Intimate Journals

Charles Baudelaire, the French poet of Les Fleurs du Mal, is often giving himself orders in these pages. He tells himself to begin work, to remember an image, to pray, to pay his debts. The commanding voice keeps returning to what remains undone. Fusées and Mon cœur mis à nu gather reflections, projected chapters, recollections and sudden judgments into a record of thought under pressure. They survive as unfinished fragments, arranged for publication after his death. Read slowly, the fragments disclose recurring concerns whose connections become clearer as the same words return.

Beauty is one of those concerns. Baudelaire finds it in melancholy, irregularity and mystery, in a face that seems to conceal a history, in the movement of a ship, in the immensity of the sea. Sensation opens onto something larger than its immediate object. Yet the same imagination draws desire towards domination and cruelty. His accounts of love repeatedly ask how the wish to give oneself can become a wish to possess another.

Religion enters this inquiry through conflicting desires. Baudelaire describes simultaneous movements towards God and Satan, by which a person seeks elevation and takes pleasure in descending. Prayer becomes a resource in the struggle to direct his will. He can treat sacred language with irreverence, then ask for strength with unmistakable urgency. The recurrence of prayer gives these pages an intimate gravity, especially when he asks that his mother may live to see him change.

The surrounding world continually interrupts this examination. Journalism, commerce, political enthusiasm and claims of progress provoke his anger. He distrusts a civilization that confuses material expansion with moral improvement. His judgments also contain contempt for women and an antisemitic call for extermination. These passages demand the same close attention as his most compelling insights.

A remembered pleasure, a hostile portrait or a practical reminder can abruptly take over the page. The fragment brings us close to the instant of assertion, with little explanation of how one claim relates to the next. Following this movement allows us to hear the persistence of certain questions: how to hold the self together, how to endure solitude, how to turn imaginative power into action.

In the closing Hygiène notes, those questions become daily obligations. Hours of work, household accounts and rules of sobriety share space with hopes for transformation. Time presses upon every postponed task. Baudelaire returns to the cumulative power of small acts, imagining a life repaired through attention and repetition. The final promise joins work to prayer and responsibility towards others. Its poignancy lies in the effort to make a beginning, again.

BnF on Baudelaire’s poetry · BnF on the unfinished notebooks · Historical French edition