Like the press and photography, the city is double: good and bad. Following the example of "Horrible life, horrible city" in the poem À une heure du matin, we can't help but see the superimposition between "modern life" and "modern city", and all the activity that follows.
The city is always accompanied by epithets ("great", "immense", "foul", etc.), and remains abstract. According to Benjamin, there is no description of the city, the crowd or the mass in Baudelaire's work, unlike Hugo's: "Neither in Les Fleurs du mal nor in Le Spleen de Paris will we find the equivalent of those urban tableaux that Hugo painted so masterfully. Baudelaire describes neither the people nor the city No details on the modern city. And yet, in Le Spleen de Paris, we find a whole range of contemporary urban furnishings, more cited than described (streets, boulevards, avenues, sidewalks, macadam; shacks, windows, garrets; parks, public gardens; cafés, tobacconists, gas stations).
Baudelaire was a contemporary of the urban revolution, between 1841 and 1861, with Haussmann of course, the key worker in this transition or decline. Parisian life shifted from the Palais-Royal to the boulevards, moving the epicenter of the capital. The city became associated with din, deafening noise and hustle and bustle, evoking a biblical or apocalyptic, satanic dimension: the modern city undoes creation, the divine order, and appears allegorical from the outset.
According to Éric Hazan, one by one, the boulevards saw the emergence of the new features of the modern city (public transport, the vespasienne, the Morris column, photographic studios, new bookshops). Light and crowds were the hallmarks of the boulevards. Many traffic accidents occur; pedestrians are not at ease. The Montmartre crossroads was particularly deadly.
Right from the dedication of Petits Poèmes en prose, the abstraction of the city is apparent. How does one go from modern life to a modern life? Is abstraction inherent to modern life? The form and content of poetic prose are imposed by modern life, by the big city, abstract and not picturesque. Let's consider a passage from the dedication of Spleen de Paris, which is somewhat bold: "It is above all from frequenting enormous cities, it is from the intersection of their innumerable relationships that this obsessive ideal is born". "Enorme" is a very Baudelairean adjective, denoting immensity and excess. In other words, what is "enormous" is that which exceeds rhythm and verse. From a syntactical point of view, we oscillate between anacoluthe and solecism, making it difficult to identify these "innumerable relationships". The poet would be the subject not only of enormous cities, but also of the intersection of their innumerable relationships. He is the one who crosses the "relationships of men with each other, or of men with things". In the alternative of two boldnesses, we choose solecism over anacoluthe.
