Baudelaire adopts Poe as much for the quality of his writing as for his "anti-Americanism," considering his work to be "une vive protestation contre l'américanisme.  Poe – il n'est américain qu'en tant que Jongleur.  Quant au reste, c'est presque une pensée anti-américaine.  D'ailleurs, il s'est moqué de ses compatriotes le plus qu'il a pu" (Correspondance I, 343).  What Baudelaire criticizes most in the U.S., anti-intellectualism, crass materialism, cultural ignorance, and aesthetic barbarism, betrays an attitude typical of many French intellectuals of the time who had little first-hand knowledge of American lifestyles and institutions.  Baudelaire blamed what he perceived as the anti-intellectual climate in the U.S. for Poe's mental anguish and premature demise.  He felt that Poe's brilliance was lost among American commonplace mediocrity.  In "Edgar Allan Poe: Sa Vie et ses ouvrages," Baudelaire depicts America as a vast prison of triviality, a country whose material interests are so prominent that it does not have time for spiritual and aesthetic activity, a place where artistic production is stifled by an overwhelming commercialist democracy: "chez un peuple sans aristocratie le culte du Beau ne peut que se corrompre, s'amoindrir et disparaître" (II, 299).  Yet what he berates as the artistic insensitivity of the American public is very similar to the attacks he made time and again on the French bourgeoisie.

Baudelaire's attack on bourgeois puerility and materialism gains full force in his critique of America.  Faced with his own reading public, Baudelaire was always more equivocal in his indictment of bourgeois culture, as in the patronizing, ironical tones with which he addresses the French bourgeoisie in the Salon de 1846: "Vous êtes la majorité, –  nombre et intelligence; – donc vous êtes la force, – qui est la justice" (II, 414).  Ever concerned with his reputation and marketability, Baudelaire uses America to criticize indirectly, but unmistakably, the qualities he objected to in his own society.  It is curious that Baudelaire, an "homme d'esprit" as he was proud of considering himself, maintained such a generalized, stereotypical opinion of the U.S., when such a country had produced a literary model and spiritual brother, as well as the most idealistic writer of the age, Emerson (whose work Baudelaire quoted sporadically in his own and to whom he accorded a whole page of Fusées).

Emerson first gained recognition in France soon after the publication of his first series of Essays in 1841.  Adam Mickiewicz and Edgar Quinet lectured enthusiastically on his work at the Collège de France shortly thereafter.  In the 1840s, Philarète Chasles, the Comtesse d'Agoult, and especially Emile Montégut all wrote insightful,  praiseworthy articles in such widely read periodicals as the Revue des deux mondes and the Revue indépendante.  Baudelaire was probably aware of Emerson at this time, because he was a reader of both periodicals and was well informed about Parisian literary trends.  Yet no clear evidence exists that he was very interested in Emerson's work during the latter's first period of popularity in France.  Margaret Gilman proposes that Baudelaire incorporated Emerson's work into his own in a passage from "Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs," published in L'Esprit public in 1846, that echoes Emerson's essay "Circles."  Gilman contends that Baudelaire must have read Emerson in the original around this time, because the initial translation of the first series of Emerson's Essays was not published in France by Montégut until 1850.  Baudelaire mentions Emerson in his work in 1852, yet only in passing, in relation to Poe: "'Le Corbeau' eut un vaste succès.  De l'aveu de MM. Longfellow et Emerson, c'est une merveille" (II, 274).  Perhaps because Baudelaire believed so much in the pronouncements of his idol Poe, who often expressed dislike for Emerson both in Marginalia ("Mister Emerson – I am lost in amazement at finding in him little more than a respectable imitation of Carlyle"  – 122) and Autography ("a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatsoever – a mystic for mysticism's sake.  The best answer to his twaddle is cui bono?" – 260), he saw no sense in developing his understanding of Emerson's work.

