From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordThe world's end in Fusées XXII is primarily an end of meaningful spiritual and moral life, even if material existence continues.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées XXII first rejects a colourful survival narrative among the ruins.
- In this editionThe edition's ‘actual results’ for résultats positifs prevents positive from sounding approving.
- A place to readserait-ce une existence digne de ce nom — Material persistence is distinguished from meaningful life.
Meaning
The world's end in Fusées XXII is primarily an end of meaningful spiritual and moral life, even if material existence continues. The speaker explicitly asks whether continued existence would deserve the name. Catastrophe is therefore not chiefly the destruction of cities or a return to a vivid wilderness. Those adventures would still contain an energy his projected future lacks.
The prophecy's vocabulary is deliberately inflammatory and often prejudicial: Americanization, animality, degraded money-wisdom and bodily coarsening. These belong to Baudelaire's polemical construction, not to an objective ranking of nations or a demonstrated prediction. Its central diagnostic claim is that people may lose the capacity to perceive their own impoverishment.
Use in the book
Fusées XXII first rejects a colourful survival narrative among the ruins. The decisive danger is that machinery and the celebrated progress of civilization atrophy the spiritual part of life. The process is ironic: humanity perishes by what it thought sustained it. The paragraph thus attacks the criteria by which success is measured, rather than merely predicting technological failure.
The imagined family makes the argument concrete. A son leaves early to compete in business with his father; respectable marriage becomes an impeccable financial arrangement; even sexual wandering loses its stray generosity and submits to money. The disturbing cradle image of a daughter pricing herself compresses the fantasy that calculation will precede experience. These are satirical projections of a world wholly measured by gain, not sociological descriptions to be accepted without qualification.
The distinction between entrailles and viscères concentrates the prophecy. The first word can carry tenderness or compassion as well as bodily interiority; the second leaves only the organs. Material survival is compatible with the loss of the humane meaning formerly lodged in the body. The reader is then asked whether the predicted time has already arrived and whether coarsened perception prevents recognition. Futurity turns into an accusation about the present.
Yet the prophecy undermines its own secure authority. The speaker feels the ridiculousness of a prophet and lacks the charity of a physician. He withdraws into composure and a cigar, indifferent to passing consciences. Finally he identifies the pages as a digression and retains them to date his anger. This is a record of a situated anger with real critical force, not an impersonal revelation. The ships at the section's opening also prevent a simple equation of constructed objects with spiritual death: an artefact there had generated imaginative depth. What matters is the form of life organized around things.
Places to read
- Fusées XXIIserait-ce une existence digne de ce nom — Material persistence is distinguished from meaningful life.
- Fusées XXIInous périrons par où nous avons cru vivre — The catastrophe reverses civilization’s own account of its means of survival.
- Fusées XXIICe sera par l’avilissement des cœurs. — The decisive ruin is moral rather than a particular constitutional arrangement.
- Fusées XXIIil ne te restera de tes entrailles que des viscères — The wordplay strips bodily existence of its compassionate meaning.
- Fusées XXIIparce que je veux dater ma colère — The ending identifies the pages as a retained record of anger.
Translation in this edition
The edition's ‘actual results’ for résultats positifs prevents positive from sounding approving. ‘Declared legally incapable’ preserves the legal threat contained in faire interdire; merely ‘forbidden’ would lose it. ‘Entrails’ and ‘viscera’ retain the bodily opposition, but English does not naturally carry all the compassion in entrailles, which translator's note 45 supplies. ‘Americanized’ and the hostile national references are preserved as the author's terms. Their presence calls for attribution and interpretation, not endorsement.