his account of written constitutions. Public opinion becomes a tyrant, the name given by Greek political theory to usurpers who would dispense entirely with the constitution of a city and rule as despots until they were overthrown. Governed by this tyrannous principle, America descends into the kind of human sacrifice Baudelaire finds in the legend of Poe. An avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, the idol of Juggernaut was, according to legend, carried on a cart whose wheels would ritually crush the worshippers helping to pull it.
Baudelaire regards Poe’s literary martyrdom as something more than a metaphor for lack of literary success. His sacrifice demonstrates the inextricability of modern literary production from modern politics. Public opinion is the nightmarish uncanny double of the civic humanist virtue epitomized by the “proud anchorites,” crushing art through the very means by which the aesthetic elite hopes to nurture it: literary production and consumption. Seen from this perspective, Baudelaire’s accusation against America is not merely a snobbish dismissal of the new world but a reasoned and deeply troubling critique, influenced by Maistre’s political theory, of the tendency of democratic institutions to undermine the very freedoms they try to secure for their citizens. Here again, the artist recognizes a public good that the larger populace, driven by private interest that it cannot recognize, cedes for an illusory equality. Baudelaire writes as a proud anchorite, recognizing in Poe’s lonely existence a warning for all modern artists.
Armed Neutrality
Baudelaire uses Maistre’s notion of sacrificial “reversibility” and his critique of social contract theory to unearth the political currents that shape the legend of Poe. These currents are suggested as well by another allusion in the Poe essays, one that indicates a way out of the tyranny from which Poe and other modern writers suffer. In the 1852 and the 1856 essays, Baudelaire frames his analysis with reference to Alfred de Vigny’s novel Stello (1832). The 1856 essay is explicit: “A well-known writer of our times has published a book to show that there can be no proper place for the poet either in a democratic or an aristocratic society, no more in a republic than in an absolute or tempered monarchy. And has anyone been able to answer him decisively? Today I offer a new legend in support of this thesis” (OC II, 297; PML 70). Poe’s life and death are proof that poets have no place in the “zoocracy” of modern bourgeois society. This passage is the only mention Baudelaire makes of Vigny in the essays (in the 1856 version, he does not name him), but Stello provides a telling context for Baudelaire’s treatment of Poe. Vigny, one of Baudelaire’s favorite poets from the previous generation of Romantics, was the original inspiration for Sainte-Beuve’s coining of the term “ivory tower.”32 Baudelaire’s brief description of Stello might confirm the superficial applicability of the coinage to the novel, but Vigny’s account of the relationship between poetry and politics is complex, and highly significant for Baudelaire’s purpose.
Vigny’s novel is a dialogue in which the fictional Romantic poet Stello, suffering from a deep depression, is “treated” over the course of an evening by the so-called Doctor Noir. Quite unlike Poe, who, Baudelaire argues, labors under the sign of a tormenting ill fortune, Stello was born “under the most auspicious star in heaven.”33 Nevertheless, he suffers spells of melancholy, during which only the “comfort of a human voice” protects him against severe attacks (F 4; E 4). When Doctor Noir finds him, Stello has isolated himself and is contemplating, “out of sheer despair,” writing a treatise “on behalf of a sublime form of government” (F 8; E 7). Doctor Noir is so alarmed that he offers to cure him through the “homeopathic” method (F 9; E 8) of telling him three stories about poets—Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert, Thomas Chatterton, and André Chénier—who die, in Vigny’s telling, as a result of the governmental forms under which they live: absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and republicanism, respectively. He offers the death of the poets as evidence that political ambitions are fundamentally at odds with Stello’s poetic vocation. In the course of the stories, we learn that Doctor Noir has tended to these poets, and intervenes on their behalf with the ruling authorities of each political order. The three rulers all refuse aid, and all speak candidly to Doctor Noir about their disdain for poets and poetry.34
Vigny insists that the hostility of the rulers to poets is not specific to the three forms of government the doctor encounters but is fundamental to the relationship between art and political power. Doctor Noir tells Stello that “the essence of Power is irreconcilable with your poetic essence, and … one cannot expect it to do anything but try to destroy what conflicts with it” (F 197; E 173). The poets are “eternal pariahs” (F 188; E 165), their history “an unbroken chain of glorious exiles” (F 193; E 169). Doctor Noir’s “prescription” follows from this observation: he orders Stello to “separate the poetic life from the political life” (F 205; E 179). Although the doctor’s orders might seem to counsel a stereotypically aestheticist turn from reality to art, the judgment is pragmatic and does not require the poet entirely to sever the tie between art and politics. The crucial emphasis, for Vigny, is on the word “life.” Poets need solitude, while politics demands engagement in the public square. The poet should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” allow politicians to “play their role,” and shun explicit political activity, as well as the lure of celebrity, literary schools, and academic associations, in favor of a solitary life devoted to the poetic craft (F 205; E 179). Retreat is the poet’s only answer to the depredations of power, regardless of the political theories that power serves.
As Doctor Noir’s allusion to the theatricality of politics suggests, this turn away from active engagement in the public square is more complicated than it initially seems to be. Doctor Noir, much like Baudelaire—who, in symbolic mourning for the Second Republic, took to wearing only black after Louis Napoleon’s coup—defines the poet’s solitude in political terms. The poet, Vigny argues, should stand above the political fray but still intervene when necessary: “The solitary thinker observes an armed neutrality that mobilizes at need. It is he who puts his finger on the scale and decides the balance, now urging on, now restraining, the spirit of nations; he inspires public actions or protests against them, in accordance with what his foresight reveals to him. What matter if his own head be endangered in the sudden advance or retreat?” (F 207; E 180–81). Doctor Noir’s prescription finds its echo in Baudelaire’s account of the relationship between the solitary dandy or the proud anchorite and the nation as a whole. As a practical matter, the poet cannot help but be engaged with politics; the most cunning poets do so only when necessary, and only on their own terms, preserving their hard-won artistic autonomy in all other instances. Recognizing a crucial distinction between genuine politics and the quotidian play of power, poets maintain an internal distance from the clamor of the public square. They speak to the “spirit” of the nation, avoiding direct competition with the status quo. The fact that even the most cautious poet’s head may be endangered by such engagement is a crucial reminder that poetry can never separate itself completely from public affairs.
Vigny’s depiction of political power in Stello is deeply satirical; the rulers Doctor Noir encounters are invariably vain and duplicitous, and much of the novel’s irony comes from the fact that these rulers are unknowingly on the brink of their demise. Like the America that torments Poe, they are real embodiments of political decadence. The only answer to the corruption and falsehood that attends political power, Vigny suggests, is a return to an older ideal of association. “The Republic of letters,” Doctor Noir tells Stello, “is the only one whose citizens are truly free [la seule qui puisse jamais être composée de citoyens vraiment libre], for it is composed of isolated thinkers, often unknown [inconnu] even to each other” (F 206; E 180). Coming on the heels of the story of Chénier’s death under the Terror, Doctor Noir’s reference to the republic of letters is highly charged, suggesting that the political form of the republic can transcend the lure of power that makes poetry a potentially fatal occupation. Vigny’s republic is composed of individuals who never meet, never even know one another, and who share only their devotion to beauty and a desire to ensure its dissemination. It is precisely this kind of republic that Baudelaire seeks to define in his essays on Poe, and evokes in the list of journal titles I discussed in the opening pages of this book, as well as in the recurrent evocations of an elite family of taste
