PLACELESSNESS IN BAUDELAIRE'S ‘LES SEPT VIEILLARDS AND ‘LES PETITES VIEILLES

Focussing on the urban heart of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, this ecocritical analysis is concerned with the poetic consequences of placelessness in 'Les Sept Vieillards' and 'Les Petites Vieilles'.Establishing a link between versification and environmental alteration, the unsettling diptych can be perceived as evoking a threshold for place identity amid Haussmann's modernization of Paris. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------By the mid-1850s, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's restructuring works were coming to define Paris (the Rue de Rivoli was developed between 1853 and 1855, and the Boulevard St Michel was constructed between 1855 and 1859).The project was founded on a desire to prevent insurrectionary barricades, enhance the health of the Parisian populace, and bring the form of the city into the modern age as an emblem of the power of Napoleon III.Appointed Prefect of the Seine département in 1853, Haussmann undertook the modernization of Paris by demolishing older parts of the city, replacing squalid tenements and winding streets with grand structures and broad boulevards.Haussmann notes that this process coincided with the idealistic spirit of progress in the Second Empire: 'l'exécution des diverses opérations […] de 1858 à 1859 […] était l'éventrement du Vieux Paris, du quartier des émeutes, des barricades, par une large voie centrale, perçant, de part en part, ce dédale presque impraticable'. 1 In slightly over fifteen years, Haussmann fundamentally reconfigured the city at a cost of over two billion francs, displacing over a quarter of a million people (especially from areas around Les Halles).These demolition and construction works were greeted with varying degrees of hesitation by residents who felt that their home was no longer recognizable.Edmond de Goncourt describes the unsettling atmosphere of the transitioning city on 18 November 1860: Mon Paris, le Paris où je suis né, le Paris des mœurs de 1830 à 1848 s'en va.Il s'en va par le matériel, il s'en va par le moral.La vie sociale y fait une grande évolution [...].Je suis étranger à ce qui vient, à ce qui est, comme à ces boulevards nouveaux sans tournant, […] implacables de ligne droite, qui ne sentent plus le monde de Balzac, qui font penser à quelque Babylone [...] de l'avenir.Il est bête de venir en un temps en construction, l'âme y a des malaises comme un corps qui essuierait des plâtres. 2 This vanishing of the older incarnation of Paris in material and moral terms entailed uncertainty about the relationship of humanity to the environment.It was amid this structural and social upheaval that Baudelaire sought to eke out an existence while refining his only collection of verse, Les Fleurs du mal (first published on 25 June 1857).Condemned by the moral authorities of the Second Empire for his tales of the disturbing elements of metropolitan life, Baudelaire was obliged to excise six poems containing elements of vampirism and lesbianism two months after the release of the collection.The thirty-six-year-old author resolved to issue a new version of the work, reconceived in its entirety, and the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published on 9 February 1861.Its structure was bolstered by the addition of thirty-five poems to the ninety-four permitted pieces, as well as by the creation of a groundbreaking second section, the 'Tableaux parisiens'.3 Following the eighty-five ennui-infused accounts in the first section ('Spleen et idéal'), the eighteen urban vignettes of the 'Tableaux parisiens' offer a variegated sketch of Parisian society undergoing Haussmann's modernization projects, and presage the desire to flee the trappings of everyday life in the four concluding sections 1 Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Mémoires du Baron Haussmann, 3 vols (Paris: Victor-Havard, 1890-93), III (1893), 54.

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