Baudelaire Against l’esprit français: A Polemic

No verbal traps. Stencil graffiti. AI image

Introduction: An Anachronistic Accusation

Charles Baudelaire never read Derrida, Lacan, or Barthes. Yet it is difficult to imagine that he would have liked them. More provocatively, had he encountered French poststructuralism, he would likely have recognized in it the very cultural pathology he diagnosed in Le public moderne et la photographie (Salon de 1859). Beneath the gravity of theory and the prestige of philosophy, Baudelaire would have discerned a familiar vice: l’esprit français at its most triumphant—verbal ingenuity elevated into spectacle, linguistic cleverness mistaken for depth, and an audience eager to be astonished rather than transformed.

This essay advances a deliberately anachronistic and polemical hypothesis. Reading French poststructuralism through Baudelaire’s critique of modern art, it argues that Baudelaire would have accused twentieth-century theorists and their readers of participating in the same economy of cleverness, shock, and reciprocal degradation that he condemned at the nineteenth-century Salon.

The Salon of 1859: Cleverness as Cultural Symptom

Baudelaire opens the Salon of 1859 not with photography itself, but with mockery. Before turning to mechanical reproduction, he ridicules painters who rely on witty, sentimental, paradoxical, or pun-laden titles to force attention. These titles are not minor aesthetic flaws; they are symptoms. When an artwork requires verbal traps (titres à piège) to arouse curiosity, beauty has already abdicated. The work no longer speaks; it advertises itself.

Baudelaire catalogues these failures with surgical precision: comic titles borrowed from vaudeville, sentimental titles dripping with imaginary exclamation marks, calembours that flatter intelligence without engaging imagination, pseudo-philosophical phrases that simulate depth while evacuating meaning. The notorious example “Toujours et jamais” crystallizes the problem. Even if the sculpture itself is excellent, the title offends because it transforms form into a riddle. Language no longer serves the work; it compensates for a loss of trust in beauty.

What Baudelaire diagnoses is not bad taste but a vicious circle. A public incapable of silent contemplation demands surprise and explanation. Artists comply by multiplying verbal effects. Each side corrupts the other. What passes for intelligence becomes, in truth, the organized failure of imagination.

L’esprit français: Wit Against Vision

Baudelaire names this tendency with bitter irony: l’esprit français. Far from a compliment, it designates a cultural temptation, the preference for brilliance over depth, rhetorical agility over sustained vision, intellectual games over poetic synthesis. This is not stupidity; it is cleverness weaponized against imagination.

In this economy, language ceases to suggest and begins to perform. It shocks, amuses, intrigues. It produces étonnement without dream. True art, for Baudelaire, does not joke. It does not need traps. Wonder arises from inner necessity, not calculated effect. When titles become riddles or paradoxes, they betray a profound anxiety: a disbelief in the power of poetic necessity itself.

From Bad Titles to Bad Theory

Replace painters with theorists, and titles with concepts, and the accusation begins to sound uncomfortably contemporary. From a Baudelairean perspective, poststructuralist theory would resemble an advanced system of titres à piège. Derrida’s différance, Lacan’s homophonic slippages, Barthes’s eroticized ambiguities, these would appear not as philosophical necessities, but as intellectual calembours.

To their defenders, such maneuvers reveal the instability of metaphysical foundations. To Baudelaire, they would look like calculated effects, designed to impress readers who no longer know how to admire. Philosophy, here, risks repeating the gesture of bad painting: substituting verbal performance for vision, technique for soul.

Shock, Difficulty, and the Seduction of Slogans

Baudelaire does not equate profundity with ease. Difficulty is not the enemy. What he condemns is external stimulation, shock generated by technique rather than inner necessity. From this perspective, poststructuralist formulations such as “there is no outside the text” or “the author is dead” would sound less like discoveries than slogans.

They circulate too efficiently. They invite quotation, repetition, applause. They behave like journalistic provocations disguised as thought. Language becomes an event, optimized for dissemination. The philosophical gesture risks collapsing into the very spectacle it claims to critique.

Celebrity Theory and the Economy of Astonishment

This suspicion would harden into indictment when confronted with poststructuralism’s cultural success. Baudelaire distrusts popularity on principle. In the Salon, mass enthusiasm signals compromise with a public addicted to novelty. Applied to the twentieth century, the celebrity of Foucault filling lecture halls, Barthes appearing in magazines, Lacan quoted like an oracle, and Derrida becoming an intellectual brand would constitute damning evidence.

If they are celebrated, Baudelaire would argue, it is because they deliver astonishment on demand. The economy has changed, but the mechanism persists: a public hungry for provocation, intellectuals escalating difficulty, and the soul buried beneath appearance.

The Defense Baudelaire Would Reject

The counterargument is well known, and strong. Poststructuralist wordplay is not ornamental. Derrida insists that puns are forced by language itself; Lacan treats equivocation as clinical evidence; Barthes mobilizes ambiguity to resist authority. Their difficulty often frustrates consumption rather than courting it.

Baudelaire would remain unconvinced. For him, meaning must ultimately transcend language. Art expresses the invisible; words are vehicles, not battlegrounds. To enthrone linguistic instability as destiny would appear not as lucidity, but as abdication.

A Long French Tradition—and a Persistent Danger

This conflict is not accidental. France has long rewarded rhetorical brilliance: from Pascal and La Rochefoucauld to Voltaire, Diderot, Mallarmé. Epigram, paradox, stylistic virtuosity—philosophical prose as performance. Baudelaire identifies this tradition precisely because he belongs to it. He sees its danger from within.

Ironically, his own prose destabilizes classical clarity through metaphor, irony, and exaggeration. Mallarmé inherits this linguistic radicalism directly. Baudelaire is thus both the prophet who warns against verbal excess and one of the figures who made it possible. This tension is not a contradiction; it is his modernity.

Conclusion: A Sophist Writes About Sophistry

What, then, would Baudelaire say of this article?

He would likely accuse it of sophistry. He would note its polemical tone, its deliberate anachronism, its taste for provocation. He would ask whether it seeks to illuminate or merely to astonish; whether it trusts the reader’s imagination or relies on rhetorical contrast, accusation, and shock. He might place this essay itself among the titres à piège, a verbal construction designed to trap attention rather than cultivate dream.

That accusation would not refute the argument; it would complete it. To write against l’esprit français in French culture is already to risk reproducing it. Baudelaire’s critique remains dangerous because it refuses exemptions. It turns back on every gesture, including its own, and asks the only question that matters: does this shock arise from inner necessity, or from the pleasure of cleverness?

Bibliography

Baudelaire, Charles. Salon de 1859.
Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.
Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.