| Situating Baudelaire's Salon de 1846 within the context of utopian socialism, this thesis argues that Pierre Leroux constituted a decisive influence in the formation of Baudelaire's aesthetic and social thought. From the central notion of an imponderable electric fluid which Leroux called calorique, Baudelaire developed aesthetic and political ideals which aimed to dissolve bourgeois individualism and to promote a new communal order.;In addition to this historical aspect, the thesis also attacks the problem of Baudelaire's irony. In the Salon de 1846, there are juxtaposed two types of discourse which together make up a complex textual strategy calculated in view of two distinct groups of receivers. On the one hand, Baudelaire produces a militant discourse, "l'ereintage par la ligne droite," which invites direct reference to the socialist thought of the period, and clearly indicates his alliance with one group of receivers, the socialist opposition to the July Monarchy, against another group of receivers, the supporters of the bourgeois State. On the other hand, "l'ereintage par la ligne courbe" sets up highly complex conditions of reception. Of the two groups of receivers, only the bourgeois, whom the sender addresses in their own code, are ostensibly present. In this situation which represents the conditions of ideological domination which characterized the society of the July Monarchy, Baudelaire marks his opposition to the bourgeoisie in more subtle ways. His self-conscious and ironical pastiche of bourgeois discourse tends to reduce it to a cliche. He also occasionally interjects fragments of socialist discourse into the bourgeois code. Both these actions function as the sender's signs of complicity with the socialist opposition, who are here forcibly relegated to the margins of this discourse. For the bourgeois receivers, the text may therefore appear to reproduce in a reassuring fashion their own code. However, the other group of receivers, with whom the sender shares a different code and for whom he creates the pastiche of the bourgeois code, are expected to decode the text on two levels, both as reproduction and as subversion of the bourgeois code. |
