Summary
“Dedication”
Baudelaire humbly dedicates these “unhealthy flowers” to the perfect poet Théophile Gautier. He is a master and friend, a wizard of French words.
“To the Reader”
The poet writes that our spirit and flesh become weary with our errors and sins; we are like beggars with their lice when we try to quell our remorse. We give up our faith for sin and are only halfheartedly contrite, always turning back to our filth. Satan lulls our soul and wears down our will with his arts. He pulls our strings and we see the charm in the evil things. We are moving closer to Hell. We take pleasure wherever we can find it, much like a libertine will try to suck at an old whore’s breast. The “demon nation” takes root in our brain and death fills us. The only reason why we do not kill, rape, or poison is because our spirit does not have the nerve. Among the wild animals yelping and crawling in this “menagerie of vice,” there is one who is most foul. He is not loud or grand but can swallow the whole world. His name is Ennui and he dreams of scaffolds while he smokes his pipe. The Reader knows this monster. Baudelaire proclaims that the Reader is a hypocrite; he is Baudelaire's a fellowman, his twin.
Analysis
The Flowers of Evil is one of, if not the most celebrated collections of poems of the modern era, its influence pervasive and unquestioned. Baudelaire dedicates his “unhealthy flowers” to Théophile Gautier, proclaiming his humility and debt to Gautier before launching into his spectacularly strange and sensuous work.
So who was Gautier? Born in 1911 and a denizen of Paris, he was a French art critic, journalist, and writer. He initially promulgated the merits of Romanticism and wrote his own volume of poems, Albertus, in 1832. By this time he moved away from Romanticism and espoused “art for art’s sake;” he believed art did not need moral lessons and should be impersonal. He traveled extensively, which widened the scope of his writing. He was also known for his love of cooking, his obsession with female nudes, and his frequent hashish indulgence. Many modernists beyond Baudelaire, such as Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound, and Proust, asserted their admiration for him.
By the time of Baudelaire’s publishing of the first edition of Flowers of Evil, Gautier was very famous in Paris for his writing. He was often captured by photographer Felix Nadir’s lens and also caricatured in papers. Baudelaire admired him intensely and not only dedicated his collection of poems to him but stated “Posterity will judge Gautier to be one of the masters of writing, not only in France but also in Europe.” Gautier scholar Richard Holmes acknowledges that the dedication has sometimes puzzled readers and critics of Baudelaire, but says that Gautier’s “bizarre and wonderful stories” with their “perfect magic of erotic radiance” explain why Baudelaire revered him.
After the short and rather conventionally styled dedication comes something far more provocative: “To the Reader,” a poem that shocks with its evocations of sin, death, rotting flesh, withered prostitutes, and that eternal foe of Baudelaire’s, Ennui. Baudelaire makes the reader complicit right away, writing in the first-person by using “our” and “we.” At the end of the poem he solidifies this camaraderie by proclaiming the Reader is a hypocrite but is his brother and twin (T.S. Eliot quoted the line in French in his modernist masterpiece The Waste Land). Personification, simile, and metaphor are used to full effect in this poem, as they will be in those to come.
Baudelaire adopts the tone of a religious orator, sardonically admonishing his readers and himself, but this is an ironic stance given the fact that he does not seem inclined to choose between good or evil. The Reader and Baudelaire are full of vices that they nourish, and there is no attempt at absolution. Not God but Satan, as an alchemist in the tradition of Hermes Trismegistus (associated with the god Thoth, the legendary author of works on alchemy) “pulls on all our strings” and we would truly do worse things such as rape and poison if only we had the nerve.
Baudelaire’s insight into the latent malevolence in all men is followed by his assertion that the worst of all vices is actually Ennui, or the boredom that can “swallow all the world.” He personifies Ennui by capitalizing the word and calling it a “creature” and a “dainty monster” surrounded by an array of fiends and beasts that recalls Hieronymus Bosch. Scholar James McGowan notes that the word “Boredom” is not enough for Baudelaire: “’Ennui’ in Baudelaire is a soul-deadening, pathological condition, the worst of the many vices of mankind, which leads us into the abyss of non-being. Baudelaire recognizes Ennui in himself, and insists in the poem that the reader shares this vice. Here he personifies Ennui as a being drugging himself, smoking the water-pipe (hookah).”
Many of the themes in Fleurs du Mal are laid out here in this first poem. First, the imagery and subject matter of the Parisian streets—whores, beggars, crowds, furtive pedestrians. His poems will feature those on the outskirts of society, proclaiming their humanity and admiring (and sharing in) their vices. Baudelaire’s characters smoke, have sex, rage, mourn, yearn for death, quarrel, and often do not ask for absolution for such sins. Second, there is the pervasive irony Baudelaire is famous for. Scholar Raymond M. Archer writes that this is an ironic view of the human situation because “Human beings long for good but yield easily to the temptations placed in their path by Satan because of the weakness inherent in their wills. People can feel remorse, but know full well, even while repenting, that they will sin again…Baudelaire once wrote that he felt drawn simultaneously in opposite directions: A spiritual force caused him to desire to mount upward toward God, while and animal force drew him joyfully down to Satan.” Third, and related, Baudelaire, implicates himself in his poems. He is no dispassionate observer of others; rather, he sarcastically, sometimes piteously, details his own predilections, passions, and predicaments.
