Nothing is more symptomatic of this rupture than the radical rewriting of the two earliest prose poems, Le Crépuscule du soir and La Solitude, between November 1861, in the Revue fantaisiste, and September 1862, on the proofs of La Presse. This reworking is exemplary of the turning point we're trying to define: the new version, in fact, has nothing but sarcasm for the sublime naturalness that the first version maintained. The upheaval is profound.
In a letter to Desnoyers, dated late 1853-early 1854, accompanying these two poems, Baudelaire refuses to rise to the infinite in the face of a sublime landscape; in his eyes, the poet is always reduced to the "bitter laughter" of the crowd. In Le Gâteau, Baudelaire attacks the sublimity of the mountain landscape head-on, in a parody of Romantic lyricism. The sublimity of the landscape does not stand up to the reality of society. The fraternity, the "fraternal agape", is instantly reversed into a "fratricidal war", like its destructive truth, that of original sin, of Abel and Cain, models of brotherhood. In the latest Baudelaire, we find a complete repudiation of nature and a perpetuation of violence as the principle of existence. There is indeed a poetry to be extracted from urban clutter and chaos.
Some have seen in Les Foules a poetic art of the Spleen de Paris. This poem seems to us to be indicative of the turning point, or fall, in Le Spleen de Paris, between 1861 and 1862. Baudelaire draws his inspiration from Poe and L'Homme des foules. Poe's tale deals with the enjoyment of crowds, and describes a kind of magical hyphen between man and crowd. Baudelaire, for his part, chose to use the word in the plural; this translation of crowd is a momentous decision. Baudelaire turns the title into a sociological notion, a theoretical concept avant la lettre - not the crowd but the crowds - that designates a collective being, a social and historical fact.
In the veryfirst line of the poem, three terms appear, on which the reader stumbles. The first evokes a "bath of multitude", an image that did not please Sainte-Beuve. Baudelaire says he once again needs the "bath of multitude" to regain inspiration, having written all his poems. There are many "baths" in Le Spleen de Paris, whether of "laziness" or "darkness". But in cases other than the one we're here for, these "baths" are refuges against the crowd. To understand the expression "bath of multitude", you really need to see it as a transgression. "Bain de foule", a cliché that has now become commonplace, didn't enter the language until the late 1880s (under the pen, incidentally, of a Baudelairian, Émile Hennequin). The crowd seen as a multitude (i.e., seen in opposition to the people) is an unfavorable vision, akin to anarchy and disorder. The "multitude bath" thus has a haughty dimension, on the order of the dandy's relationship with the people. The expression first appeared in Les voluptés de l'opium in Paradis artificiels, reflecting the importance of this text in Baudelaire's awareness of modernity. "Jouir de la foule" and "ribote de vitalité" are the other two surprising and perhaps shocking expressions in this incipit. Ribote" is an old-fashioned, offbeat, popular word for a drinking party, debauchery or orgy.
