Hazel Smith follows the original flâneur through the changing streets of 19th-century Paris…

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The 19th-century poet, essayist and art critic Charles Baudelaire was born and died in Paris, and rarely strayed far from its streets. In fact, it was the rapid transformation of these streets that inspired his most enduring work, Les Fleurs du Mal. Published in 1857, it captured the tensions of a changing Paris as only a lifelong flâneur could.

Born at 13 rue Hautefeuille, Baudelaire was baptised at nearby Saint-Sulpice in April 1821. After the death of his elderly father five years later, Baudelaire’s wandering life began, moving with his mother through a series of cheaper apartments until she remarried. When Baudelaire’s despised stepfather, Colonel Aupick, was posted to Lyon in the 1830s, the youngster attended boarding school there for four years. Apart from Lyon and his final years in Brussels, Baudelaire’s favourite footpaths were within Paris.

Rue_Hautefeuille_21_-photo-1869-1870, inconnu, wikimedia commons

A SEA VOYAGE

Baudelaire attended the prestigious Lycée-Louis-le Grand in Paris, but was expelled in 1839 (for refusing to hand over a note from a classmate) and enrolled at the Collège Saint-Louis, where he passed the baccalauréat. In line with his stepfather’s wishes, he began studying for a career in the law, but in practice, spent his time in the Latin Quarter, drinking daily, hiring prostitutes and accruing considerable debts. In an effort to redirect his debauched stepson’s bohemian energy, Aupick shipped Baudelaire off to Calcutta in 1841.

Sailing from Bordeaux to India, the ship anchored at Mauritius, after badly weathering a hurricane at the Cape of Good Hope. Shunning the idea of India, Baudelaire jumped ship and bought a return ticket to France, eager to receive the inheritance from his father’s estate due to him upon his 21st birthday.

Plaque_Charles_Baudelaire,_17_rue_Hautefeuille

Just shy of turning 21, Baudelaire moved to the Île Saint-Louis. Except for a smattering of other locations, the treasure hunt for Baudelaire’s many addresses centres near the Seine and in the Saint-Germain district. During his short life, Baudelaire had many Paris addresses (some reckon more than 40), largely dismal places, some of which he shared with his lover Jeanne Duval. Constantly in debt, Baudelaire hauled his possessions from place to place in a handcart, steps ahead of his creditors. In 1855, he complained to his mother that he had moved six times in one month.

Apart from his enforced sea voyage, Baudelaire was not well travelled: it was the labyrinth of Paris which inspired. him. He found the magnetism of each city street corner irresistible and scavenged the streets for mysterious encounters that would kindle his writer’s imagination. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he scorned the countryside. In his notebook, he wrote: “What are the perils of the jungle and prairie compared to the daily shocks and conflicts of civilisation?” On vacation in Honfleur, Baudelaire wrote in a letter that he would gladly trade its persistent sun and the seaside for the fresh water contained within the geometric walls of a cement quay. His favourite walk, he declared, was along the banks of the Canal de l’Ourcq.

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin described Baudelaire as, “a botanist of the asphalt”. He was, indeed, a flâneur at heart, a role he popularised. In his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life, he wrote that being a flâneur was “to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.” Today, the term conjures an idle, aimless stroller, but for Baudelaire, a flâneur was an urban geographer.

According to his friend, the photographer Nadar, the young Baudelaire was as handsome as a god and rather a dandy, wearing dark trousers, tight around his polished boots, a blue starched workman’s blouse and pink gloves. His long, curly hair (which he sometimes dyed green) was worn without a hat. Oddly, Nadar described Baudelaire as walking around the city with a jerky step, nervous and soft like a cat’s, choosing each paving stone as if not to crush an egg.

The melancholic Baudelaire often wallowed in alcohol and laudanum. Aside from wandering the Paris streets, Baudelaire took other trips – inside his mind. His debauchery and taste for the exotic predisposed him to experiment with drugs. One of his more esoteric addresses was the Club des Hashischins, located in the Hôtel de Lauzun on the Île Saint-Louis. The club, which had started as a research experiment, boasted members such as Hugo, Dumas père and Balzac. Here, in the 1840s, Baudelaire experimented with a jam made of hashish, although after about a dozen trips, he renounced the drug, saying that a true writer needs only his natural dreams. Baudelaire later wrote about his experiences in Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises), published in 1860. After his experimentation with drugs was over, Baudelaire stayed on at this elegant address.

hotel_de_lauzun_facade 1898, photo byLouis Edouard Fournier, public domain

A CHANGING CITY

“Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours… his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined,” is how the gossipy Goncourt brothers described the poet in 1851.

He gained further notoriety with the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857. In describing the rapid industrialisation of Paris, he scandalously touched on the themes of sex, death, depression, lost innocence and alcohol. He was prosecuted for offending public morality, resulting in the suppression of six of his poems and a 300-franc fine. By this point, Haussmann’s transformation of Paris was under way. Before the 1850s, the city was a maze of narrow, congested streets and bridges. Haussmann’s sweeping plans struck grand avenues and boulevards through its medieval core. The large-scale urban renovation, initiated under Emperor Napoleon III, led to the loss or alteration of several of Baudelaire’s former addresses, including his birthplace, which was demolished to make way for the expansion of Boulevard Saint-Germain.

Charles_Baudelaire Nadar Wikimedia

In his 1860 poem Le Cygne (The Swan), he wrote: “Old Paris is no more; the form of a city changes, alas, more quickly than the human heart”.
Paris’s heart had indeed been changed by Haussmann’s project, and many of its inhabitants displaced. Baudelaire often stepped away from the new pretty boulevards and public parks in favour of the haunts of the city’s tramps and vagabonds, an emblem of the tension between old and new. Critiquing the ugliness and alienation associated with the modern world, Baudelaire gave new cultural weight to the term modernité. Though he would have liked to preserve the Paris of his youth, he was eventually able to balance the idea of an eternal Paris with that of the fleeting beauty found in everyday life. In The Painter of Modern Life, an essay published in Le Figaro in 1863, Baudelaire encouraged the artists of the day to abandon historical subjects and instead embrace the new modernity.

In April 1864, Baudelaire moved to Brussels, hoping to have his complete works published there. A massive stroke in 1866 left him partially paralysed and mute and he returned to Paris where he died in a nursing home aged 46 on August 31, 1867. He was laid to rest in Montparnasse Cemetery.
At his death, many of Baudelaire’s prose poems remained unpublished; Le Spleen de Paris, a collection of 50, appeared in 1869. Today, Rue Charles Baudelaire borders Square Trousseau in the 12th arrondissement. Baudelaire might well have found it beautiful.

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