L’usage social de la liberté littéraire deviendra de plus en plus rare et précieux. Les grandes démocraties de l’avenir seront peu libérales pour les écrivains ; il est bon de planter très haut des poètes drapeaux comme Baudelaire.

On pourra les agiter de temps en temps afin d’ameuter le petit nombre des esclaves encore frémissants.

The social use of free literary expression will become increasingly rare and precious. The great democracies of the future will be very illiberal for writers; it is therefore good to plant poets like Baudelaire upon the highest eminences as standards.

We will be able to wave them from time to time so as to riotously rouse the small number of slaves still trembling for freedom.

— Guillaume Apollinaire, introduction to L’Œuvre poétique de Charles Baudelaire (1924) [my translation]

In May of 1865, the talk of tout Paris was the scandal of the Salon, the inclusion of Édouard Manet’s Olympia in the annual exhibition of painting and sculpture held by the Académie des beaux-arts. Two years earlier, Manet had been in the thick of an agitation, his provocative canvas Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe serving as a convenient standard behind which a group of disaffected artists could rally, petitioning the Emperor, Napoléon III, in protest at their rejection by the jury. Now Manet was at it again with something that had been accepted by the jury but which was—if possible—even more outrageous a slap in the face than his Luncheon on the grass had been.

Manet had expected trouble, but from a different quarter, his other entry in the Salon of that year, a history painting showing the Saviour being insulted by the Roman soldiers, going unremarked as compared to Olympia, an uncompromising nude of a contemporary Parisian prostitute so offensive in her frankness that she excited embarrassed ridicule from visitors to the Louvre when she did not actually excite physical attack. Manet, a naïve revolutionary with an earnest desire for the respectability of the Académie, was nonplussed. He wrote his friend, the poet Charles Baudelaire, who had frequently covered the Salon as an art critic of exquisite though outré tastes, seeking guidance and reassurance.

Je voudrais bien vous avoir ici mon cher Baudelaire, les injures pleuvent sur moi comme grêle…. J’aurais voulu avoir votre jugement sain sur mes tableaux car tous ces cris agacent, et il est évident qu’il y a quelqu’un qui se trompe.

I very much wish you were here, my dear Baudelaire, for insults rain on me like hail…. I should have liked to have your healthy judgment on my paintings, for all these cries grate on me, and it’s clear that someone is in the wrong.

— Édouard Manet to Charles Baudelaire, undated letter of early May 1865 [my translation]

The 44-year-old poet was then in Brussels, where he had been for over a year, escaping his Parisian creditors, attempting to sell the rights to his works to Belgian publishers, giving scarcely attended lectures on modern French art to the uncultured Bruxellois, drinking heavily, and roundly hating the place, which he condemned in poems and pamphlets. Sick, penniless, within a year of suffering a mysterious crisis that would leave him partially paralyzed, almost mute, and barely sensible, two years away from his death, Baudelaire had little time for Manet’s complaint. Hearing without sympathy his friend’s lament from the capital of fashion and culture, on 11 May, 1865, Baudelaire fired off an exasperated epistle from the Godforsaken Belgian backwater to the man whom future generations would acknowledge to have been the reluctant, unfairly crucified father of modern art.

Croyez-vous que vous soyez le premier homme dans ce cas ? Avez-vous plus de génie que Chateaubriand et que Wagner ? On s’est bien moqué d’eux cependant ? Ils n’en sont pas morts. Et pour ne pas vous inspirer trop d’orgeuil, je vous dirai que ces hommes sont des modèles, chacun dans son genre, et dans un monde très riche et que vous, vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrepitude de votre art.

Do you think you’re the first man to have been laughed at? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? Have they not been made fun of? They haven’t died of it. And so as not to puff up your pride too much, I will tell you that these men are models, each in his own field and in a very rich world, and that you—you are merely the first in the degeneracy of your art-form.

— Charles Baudelaire to Édouard Manet, letter of 11 May, 1865 [my translation]

Those last, emphasized words would be prophetic, not merely of Édouard Manet’s destiny to embody the title that his friend had incorrectly or churlishly ascribed to another, lesser artist, to be ‘the Painter of Modern Life’, but it would equally be prophetic of the destiny of Baudelaire himself: By the end of the century, this poet, mocked and derided in his lifetime for his own pretensions to academic respectability as a troubadour of prostitutes, would be regarded by the physician and social critic Max Nordau as having been the fountainhead of degeneracy in modern life and the chef d’école in the Decadent movement of modern poetry, and early in the next century, T. S. Eliot would declare that modernism in poetry had definitively begun with Charles Baudelaire.

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What you have just read is the proposed first ‘chapterlet’ of the critical monograph that opens my forthcoming book of translations drawn from the works of Baudelaire: Malediction, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms & Parisian Spleen.

With 96 per cent of the poems, prose poems—and fiction (!)—of Charles Baudelaire now translated and in place, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is on-track for release before Christmas.

Pre-orders for the book in three formats—the hardcover dust jacket “Melbourne Edition”, the Economy Softcover version, and the PDF eBook—are now being accepted at an early-bird price.

Select your choice and quantity below to secure your copies in the desired formats, with invoicing for shipping to occur when the first print run occurs in a month’s time.