Entre rue et boulevard : les chemins de l'allégorie chez Baudelaire

The grands boulevards are nearly absent in Baudelaire’s work: although his urban topography is a maze of streets, alleyways, and other public thoroughfares, the poet rarely describes them in detail. Actual boulevards (and, in fact, is it not a question of the later Hausmannian variation?) appear on only three occasions: the poet loses his halo while crossing one; from the table of a café he watches a poor family peering in from one; it is upon a boulevard that he encounters one day a •mysterious Being” who will lure him into a gambling house. By following the evocations of streets in Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris, one can detect the fine network linking passageways to the poetic voice, where the surprise and shocks occasioned by traversing the city partake of the allegorical imagination. A space marked by chance and by rupture, the street, in its various forms, is emblematic of Baudelaire’s poetic practice.