In May of 1848 a curiously missed encounter occurred between Baudelaire and Emerson.  At the time, Baudelaire was eagerly trying to meet as many Americans visiting or residing in Paris as he could, in order to gather information about Poe while he worked on his translations of Poe's Tales.  Although Emerson, during a visit to Paris, was invited to the home of Tocqueville and met Michelet and other faculty at the Collège de France, Baudelaire, for whatever reasons, did not meet him.  Most likely, Baudelaire did not know that Emerson was in Paris, for he surely would have sought him out.  This missed meeting is perhaps no surprise because the several weeks that Emerson spent in Paris were some of the most politically turbulent of Baudelaire's life.  Baudelaire closely followed the events that ocurred during the last weeks of Louis Philippe's bourgeois monarchy; he even became involved in revolutionary activities by publishing left-wing political pamphlets, attending activist rallies by the socialist reformers Louis Blanqui (one of the first to have formulated the notion of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat') and Armand Barbès, and even taking his place on the barricades, rifle in hands, during the uprisings in June.  Baudelaire and Emerson probably attended some of the same political rallies.  Several biographers have documented that they were both at Barbès's "Club de la Révolution" on May 10 and at Blanqui's "Club des Droits de l'homme" on the evening of May 13 (Pichois, Poggenburg, Rusk, Richardson).  In Emerson's description of the "stormy affair" at Barbès's club, he witnessed students, artists, and hommes de lettres enraptured by Barbès's fiery rhetoric, a marked contrast to Emerson's oratory style.  Baudelaire was perhaps one of these latter attendees whose emotional intoxication shook Emerson's habitual serenity and imperturbability (Letters, IV, 73).  On May 21, both Baudelaire and Emerson were present at the elaborate celebration of peace and work at the Place de la Concorde.  One can speculate that they perhaps passed on the streets or even rubbed shoulders at one of the political rallies.

This missed encounter is all the more interesting considering that Baudelaire returned to the stormy days of 1848 at the same time that he did to Emerson, during the 1860s, as he wrote his last two works, which were actually collections of unpublished notes and aphorisms: Mon coeur mis à nu and Fusées, gathered by his editors under the title of Journaux intimes.  These writings, however fragmentary, are nevertheless crucial to an understanding of Baudelaire, in a political context, and of Emerson's role in his thinking.  Both Fusées and Mon Coeur mis à nu concern Baudelaire's readings, ideas for future works, personal memoranda, and acid comments on political and social events.  In the Journaux we can witness the direct unfolding of many of Baudelaire's concerns at a crucial point in his life, from the late 1850s to early 1860s, when he was trying to make sense of his past and of what directions his future was to take.  At this point in his life, Baudelaire was making one last desperate attempt to put his life in order, spurred on by a sense of responsibility toward his mother, left a widow in 1857, and an uncontrollable anxiety that he would die a failure: "la peur de mourir avant d'avoir fait ce que j'ai à faire" (Correspondance, 26 mars 1860, II, 17).  He saw himself as another Poe, a victim of bad luck and a modern-day literary martyr: "le plus curieux martyr de Paris peut-être" (Correspondance, 9 février 1857, I, 372).  Accompanying this despair over his failed literary career is a constant obsession with death.

It is at this time that Baudelaire returns to Emerson, looking for a guide more personal than literary.  The first reference to Emerson in Fusées occurs just after a reference to Swedenborg's theory of dreams: "La pensée de Campbell (the Conduct of Life ) / Concentration / Puissance de l'idée fixe" (I, 652).  The reference is to the section entitled "Power," from Emerson's Conduct of Life: "The poet Campbell said, that 'a man accustomed to work was equal to any achievement he resolved on, and, that, for himself, necessity, not inspiration, was the prompter of his muse" (VI, 74 ).  Baudelaire returns often to this ethic of focused work in the Journaux, encouraging himself to be less of a procrastinator: "Le goût de la concentration productive doit remplacer, chez un homme mûr, le goût de la déperdition" (I, 650).  This maxim, found on the very first page of Fusées, is a non-referenced translation of a passage of Emerson's occurring just before the previous quotation of Campbell: "The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation" (VI, 73).  Mon Coeur mis à nu opens with a passage that is a variation on the theme of the concentration of self as the most successful mode of being: "De la vaporisation et de la concentration du Moi. Tout est là" (I, 676), echoing Emerson's "Concentration is the secret of strength . . . in all management of human affairs" (VI, 75).  Thus, on the very first page of both Fusées and Mon Coeur mis à nu, Baudelaire used the work of Emerson as a sort of touchstone to help guide his own diffused thoughts.

