I mentionned at the beginning of these lectures on Baudelaire that it was fitting that we should conclude Realism and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century France, with Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire is an important figure in the development of nineteenth-century French writing. Baudelaire's work both continues and breaks away from the themes and modes of writing inaugurated by the Romantics. We might consider Baudelaire as both the last Romantic and the first to reject Romanticism. Moreover, he is also central to the development of twentieth-century art and literature. His work prefigures or anticipates Modernism (broadly much of the art and literature produced between 1850 and 1930), in particular, the Modernist poetry of the early twentieth-century. The work of Guillaume Apollinaire and T.S. Eliot, to take but two examples, was deeply influenced by Baudelaire. The one poem that best illustrates this is perhaps is `Le Cygne'.

What I intend to do in this lecture on Charles Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du Mal is to concentrate on one poem in particular, `Le Cygne', which is in some ways typical or exemplary of Baudelaire's work as a whole. Indeed, the critic Charles Mauron described it as "un carrefour de thèmes baudelariens", a meeting point, intersection, summa or compendium of Baudelaire's preoccupations.

I don't want to do a sort of commentaire composé where we are looking for the hidden unity between form and meaning. Instead, I want to swoop down on the poem and pick up on the issues that concern us. I want to use the poem as a pretext to discuss the general context of Baudelaire's work and to point out some of the ways in which Baudelaire innovated and brought about a minor revolution in lyric poetry.

`Le Cygne' is an exemplary poem because in it we see many of the central themes of Baudelaire's writing, and by this I don't just mean Les Fleurs du Mal but also his prose poems and his art and literary criticism as well. Here, briefly and bluntly put are the themes explored in `Le Cygne':

Okay then, let's take these themes one by one.

The poem's dedicatee is the poet Victor Hugo. Hugo is firstly the receiver of the poem ("Voici des vers faits pour vous, en pensant à vous/I made these verses for you, thinking of you" claimed Baudelaire in a letter to Hugo). But Hugo is also the subject and very stuff of the poem. Three poems in all were dedicated to Hugo: `Le Cygne', `Les Sept Vieillards' and `Les Petites Vieilles'. Moreover, also in 1861, Baudelaire published the essay `Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains: Victor Hugo'. At the time of its composition and publication Hugo was exiled in the Channel Islands for his opposition to the political régime of Napoléon III, who he called Napoléon le petit and the Second Empire. The Second Empire is generally characterized by historians as a repressive, highly centralized and authoritarian pseudo-democracy and this particular characterization provided most of the grounds for Hugo's hostility to it.

Baudelaire, in dedicating a poem about exile to Hugo, an intellectual in exile, may well be interpreted as sharing Hugo's political resistance to the Second Empire. This, I think, is a valid reading since Baudelaire too was disenchanted and estranged from the whole spirit of the Second Empire. However, Baudelaire's conception of exile and the exploration of its various forms in `Le Cygne' goes beyond any single political meaning. He is interested in the multiple modalities of exile: spiritual, economic, intellectual, emotional etc.

All of the poem's emblematic characters are suffering from exile in one way or another: Andromaque, the swan, the black woman, the orphans, the lost sailors, the captives, the political exiles etc.. Indeed, there are so many exiles that Baudelaire cannot possibly list them all and his poem ends with points de suspension suggesting the existence of many more.

The poem begins with an apostrophe to Andromache, widow of Hector and prisoner of Pyrrhus in an exile emblematic of all exiles.

The swan of the poem is one of Baudelaire's urban outcasts suffering because it has escaped from its cage - a nice irony here - and because the pavement is dry and hard and it is longing for a burst of rain-bringing thunder.

All of the emblematic figures in the poem may also be interpreted as doubles of the poet. One should add here, that Baudelaire sees Hugo as an exemplary artiste solitaire who, by dint of his genius, is already in a form of spiritual and intellectual exile anyway, quite apart from any political exile.

