Baudelaire-Paris, Creation of a Perceptive and Phantasmagorical Mythology

Abstract

Abstract: How did Baudelaire construct the myth of Paris in the mid-19th century? His idealism, incompatible with the industrial and positivist society of the Second Empire, led him to weave new relations between humans and the world to beautify modernity. We’ll first analyze the construction of the myth of Paris from the disenchanted, realistic picture that Baudelaire paints. Then we’ll observe how Baudelaire metamorphosizes urban space. As a response to Haussmann’s dismembered Paris, Baudelaire creates inner landscapes reconstructed by imagination and memory, with the interplay of correspondances forming a mystical cosmology. As the theater of a phantasmagorical scenography, Paris takes on the appearance of a Chimera and acquires a new psychological and poetic density. Finally, we’ll look at the importance of receptive feeling. The reader takes part in the construction of this living myth by an active and emotional reading, thus bestowing on the capital an individual, subjective and universal dimension.