Baudelaire borrowed other material in the Journaux directly from Emerson, without indicating that he had done so.  Baudelaire attempts to adhere to Emerson's work ethic by prodding himself on to a productive professional life: "Plus on travaille, mieux on travaille, et plus on veut travailler.  Plus on produit, plus on devient fécond" (I, 668); "Si tu travaillais tous les jours, la vie te serait plus supportable" (I, 670).  He follows Emerson's exhortations toward the doctrine of self-reliance: "Insist on yourself; never imitate.  Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation" (II, 83) with his own premise, "avant tout, être un grand homme et un saint pour soi-même" (I, 665).  We see Baudelaire, ambivalent, even spiteful in his earlier commentaries on American writers, now desperately trying to order his life around principles established by one of them, a near antithesis of Poe.

Emerson surfaces again in the essay, "L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix," in which Baudelaire quotes him twice at key points, showing his continual preoccupation with Emerson in the 1860s:

"Ce qui marque le plus visiblement le style de Delacroix, c'est la concision et une espèce d'intensité sans ostentation, résultat habituel de la concentration de toutes les forces spirituelles vers un point donné. <<The hero is he who is immovably centered>>, dit le moraliste d'outre-mer Emerson, bien qu'il passe pour chef de l'ennuyeuse école bostonienne, n'en a pas moins une certaine pointe à la Sénèque, propre à aguillonner la méditation.  La maxime que le chef américain du Transcendentalisme applique à la conduite de la vie et au domaine des affaires peut également s'appliquer au domaine de la poésie et de l'art" (II, 755).

Baudelaire goes on to translate the Emerson quotation ("Le héros est celui-la qui est immuablement concentré") and repeats it twice in the next paragraph;  it thus functions as a leitmotif, punctuating a quality of Delacroix and Emerson that Baudelaire greatly admired but did not feel that he himself possessed.  The quotation is from Emerson's Conduct of Life, "Considerations by the Way," a work that Baudelaire quoted directly in Fusées, actually dedicating a section entitled, Hygiène, Conduite, Méthode, to a list of his favorite Emersonian one-liners (I, 673-675).  Baudelaire even enlists Emerson as an ally to attack what he saw as the empirical narrow-mindedness and cultural mediocrity of his time as inspired, in his opinion, by Voltaire: "Emerson a oublié dans Représentants de l'humanité.  Il aurait pu faire un joli chapitre intitulé: Voltaire, ou l'anti-poète, le roi des badauds, le prince des superficiels . . . . Voltaire, comme tous les paresseux, haïssait le mystère" (I, 687-88).

Beyond Baudelaire's philosophical and aesthetic borrowings, significant affinities exist between Emerson's and Baudelaire's involvement in, and attitudes toward, the political events of 1848.  Baudelaire specifically renounced explicit political involvement after the events – there are significant gaps in his biography during the late 1840s.  He apparently left Paris, spent time in Châteauroux and Dijon as an unsuccessful editor and journalist, and did not sustain any significant creative or critical work for a year or two.  He was shaken by the failed revolution and, years later in the Journaux, tells us that he depoliticized his activities after this time, depressed as he was by the failure of positive social change as promised by Blanqui and Barbès, and went into an intellectual funk.  In the retrospective haze of the 1860s, Baudelaire condemns his earlier passion for revolution: "1848 ne fut amusant que parce que chacun y faisait des utopies comme des châteaux en Espagne. / 1848 ne fut charmant que par l'excès même du ridicule" (I, 680).  The naive idealism of the left during the events of 1848 certainly affected Baudelaire and ultimately caused him to acquire a distaste for direct political action.  Yet from 1848 on, Baudelaire nevertheless maintained a constant, although implicit, political stance in his work; he was ever the "anti-bourgeois" writer, a secret agent of anarchist politics as promoted by Blanqui.  In his own idiosyncratic way, Baudelaire was dedicated to undermining the bourgeois hegemony of France from within its systems of cultural production.  Texts written near the end of his career, such as Pauvre Belgique, "Le Mauvais vitrier," and especially "Assommons les pauvres," attest to Baudelaire in a politically charged mood.  The central theme of the Journaux may be how to create an effective political art, yet they were written by someone who had failed in the public world and had nothing but contempt for it.

