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PARTISAN REVIEW
they made the artist a scapegoat whose sacrifice restored, or was in–
tended to restore, their shattered complacency.
The active part taken by the nineteenth-century artist in politics
seems at first perplexing. It is, perhaps, understandable that the youth–
ful Rimbaud should have rebelled against his world and joined the
Commune; but though the notes on politics which I have already
quoted were almost certainly written after B.audelaire had severed his
connection with the parties in 1851, it seems strange to meet him at
the barricades in 1848 fighting on the side of the insurgents. His
contemporaries thought so too. One of them has described him
brandishing a gun which had obviously never been used, and de–
claring proudly: "I have just fired a shot." "Not for the Republic
surely?" asked the observer incredulously. But Baudelaire simply
shouted violently to his followers: "We must go and shoot General
Aupick." "I had never been so painfully struck," concludes the ob–
server, "by the lack of character in this nature which was in many
ways so fine and so original."5
We know of course that Baudelaire like Stendhal suffered from
an extreme mother-fixation and that for this reason hated his step–
father and
his
ideas as much as Stendhal hated his own father and
his royalism. It seems to me that on this occasion, however, the refer–
ence to Aupick was a rationalization and that Baudelaire is a symbol
of the bewildered artist at odds with society who really does not
know whose side he is on or whom he should shoot. In later life he
came to feel that his behavior had been inconsistent. "What was the
nature of my intoxication in 1848?" he asked in his diary. He an–
swered: "Thirst for revenge. Natural delight in destruction. A literary
intoxication; the memories of books I had read." But there was a
deeper reason. "I can understand a man forsaking one cause," he
wrote, "in order to see what it feels like to support a different one."
At bottom the problem was psychological. The modern artist
realized that he was an explorer trying to discover new realms of
experience, that he was irrevocably committed to a policy of devel–
opment and change. This meant that any form of conservatism, any
5. The observer was Buisson. The story is told in Crepet,
Charles Baudelaire,
pp. 78-9. On Baudelaire's political activities, see
J.
Mouquet
&
W. T. Bandy,
Baudelaire en
1848, Paris, 1946.
