<i>LES FLEURS DU MAL</i> IN LIMBO: THE NON-APPEARANCE OF <i>LES LIMBES</i> REVISITED
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Baudelaire's ill-fated project Les Limbes is a well-established fact of literary history. The volume was first announced on the back cover of Le Salon de 1846 and was the subject of a more detailed listing in L'Écho des marchands de vins in November 1848. A number of poems from the work subsequently appeared in Le Magasin des familles and Le Messager de l'Assemblée. An initial change of title to Les Lesbiennes preceded its eventual transmogrification into Les Fleurs du Mal. This note will provide additional information about L'Écho des marchands de vins before proposing a new interpretation of the disparaging assumptions made about Les Limbes by Jean Wallon. Finally, it will consider a major reason for the work's non-appearance. L'Écho des marchands de vins might not seem the most obvious location for an advertisement of Baudelaire's first volume of poetry. Yet to follow Felix Leakey in characterizing it as a ‘journal of the wine trade’ and therefore ‘a most obscure and unlikely quarter’1 risks misrepresenting its nature, which can be better gauged from its full title: L'Écho des marchands de vins, des vignerons et des ouvriers. Richard Burton, in the wake of Jean Ziegler, has demonstrated the commitment of this short-lived periodical, the organ of the Comité central des boissons, to a radical political agenda, painstakingly reconstructing the circumstances in which wine and its taxation were live issues for the Left at the beginning of the Second Republic.2 He duly picks up on the fact that Ledru-Rollin was listed by L'Écho as having attended the banquet organized by the Comité central des boissons in November 1848. Its columns contained, however, other indications of its rolliniste orientation. More generally, readers were offered a combined subscription that included its sister publication, Le Républicain politique, commercial et agricole.3 Its gérant was Claude Genoux, ‘autodidacte’ and ‘ouvrier margeur à l'Imprimerie Paul Dupont’,4 author of Mémoires d'un enfant de la Savoie (1844), a three-page document entitled L'Ouvrier philosophe (1845), and a collection of Chants de l'atelier (1850),5 as well as contributions to L'Almanach républicain, which was advertised in the same number of L'Écho as Les Limbes. Its rédacteur en chef was the socialist Jules de La Madelène,6 who had published stories in Pierre Leroux's Revue indépendante. Baudelaire's associate Pierre Dupont was alone identified by Izambard as a contributor.7 In view of the persistent myth that ‘Le Vin de l'assassin’ first appeared in L'Écho des marchands de vins,8 it is noteworthy that Wallon believed Baudelaire to be a contributor.9
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".