Baudelaire never fully supported actual social revolution; he was always more of a révolté than a révolutionnaire.  Seeing the shortcomings firsthand of the failed attempts of 1848 to radically transform the French social fabric, and how the political climate became quickly reactionary in the wake of Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of 1851, Baudelaire turned his back on organized politics. Instead he decided to embody a surreptitious political activism in his writings.  He did not, as his biographers Starkie and Pichois have claimed, purge himself of an interest in political reform; he merely chose a different means by which to do so.  The Second Empire became extremely repressive; under the Haussman renovations, Paris was surrounded by ramparts and wide boulevards were constructed which allowed more accessible troop movement and on which it was harder to set up barricades.  The French government was clearfly signaling to the populace that it was ready to crack down when necessary.  Given these circumstances, Baudelaire went underground and exchanges the shiny new rifle of the February and June uprisings for his pen, in order to challenge the bourgeoisie he so despised.

Emerson's politics are also more implicit than explicit in his work; he spent most of his life struggling with the question of how to best formulate the relationship between the subjective individual and the collective action needed in a healthy society; in other words, how to reconcile self-sufficiency with social solidarity.  Emerson's privatism was opposed to the dogmatism needed to maintain a minimal social bond of laws, business practices, customs, and politics. In this sense, Emerson was anti-political.  Yet such a doctrine of individuation is exactly what Herbert Marcuse described as "affirmative culture," a formula whereby the personal becomes vitally political:

"By affirmative culture is meant that culture of the bourgeois epoch which led in the course of its development to the segregation from civilization of the mental and spiritual world as an independent realm of value that is also considered superior to civilization. Its decisive characteristic is the assertion of a universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world that must be unconditionally affirmed: a world essentially different from the factual world of the daily struggle for existence, yet realizable by every individual for himself "from within," without any transformation of the state of fact. It is only in this culture that cultural activities and objects gain that value which elevates them above the everyday sphere. Their reception becomes an act of celebration and exaltation"  (Marcuse, 95).

Has not the perennial problem of American society been, as it was of Baudelaire's life, how to reconcile private individualism with the collective "daily struggle for existence?"  Emerson's project was never one of a sentimental humanism; his social ontology was reciprocal, yet he was adamant in his formulations of the correct balance between subjectivity and objectivity.  The successful citizen was the person "whose inward and outward senses are truly adjusted to each other" ("Nature," I, 9).  Was not Baudelaire's quest, one never fulfilled, to achieve this Emersonian ideal?  Did he realize too late in his life, that this ideal emanated from a writer of a country he considered too uncouth to be taken seriously on a cultural level?

Emerson's notion of what American intellectual life should be is expressed in "The American Scholar," where he affirms that the life of the mind is not inferior to concrete social activity.  The intellectual's mode of being in the world is one of interactive movement – neither a solipsistic transcendentalist nor a political actor seeking to force the social will to conform to dogmatic axioms but, rather, "In the right state, he is Man Thinking.  In the degenerate state, the victim of society, he tends to be a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking" ("The American Scholar," I, 84).  Intellectual activity must precede lived experience, the latter enhanced by the former.

In the 1830s, America's political independence having been secured, Emerson was seeking to develop a democracy of intellect and conscience whereby true subjectivity, understanding one's own worth as well as limitations, would perpetuate an enhanced social fabric in which individualism could open onto the vista of the collective: "Another sign of our times also marked by an analogous political movement is the new importance given to the single person.  Every thing that tends to isolate the individual, – to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat man as a sovereign state, – tends to true unions as well as greatness" ("The American Scholar," I, 113).  Inwardness is thus not a refusal of social interaction but, paradoxically, an activity that bonds citizens to one another, each his or her own microcosmic fragment of the whole.  Emerson's formula for social equality was one that arose from his belief in the innate divinity of the human spirit: "A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which inspires all men" ("The American Scholar," I, 115).

When Emerson traveled to Paris in May of 1848, he found himself unexpectedly in the middle of revolutionary turmoil.  The impact of French socialism, and the fact that the influence of the masses seemed to be rapidly restructuring French society, challenged his doctrine of individualism. Thereafter he struggled in his journals, lectures, and letters of the period to rethink his position.  His presence at the political clubs, where he came face-to-face with an earnest radicalism, in stark contrast to the cooperative idealism of the Brook Farm commune with which he had been briefly associated, challenged his normal aloofness to the poor and hungry working classes of Europe, so unfamiliar to him in prosperous New England.  In a letter to his wife Lidian, the effect on him of the events of May 1848 is evident: "the deep sincerity of the speakers who are agitating social, not political questions, and who are studying how to secure a fair share of bread to every man, and to get God's justice done throughout the land, is very good to hear" (Letters, IV, 73-74).

