Reading Baudlaire and the City

Abstract

The present article discusses from the poems of Baudelaire gathered in Parisian Paintings of the book The Flowers of Evil, the modernity imposed to the urban space in Century XIX. This modernization profoundly transformed not only the places but also the people and the relations between them. In this study we will use the bilingual edition of The Flowers of Evil. Our reading of Baudelaire will be based on the need pointed out by Fredric Jameson (1992) to "restore to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of the (...) story". Let us, therefore, meet what was presented in Walter Benjamin's thesis VII, On the Concept of History, in which he states that "there was never a document of culture that was not also a document of barbarism."