Everyone is suffering from some kind of exile. Baudelaire's is perhaps that of being entraped in a city were the bourgeois ethos is omnipresent. `Le Cygne' is a poem about the individual's exile within the modern urban space. The individual is forever misplaced, replaced, displaced. The individual's place is to be forever out of place. This brings us to the second theme that I've identified, that of modernity.

Earlier on in this lecture I described the Second Empire as a repressive, highly centralized and authoritarian pseudo-democracy. This is a little unfair since it was also was a régime which sought to put an end to the endemic class conflict which had plagued France since the revolution through economic expansion and, it was hoped, increased prosperity. The Second Empire oversaw a process of increased industrialization, urbanization, the commercialization of agriculture, the greater integration of provincial society into the national whole and the construction of the modern bureaucratic state. In short, under the Second Empire France underwent the process of modernization.

The French at the time of Baudelaire's writing then, were undergoing an epocal change. Old patterns of living were dying and new ones were taking their place. The semi- feudal, aristocratic and largely agricultural social order was giving way to an industrialized and bourgeois order which transformed existing certainties of social and psychological existence.

Modernization was however, a deeply ambilavent process. On the one hand, it clearly brought to many a better standard of living but on a more disturbing level it also led to new forms of social control and, through its continual revolutionizing of methods of production disturbed and disrupted traditional, ingrained patterns of living. What Wordworth called "the ballast of familiar life" (The Prelude, VII) was jettisoned.

Baudelaire's poetry, in both verse and in prose, is about the experience modernity, of mobility in society, of acceleration in history, of the discontinuity in everyday life, of the elusive, the transitory and the ephermeral.

But Baudelaire's `Le Cygne' is not just `about' modernity. Through its formal innovations it is also a highly `modern' poem and anticipates the formal and stylistic devices employed by Modernist poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and T.S. Eliot.

There is a kind of dialectic between tradition and modernity going on in the poem. Tradition, transmitted through the alexandrines and the literary allusions to Racine and others and modernity expressed through the exploitation of urban imagery and an aesthetics of fragmentation and discontinuity.

`Le Cygne' works by free association of thought, a kind of early `stream-of- consciousness'. The different parts of the poem are linked by emotion, imagination and memory rather than by logic. We move, without any explanation of the sifts from Victor Hugo, to Andromaque, to the swan, the black woman, the lost, the displaced, the lonely etc..

In his vast but uncompleted work called Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Walter Benjamin saw Paris, and the developing forms of urban life there, as representing the characteristic features of modernity, of modern life in general andits disturbing effects on social relations and the individual psyche. Baudelaire as a writer was one of the first to interrogate this.

The modern city with its new concentrations of commerce, transport and people, with its expropriations and uprootings all undermined traditional relationships.

As the Marxist critic Raymond Williams points out, industrialist capitalist society also produces its own human `garbage'. The poet joins the beggar, the prostitute and the rag- picker on the margins of society.

What fascinates Baudelaire about the city is its multiplicity, its clashes, its juxtapositions of the incongruous, its unforeseen encounters. In this respect he is the precursor of the Surrealist movement which made the city and the clash of the incongruous central to their aesthetic.

Paris a magnificent spectacle of display, consumption and excess: gas lamps, chic cafés, elegant wide boulevards, glossy surfaces and showy pleasures. Paris was full of places for overt consumption and pleasure for those with the economic power and leisure time to enjoy what the modern metropolis had on offer. The social consequences of Haussmanization.

Via the process of Haussmanization, Paris evolved into a city of carefully ordered social space, with wide boulevards and regularized vistas.

Paris, like any other city, had never remained static. From as early as 1770 pressure was building up within the city for more space and it began the steady process of exansion. What this process of expansion did was to allow greater opportunities for property developers and speculators to buy land cheap and sell at a handsome profit. New sites periodically became available and new property developments were created. The new bourgeoisie made unheard of profits through property speculation. The arrival of the railway in the 1830's in its turn contributed to this process. The trick was to build expensive appartments and make them so desirable that the wealthy would move in and in their turn push property values even higher. Many of the appartments that you might see in Paris today were built with this in mind and were constructed according to rigidly codified stylistic constraints. Modernization and capitalism go hand in hand.

