From princes and (ex)conjurators: rebellion, idealism and community in Baudelaire (at shadow of terror)

Abstract

The article discusses the meanings and scopes of the topoi-feelings of rebellion and Satanism - and others inseparable from them - in the work of Charles Baudelaire, arguing that they are articulated, sometimes in an unsuspecting way, to a revolutionary ethics and a fraternal/communal sense. By trying to catalyze the paradoxical potency of these motifs without subsuming in it the ethical and symbolic fields in dispute, we propose a critical trigger compatible with the “aesthetic of shock” of the French poet: the reading of his texts, especially from the volume The spleen of Paris, in the light (or at shadow), brief but intense, of his ambiguous positions regarding the Jacobin leader Maximilien de Robespierre.