From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordFoule names a physical gathering and an opportunity for the individual to cease feeling merely singular.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées I calls the pleasure of crowds a mysterious expression of numerical multiplication.
- In this edition‘Crowds’ is preferable here to a uniform ‘masses’, which would politicize every occurrence.
- A place to readLe plaisir d’être dans les foules — Crowd experience begins as a pleasure to be interpreted.
Meaning
Foule names a physical gathering and an opportunity for the individual to cease feeling merely singular. Its pleasures are not necessarily the same as affection for a political people. Baudelaire can desire the crowd's multiplication while despising collective judgment, shared slogans or democratic self-congratulation. The different targets should not be flattened into one attitude toward ‘the masses’.
The word also changes the scale of intimacy. A performance or ball lets everyone take pleasure in everyone else without forming an exclusive couple. Such circulation may promise an enlargement of life, but the self's surrender can become dependence on stimulation or an escape from solitude.
Use in the book
Fusées I calls the pleasure of crowds a mysterious expression of numerical multiplication. Fusées II intensifies this with the religious intoxication of great cities and the reciprocal formula ‘I am everyone; everyone is me’. The isolated ‘Whirlwind’ is both an image of movement and a warning against reducing the sequence to a stable creed of universal fellowship. These are notes testing an experience of expansion.
The same Fusées ends with a man jostled by crowds who turns away from the destinies of passing consciences. Fusées XXII converts collective proximity into fatigue, then into the dandy's pride in separation. Its ending does not simply cancel the earlier pleasure: the speaker knows that composure itself is intoxicating. Withdrawal and immersion can each be modes of enjoyment.
Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII jokes that the man fleeing the city seeks a crowd in the country and so rebuilds the city there. Mon cœur mis à nu LXIX lists the intoxications of blood, crowds and a man under torture; crowd feeling can participate in ferocity, not just sympathetic expansion. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII makes horror of solitude the motive for losing the self in exterior flesh. Taken together, these fragments show why the crowd is an aesthetic resource and an ethical hazard. No durable public or reciprocal obligation necessarily follows from the intensity of feeling many lives at once.
Places to read
- Fusées ILe plaisir d’être dans les foules — Crowd experience begins as a pleasure to be interpreted.
- Fusées IIMoi, c’est tous ; tous, c’est moi. — A reciprocal formula gives collective immersion a pantheistic cast.
- Fusées XXIIPerdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoyé par les foules — The final prophecy returns the crowd as bodily pressure and exhaustion.
- Mon cœur mis à nu LVIIIrefaire la ville à la campagne — Flight from urban life reproduces its collective arrangement.
Translation in this edition
‘Crowds’ is preferable here to a uniform ‘masses’, which would politicize every occurrence. The 2026 edition renders tous as ‘everyone’ in Fusées II, preserving persons rather than an abstract totality. ‘Whirlwind’ gives tourbillon its unsettled physical motion. At the end of Fusées XXII, ‘jostled’ keeps the bodily friction that a paraphrase such as ‘alienated by society’ would lose.