Baudelaire did not come to Manet's defense either in 1863, during the scandal surrounding Déjeuner sur l'herbe, exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, or in 1865, during the scandal surroundingOlympia, a painting exhibited at the Salon, despite the undeniable proximity of his last years in Paris. Baudelaire seems to have owned one or two Manets. But there's something about Manet that Baudelaire resists, despite their intimacy.
In contrast to Chateaubriand and Wagner, who are models in a rich world, Manet is only the first, not a model, in a decrepit, degraded art, painting, which is no longer rich. This sentence, often judged to be harsh on the painter, is in fact a lesson in humility, applicable to the poet himself. Decrepitude is modern progress: in L'Exposition universelle, Baudelaire denounces the "rambling sleep of decrepitude" of the thurifers of progress. La Corde, published in Le Figaro on February 7, 1864, is dedicated "À Édouard Manet", but the dedication disappears when it is published in L'Artiste on the following November 1. It's a rather elusive prose poem, enigmatic in its irony. Should we read it as referential or not? Should it be seen as a faithful relation to reality, or pure fiction? Why, moreover, has the dedication been removed? Perhaps it was requested by Manet. In the poem, the painter is presented as optimistic and generous, wanting the best for the child in his care, trusting in nature. But a second reading is possible, which emphasizes the artist's insensitivity and self-satisfaction - the "paradise" of the studio / "paternal hovel" - with an "abridged wisdom" that is simplistic, bourgeois and paternalistic. The painter can thus appear increasingly unpleasant, exploiting the child and responsible for the child's death through his reprimands. The poet, for his part, remains out of frame, commenting ironically on art, on the artist, curious about anonymous crowds, but insensitive to the suffering he sees before him. This can be seen as a condemnation of an art that is insensitive to reality, an implicit condemnation of both Manet and Baudelaire.
Finally, let's turn to Guys. The oddity of this choice of Baudelaire has often been pointed out, most recently by Calasso, for whom Guys was an unknown, who had no academic protection, a reporter for pictures who couldn't even bear to see his own name in print. Baudelaire calls him a "painter of manners", that is, a hybrid being, "of literary spirit", philosopher, poet, novelist, moralist: observer, flâneur, philosopher, call him what you will. [Sometimes he's a poet; more often he's a novelist or moralist; he's the painter of circumstance and all that it suggests of the eternal." The 1846 Salon linked comedy and modern beauty, in the paradoxical beauty of the trivial, and insisted on duality. This duality of the beautiful is taken up again in The Painter of Modern Life , and has depended on the dual theory of beauty since 1846: "This is a fine opportunity, in truth, to establish a rational and historical theory of the beautiful, in opposition to the theory of the unique and absolute beautiful [...]. Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, the quantity of which is exceedingly difficult to determine, and a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, in turn or all together, the epoch, fashion, morality, passion."
This lecture has enabled us to open four dossiers and examine through them Baudelaire's dual relationship to modernity: the press, the photograph, the city, the artist - with many overlaps. It's a modernity that's approached from the side, through the back door. All things modern are the object of an ambivalent attitude on Baudelaire's part, of a permanent Odi et Amo , of a feeling constantly oscillating between horror and ecstasy.