Although the conservative bourgeoisie won the day, and Blanqui and Barbès thrown into the dungeon of Vincennes, Emerson had developed a newfound sympathy for the socialists.  He told a London audience at one of his Houghton Library lectures only a few weeks afterwards: "truly I honour the generous ideas of the socialists, the magnificence of their theories, & the enthusiasm with which they have been urged.  They are the inspired men of the time."   Yet at the same time, Emerson argued that the intellectual should remain aloof from the current events of the time, with a specific reference in his journals to the Paris uprisings: "and my rede is to make the student independent of the century, to show him that his class offer one immutable front in all times and countries, cannot hear the drums of Paris, cannot hear the London journals" (Journals, X, 328).  Emerson's own actions concerning the socialist revolt in Paris are as ambiguous as is his ideological position.  While the workers attempted to take over the National Assembly on May 15, 1848, only to be overcome by the National Guard at the Hôtel de Ville, Emerson was attending a lecture of Michelet's at the Sorbonne on Indian philosophy, oblivious to the unfolding of such cataclysmic events.

Over a decade after his individualist exhortation of "The American Scholar," Emerson appears to have evolved on the question of political and social change, but he also seems to have solidified his initial position.  In response to the radicalism offered by his European contemporaries  Blanqui, Barbès, and Marx, Emerson is more revolutionary, in a sense, in his thinking than they, calling not for new social orders, but for a holistic regeneration of people that would ultimately create a better society.  In this, like Baudelaire, Emerson saw the socialists as shortsighted.  He claimed, in one of his last London lectures, "Politics and Socialism" – "In this age of mutations every little while people become alarmed at the masses in society & expect a revolution.  There will be no revolution until there are revolutionists" (Letters, IV, 75).  Emerson's definition of "revolutionists," as put forth in "The American Scholar," were inspired individuals whose right actions would regenerate the collective political body.  He also claimed, in a letter of 1848: "Forever we must say, the hope of the world depends on private independence and sanctity" (Letters, IV, 75).  After the bloody insurrection of the June days in Paris, when Baudelaire risked his life on the barricades, Emerson became much less sympathetic with proletariat political activism and retreated into his transcendental infinitude of the private individual, as the way to effect positive social transformation.  He used events in France, along with his assessment of the French national character, as sort of a negative barometer to forge his own positions.

Emerson ultimately repudiated the events of 1848, and developed his own mode of political subversion: that of the sovereignty of the dissenting individual, of autonomy preserved "precariously but decisively, and all the more decisively for its precariousness, within the bounds of community; a form of protest that is bound to challenge (subvert, defy, resist) the consensus it represents" (Bercovitch, 656).  This approach is very similar to Baudelaire's view of the problem.

With a similar goal, Baudelaire abandoned political activism for a more long-term solution.  More than for Emerson, the events of 1848 were a terribly destabilizing experience for him.  After 1848, and especially the elections of 1852, in which a predominantly lower-class electorate overwhelmingly and paradoxically endorsed conservative candidates, he did not totally abandon interest in radical politics but, like Emerson, the nature of his radicalism shifted.  Baudelaire moved from the confrontational model of the Blanquists to a virtually anti-socialist world-view that centered on the moral superiority of the authentic, individual artist.  Baudelaire's opposition to the wealthy and pleasure-seeking bourgeoisie remained constant; he was no less anti-bourgeois after 1848 than he was before, and he did not, like so many other writers of the day, turn to an apolitical aestheticism in his literary practice with its accompanying cynicism and indifference to everyday life.  Yet he had nothing but contempt for socialism, as many passages of Pauvre Belgique demonstrate, such as his sarcastic treatment of "citoyen Lafargue," Marx's son-in-law and one of the pioneers of Marxist theory and practice in France.  What Baudelaire did to establish his oppositional ideology was to posit himself as the absolute individualist, an outsider beyond the workers, the bourgeoisie, revolution and reaction, left and right.  He became an engaged observer of human history which was for him a grotesque horror story of futility: "Le canon tonne . . . les membres volent . . . des gémissements de victimes et des hurlements de sacrificateurs se font entendre . . . C'est l'humanité qui cherche le bonheur" (I, 371).

