Our starting point was Claudel's all-too-famous phrase, quoted by Rivière and repeated everywhere: "It's an extraordinary blend of Racinian style and the journalistic style of its time." Rivière wanted to talk about the contiguity of the rarest and most familiar words, even the wildest words with the simplest.
Despite his aversion to the press, Baudelaire published his poems there; however, there was a peculiar distribution of his texts between La Presse, a mass-circulation daily, and L'Artiste, an art magazine, both of which belonged to Arsène Houssaye. Does this mean that some poems are better suited to the press and others to the magazine?
When we reread the pieces in Spleen de Paris in their context, in the newspapers where each of the texts appeared, we see the extent to which the very form of the prose poem is marked by the medium of its publication, the press, the small press (and the memory of the "petits journaux" to which Baudelaire collaborated): a brief text, a thing seen, a news item, a piece of realism, all followed by a moral. On the printed page, the poem rubs shoulders with the premier-Paris, political news, miscellany, the stock market, the legal chronicle and advertising, amid triviality and vulgarity. There is no, or no longer any, clear boundary between the modern world and poetry, no longer any privilege for poetry and the (now declassified) poet in the cacophony of the newspaper. When we see "L'Étranger" again on the front page of the newspaper, we ask ourselves the question of the reader and reading; we read it, in retrospect, as a veritable assault on the reader and the bourgeois. The poem then regains all its initial force and violence. The prose poem competes with the soap opera and advertising.
Baudelaire's relationship with the editors was extremely conflictual; he classed them as literary scoundrels. Many of his poems bear witness to these confrontations. This is particularly true of "La Chambre double", one of the first poems to appear on the front page of L'Artiste, in which the poet evokes three avatars of horror: the bailiff, the mistress and the "leaper" of a newspaper director (a term he borrowed from the serial novel). This recollection is also found in "Une heure du matin" (the poem that opens the second issue), in which the editor of a magazine is compared to a "rascal", and in "Le Gâteau" (at the top of the third issue), as well as in "Les Tentations".
