Baudelaire’s “Tableaux Parisiens”: Metropolis Multitude, and Modernity

Abstract

The section titled ‘Tableaux Parisiens,’ in the second edition of Charles Baudelaire’s the Flowers of Evil highlights a remarkable transition from the poet’s initial romantic preoccupation to an outstandingly different kind of poetry which shocked the contemporary readers and led the later critics and poets alike to regard him as the first modern poet. Modern poetry, as this paper aims to show, has been the product of the lone poet’s painful effort to adapt himself to the unpredictable city and his subsequent failure, alienation and ennui. This failure is the fate of everyman, and the failed self, the fallen self With all its secrets, finds in the city a market and incarnates at times as a prostitute looking for customers to sell herself and at other times as a poet in search of a publisher to sell himself. Baudelaire, unlike his predecessors, does not shun this lost tribe of people from his poetry but makes them and their city the very subject therein. Thus, a study of the city, which supplied the poet the inspiration and the materials for his work, would be a key to Baudelaire’s modernity. With this perception this paper seeks to make a critical reading of ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ and show that Baudelaire’s modernity was born in the metropolis with his discovery of isolation in the multitude.