How can we then reconcile Baudelaire's cultural politics, taken in the sense of a successful model of human society, and the extreme difficulty he had in ordering his own life?   Like Emerson, he is one of the modernist icons of Marcuse's "affirmative culture," attempting to produce a realm above the everyday sphere that will entice citizens, make them more feeling and understanding human beings, and thus transform their own existence for the better of all.  Although Baudelaire's and Emerson's circumstances were very different, their cultural politics have much in common.  At the core their idealism is a call for the secular spiritual regeneration of individuals, not new social orders.  After 1848, they increasingly criticized the socialists, as well as the conservative bourgeoisie, for being superficial.  They proposed a larger transformation as the solution to the problem of human cooperation and happiness.

Both Baudelaire and Emerson developed their aesthetics under the influence of Swedenborg's theory of "correspondances" –  the hidden relation between the world of objects and the world of spirit, the symbols of nature that can be interpreted only by the poet-thinkers, deciphering in their works the mysteries of the universe for human edification.  The importance that Baudelaire attaches to the imagination that decomposes the world and creates a new one is gloriously explained in the Salon de 1859.  If, in Emerson's terms, people can get in touch with the "divine soul" within them, then they can produce the realm of Marcuse's "independent value" for themselves and each other, a mode of being beyond material exigency, human fallibility, political corruption, and cultural decay that can transform the human experience for the better.  Thus we see Baudelaire and Emerson, despite being antagonistic to each other's cultural and political landscapes, sharing an approach to the relationship between personal responsibility, as informed by meaningful aesthetic experience, and an effective strategy toward the common good.

The differences between Baudelaire and Emerson are pronounced, and the correlations between them telling; it is perhaps within this contrast that we can learn the most about their relationship.  Although Emerson never mentioned Baudelaire explicitly in his work, he was sure to have been aware of him, and perhaps even revolted by Les Fleurs du mal, taking into consideration that he had trouble accepting the daring innovations of Thoreau and Whitman, who were less iconoclastic than Baudelaire.  And Emerson not only became more conservative in his politics during the 1850s, but he also negatively portrayed the French to support his newfound conservatism.  In an unpublished 1854 lecture, "France, Or Urbanity," Emerson attacks the French and charges them with thoughtlessness, vanity, lack of moral character, inconstancy, and ferocity.  In "English Traits" he says: "in France, ‘fraternity,' ‘equality,' and ‘indivisible unity,' are names for assassination" (V, 287).  In France, those conservative enough turned to Emerson's writings to counter the people's enthusiasm for socialism.  Emile Montégut, for example, praised Emerson's teaching of reserve, and of remaining wary of extreme opinions and extravagant beliefs.  What Montégut called Emerson's "observation sagace, absence de dogmatisme" (xvi) was a good answer to the hegemonic oppression of the Second Empire, as well as to the contagious fanaticism and oppression of the socialists and their demagoguery.  Baudelaire, in all of his notorious ambiguity, is drawn to Emerson, who is like himself, especially in the 1860s, both aloof and engaged, progressive yet conservative.

