Baudelaire and Brussels’ architecture: From imitation to the life of form
Buvat, Margot
Baudelaire and Brussels’ architecture: From imitation to the life of form - 2021.
83
If a great many of Baudelaire’s fragmentary notes on Belgium (1864-1866) stand out for their violence and their belgophobia, such is not the case for the bundle entitled “Architecture, églises, culte”(“Architecture, churches, cult”) a draft of aesthetic reflections that the poet, it seems, planned to put together in Pauvre Belgique ! (Belgium Stripped Bare). This is because it breaks with the endless rumination which endlessly accuses the Belgians of imitation, and is different from the observations which constantly show up a Belgium monkeying France. This paper, by crossing a reading of Baudelaire with that of the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, purposes to show how the new architectural forms the poet encountered in Brussels enabled him to think about imitation in a more euphoric manner, thinking about the process not only as the angst filled mimetism of copy, but according to its own slow, subterranean and organic rhythm, where Baudelaire found echoes of his own aesthetic.
Baudelaire and Brussels’ architecture: From imitation to the life of form - 2021.
83
If a great many of Baudelaire’s fragmentary notes on Belgium (1864-1866) stand out for their violence and their belgophobia, such is not the case for the bundle entitled “Architecture, églises, culte”(“Architecture, churches, cult”) a draft of aesthetic reflections that the poet, it seems, planned to put together in Pauvre Belgique ! (Belgium Stripped Bare). This is because it breaks with the endless rumination which endlessly accuses the Belgians of imitation, and is different from the observations which constantly show up a Belgium monkeying France. This paper, by crossing a reading of Baudelaire with that of the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, purposes to show how the new architectural forms the poet encountered in Brussels enabled him to think about imitation in a more euphoric manner, thinking about the process not only as the angst filled mimetism of copy, but according to its own slow, subterranean and organic rhythm, where Baudelaire found echoes of his own aesthetic.
Réseaux sociaux