Baudelaire: the visionary of modernity.

Abstract

The word "modernity", used to describe the "lived history of a past that is no longer accessible to us without the mediation of historical intelligence"¹, was first used in 1849 in Chateaubriand's "Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe"², in which he comments on his great works, but in fact it was studied during the Enlightenment by Samte-Palaye and other scholars between the two "antiquities" - the heroic times of pagan antiquity and those of Christianity. What history attributes to Chateaubriand is his use of the term "modern age" to describe an era whose apogee belongs to the past. However, it was with Baudelaire that this term gained a very special category as the watchword of a new aesthetic. This aesthetic poses the problem of the nature of beauty, which is nothing other than the result of an unfinished process, and which Baudelaire develops in his reflections on Constantin Guys, the " Peintre de la vie moderne " (1859) and above all in his " Tableaux Parisiens ".