In a sense, Baudelaire is more American than Emerson – he represents the new impulse that has characterized such a wide variety of high and popular Western culture for over a century.  Always on the go, domestically mobile, constantly setting up money-making ventures, he is the epitome of restlessness and exuberance, in contrast to Emerson's calm, informed embrace of world cultures and gradual political evolution.  Emerson, also involved in the difficult social issues of his time and suffering through numerous family tragedies, succeeded in raising himself above it all.  For most of his adult life he resided at one tranquil home in a pastoral setting in Concord with his books, friends, family, and writing.  Following Montaigne and Montesquieu, Emerson embodied a classical humanism, so atypical of Baudelaire.  But wasn't Emerson's life, the bourgeois intellectual, spiritually and aesthetically independent, financially secure, and playing a key role in the development of a country's politics and culture, the very life that Baudelaire so craved?  As he expressed in several letters to his mother during the 1860s, Baudelaire wanted a peaceful, modest dwelling in order to reflect and write the rest of his days, surrounded by his books and paintings.  In his early twenties he squandered his inheritance to live the life of an Parisian esthete, when he could have made a wiser choice, getting a small pied-à-terre on the outskirts of Paris, having the family lawyer Ancelle invest the rest for him, and living the calm life of the bourgeois artist of independent means.  This was why Emerson's individualism appealed to Baudelaire in the 1860s; yet Emerson's appearance in the Journaux was too late to be of any help.  Baudelaire rarely quoted such long passages of English in his work, great translator of English into French that he was, as he does with the Emerson quotations from the Conduct of Life.  In the Journaux, the Emerson quotations stand out, symbolically demonstrating that Baudelaire did not have time to assimilate him as thoroughly as he did Poe.  The quotations are a conspicuous, undigested intertext which shows Baudelaire's inability to come to terms with the fact that he had perhaps misunderstood the American experience, and had been blinded by the ideological wiles of the French government to which he was so opposed.

On a political level, Baudelaire never reconciled his right bank and left bank differences.  He moved back and forth so often between the bohemia of the Latin Quarter and the high society of the right bank (forty-three different residences in his lifetime) that he was never really able to connect the bourgeois aesthete and the bohemian revolutionary within him.  The happiest period of his life was, in fact, when he lived on the Isle St. Louis, an island between the two halves of Paris, aloof from society in its very heart.  By the 1860s, he had evolved to a political impasse: he rejected the 1848 revolution, losing faith in the republic, eyeing the proletariat with distaste, and eventually rejecting Pierre Proudhon's vision of social revolution as naive.  Baudelaire is no utopic visionary or symbolist esthete as he has so oftfen been labeled by the academic establishment.  But then, what's left?  Baudelaire's notion of the "dandy?"  The word's etymology stems from "foreign devil" in Chinese, suggesting Baudelaire's role as a cultural terrorist, infiltrating the bourgeois hegemony like an underground spy.  Yet even this interpretation of Baudelaire is tenuous, because paradoxically, he most often adhered to the dogmatic clichés of his time about America and adopted the reified positions of the dominant bourgeoisie under Napleon III.

Baudelaire never mentions how the French government officially disdained the U.S. out of fear of losing the power of center stage in world politics.  This fueled the generally negative popular opinion of the U.S. in France, despite all the latter's fascination and occasional feeling of kindredness with the former.  Tocqueville is the exception, yet even Democracy in America is not wholly praiseworthy in its views on American life and political system.  Despite his sympathy for America's democratic achievement, he remained faithful to French patrician culture (Drescher).  Baudelaire succumbs to this officialized anti-Americanism, yet he also paved the way for the numerous intellectual, economic, cultural exchanges that have taken place between France and the U.S.  The first modern visionary, Baudelaire championed the beleaguered Poe and would have welcomed Whitman who, better than most others of his time, reconciled in a work of art the paradoxes of modern western culture as Baudelaire tried to do.  The search for beauty in everyday life as achieved by Whitman is what Baudelaire's aesthetic of "modernité" is all about – the union of the eternal and the transitory, the depiction of life as it really is, in all of its strange beauty.  Had Baudelaire more time to live, he would perhaps have appreciated the new American literary tradition.

The beginnings of Baudelaire's familiarity with American writers, and his subsequent influence upon them, originate in his contacts with Poe and Emerson.  Unfortunately, Baudelaire formulated his opinions on the American literary scene in its nascent stages, dismissed most of it as prosaic, and never really developed a true appreciation for anyone beyond Poe and Longfellow (having translated 800 lines of Hiawatha).  In contrast to his anti-Americanism (which he defined as unabashed materialism, thirst for wealth, and plebeian vulgarity of tastes and mores), he would have relished the arrival of Eliot, Pound, Ginsberg, and many others – all of whom are indebted to Baudelaire.  He would have admired Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly," Eliot's "The Wasteland," and Ginsberg's "Howl," written as they were in the wake of his example.  He would have been happy to know that he was finally admired, and that world-acclaimed songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and others, read his poetry and assimilated much of his sensibility and even an occasional lyric into their own highly popular works.  Baudelaire has, in fact, been a mainstream intellectual force in high modernist culture as well as in popular postmodern culture in the U.S. during the past one hundred and thirty years.  He is an active force in our educational system (many U.S. high-school and university students of French will eventually read a poem or two by Baudelaire), academic life (how many scholars and graduate students have written books, articles, theses, and dissertations on his work?), and popular culture from new-wave fashion (how many different haircuts and custom-made suits did he design for himself?) to punk (drugs, Satanism, sadomasochism, anarchy, unbridled energy).  He has been a formative influence, both positively and negatively, in the American poetic tradition since 1945.  The post-World War II generation was the first to be mass-educated at the university level and to come into frequent contact with Baudelaire's work.  He continues to be popular in general literary culture in the U.S. (Richard Howard's 1982 bilingual translation of Les Fleurs du mal was a bestseller).

