the theoretical. stances that dictated Benjamin's construction of "The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire," a few remarks may suggest a line of approach. By the late
1930s Benjamin was convinced that traditional historiography, with
its reliance upon the kind of storytelling that suggests the inevitable
process anq ou:zome of historical change, "is meant to cover up the
revolutionary moments in the occurrence of history.
The places
where traditiqn breaks off-hence its peaks and crags, which offer
footing ~o one who would cross over them-it misses." 17 Benjamin's
essay is thus composed of a series of vivid images torn from their
"natural" or "briginal" context and integrated into a text based on
principles of montage. 18 And he did so from the conviction that
lthese images, often based on seemingly inconsequential details of
v1large historical structures, have been ignored as the dominant class
ascribes truth value to its own, ideologically inspired version of history. In order to uncover what Benjamin calls "true history" or "primal history," he proposes "to extract, to cite, what has remained inconspicuously buried beneath-being·, as it was, of so little help to
the powerful:' 19 How, though, are we to understand the relationships
between the i~ages
in Benjamin's text? Far from the "lack of mediatio'n" or "billiard-ball determinism" attributed to Benjamin's practice
by
Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson, Benjamin counts on the
1
hexpressive" capacity of his images. 20 "The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure-pre"
/ cisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection
j 1 but its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from if causal
point of view, it may be said to 'condition."' 21 Benjamin thus seeks to
create a textual ,space in which a speculative, intuitive, and analytical
intelligence can move, reading images and the relays, between them
1 in such a way that the present meaning of "what has been comes toI

12

MICHAEL W. JENNINGS

gether in a flash:' This is what Benjamin calls the dialectical image.\
And "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" is the finest, [ ,/
r
most fully realized example of the critical practice informed by the \
"
theory of the dialectical image. 22
In the central section of "Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," titled "The Flaneur;' Benjamin turns to an extended consideration of the reciprocallfgenerative relations between certain artistic
genres and societal forms. In the crowded stre.g£-h_ubaoJP~
'
t_r~Jhe.ind¥ua-sm=lf65&14>0o
..masses;_.all,
traces of indvualexstc._rf~J
...df.a@~,u!c;LR9Pl1ri"y
af.ld artistic forms such as physiologies (li~:ryand
ar.tistic.exempli_.............~-

~.

~.t9!_2Pi?1TLnd

... :-·,;.~_•'"

..

-··

P,!}no.ramas-(representationsof·
"tyEi_c.