Georges Haussmann was appointed by Louis Napoléon as the prefect of the Seine between 1853 and the fall of the Emperor in 1870. Through direct grant, public loans and creative accounting, Haussmann set about on one of the most ambitious projects in urban planning in the history of Europe. In order to glorify the new Napoleonic empire he began to construct a city that would not only rival the major European capitals of London and Berlin but which would also echo the Rome of the great Emperor Augustus. Louis Napoléon, through Haussmann had in their sights then, the recreation of the glories of Augustian Rome. The Paris opéra (the Opéra Garnier not the Nouvel Opéra at Bastille) would become the focal point of Paris and the focal point of Napoleonic cultural supremacy.

The social consequences of Haussmanization may be described thus:

So then, the city Baudelaire wrote in was the newly expanding Paris of the Second Empire. a city of monumental neo-classical façades, efficient seerage system and carefully planned roads all meant to recall the glories of the ancient Roman empire. The city and its life were however in reality, built and dominated by the ideology of the bourgeoisie. The poet was an outsider to the bourgeoisie and its ideology. He lurked behind its elegant façades in garrets and attic rooms. The poet's Paris was one of squalor, corruption and the dissolution of social hierarchies.

When Hector was killed by Achilles and the ancient city of Troy destroyed, his wife Andromaque was taken prisoner and placed in exile with Achilles' son Pyrrhus.

There is also a reference to ancient roman in the line "Et tettent la douleur comme une bonne louve" which is a clear allusion to the myth of Romulus and Remus, the two boys brought up by a she-wolf and who later founded the city of Rome.

Ancient cities, destroyed greatness being replaced by something more mediocre.

The mid- to late-nineteenth century witnessed a massive increase in the size of the urban population and a corresponding decrease in the size of the rural population. This process of urbanization led to the phenomena of the crowd. Urban subjects had, by the early to mid nineteenth century, penetrated the novel - one thinks in particular here of Balzac - but not, with a few exceptions, poetry or the visual arts. Baudelaire wanted to change all this and bring modernity into poetry and painting. He was an influential art critic as the work he produced on Manet testifies.

The phenomena of the crowd. The city is populated by thousands of people who are unrelated to one another. They pass one another by everyday as if ghosts or apparitions in an "unreal city" to use T.S. Eliot's term.

The prostitute became in the art and literature of the mid to late nineteenth century the very icon of modernity The prostitute is the key exemplification of modernity insofar as s/he represents: i) the anonymous, the cold and the unfeeling; ii) the precarious, the fleeting and the transitory and iii) the commercialized nature of human social relations since the prostitute is "both seller and commodity in one" to use Walter Benjamin's terms. The prostitute represents the commodification of social relations, a cooling off in the ways in which human beings relate to one another.

Paris produces through the phantasmagoria of its arcades and its circulation of commodities a reflection of the present but also a glimpse nto the future, an anticipation of the future.

Baudelaire is fascinated by the ambiguities, the dangers and pleasures of modern life and mass culture. However, he sought to distance himself from modern life, to become a critical observer of modernity. The figure of the flâneur is central here as he can confront commodification without being negated by it. So, there is an interest in but ultimate separation from the crowd. He is ultimately, an early antagonist to mass culture.

`Mon coeur mis à nu' in OC, I p.676

Baudelaire is fascinated by the inhabitants of the "foumillante cité" of Paris.

The poet is able to indulge in introspection, an examen de conscience (centralisation) but can also transport himself to the outside world (vaporisation).

Central to Baudelaire's vision of the human condition are the two interrelated concepts of spleen and idéal. These terms provide the two points of an axis on which man swings violently.

Or perhaps it is being trapped in his spleen, with only brief glimpses or memories of l'idéal. What is spleen if not dissatifaction with a present unfavourably compared the the idéal of the past?

In this brave new world is it any wonder than some might wish to escape. Through drugs, alcohol, sexual ecstasy. This search for escape from the horrors and uncertainties of modern life is one of the main themes of Les Fleurs du mal.