Baudelaire's relationship with Jeanne Duval highlights the multicultural morass of his life and poetry – a heart of darkness where the "civilized" meets the "primitive," white man meets black woman, the dandy meets the bohemian, classical France meets the Francophone world.  His life and work symbolize the similar dilemma of the U.S. – how to reconcile the conflicts of a multiracial society, a problem that Tocqueville believed would eventually be America's downfall.  Much of Baudelaire's most inspiring work was written during his twenty-year relationship with Duval, a sexy actress from the French colonial empire who became an alcoholic and a drug addict.  Baudelaire supported her during most of his adult life.  Obsessed with the lack of money and living on credit, his relationship to Duval was extremely dysfunctional.  The lawyer Ancelle had actually invested the money left over from Baudelaire's inheritance (which the latter could not touch after the 1844 conseil de famille had the remaining principal from the inheritance frozen).  Ancelle was a shrewd investor, and although Baudelaire could only spend a small monthly allowance, which was never enough to clear him of debt, he died a fairly wealthy man.  His mother received this money upon his death and she subsequently donated it to the Church.  Baudelaire thus plays the role of a martyr for French civilization, as he did for Jeanne, and for the society that ridiculed him.  He saw how awful his life had become because of money – he blamed the U.S. for having created the modern obsession with material gain.  America was, on the one hand, the fulfillment of everything Baudelaire detested.  On the other, it was a haven – the exotic beauty of Longfellow, the creative genius of Poe, and the literary philosophy of Emerson.

Baudelaire is a multicultural dynamo who created enigmatic webs of cross-cultural relations, highlighting the ambiguities involved in examining the confluences between French and American civilization.  Baudelaire is perhaps the epitome of a French-American, a term that never came into being as it did with other non-Anglo ethnic groups.  He was cultured yet materialistic, physically restless yet an imaginative dreamer, hard-working yet self-indulgent.  This undercurrent of conflicting interaction between Baudelaire and the U.S. is still with us today.  If we can reach beyond some of the differences between Baudelaire and Emerson, we can learn from the similarities between them, though not apparent at first sight, and thereby enhance our perspective on the intricacies of French-American cultural relations.

In a sense, Baudelaire exiled himself to the U.S., lumped together in his mind with Belgium, that other "Eldorado de la canaille française."  Trying to get a new start on life, he left Paris and the suffocating environment of failure in his personal life, in his career, and in his aspirations for humanitarian social progress and enlightened political reform.  He escaped to make himself over, finally taking Emersonian responsibility for his life, living alone in a hotel room, trying unsuccessfully to put his life in order.  Baudelaire struggled unsuccessfully, even in his final months, to harmonize the complex elements of his personality.  Yet Baudelaire closed the circle in his own enigmatic way, by valuing in himself, something he originally despised. For Brussels could as well have been Boston for him (remember the "école ennuyeuse bostonienne") and the "vulgar" environment to which he exiled himself.  It was perhaps where he belonged, anonymous, aloof from events, suffering in silence  He was, in his final years, like Thoreau – recluse, living off the indulgence of friends, misunderstood by most, trying to recast his life in the most authentic way possible.  Or perhaps he was a modernist Montaigne, one of Emerson's prototypes, the answer to Voltaire's neo-classical empiricism and narrowness, dying of a slow disease in his seclusion while essaying the perennial problems of humankind.  In this intellectually and culturally inhospitable environment, Baudelaire's political discourse and interest in Emerson resurfaced.  He reconsidered his philosophical and aesthetic positions one more time and reformulated his political ideas in all their rich ambiguity.