French Literature Reviews - 2026
Étienne Crosnier, Baudelaire pionnier du théâtre et son double.
Theatre and Performance
For Baudelaire, the theatre was a passion of his youth. Alongside his schoolmates from the Pension Bailly—Prarond, Champfleury, Le Vavasseur, Buisson—he applauded Victor Hugo’s plays at the Odéon or the Porte-Saint-Martin. Later, he witnessed the decline of Romantic theatre in the face of Ponsard’s neoclassicism. However, under the Second Empire, the stage underwent a revival, genres multiplied, and the poet of The Flowers of Evil tried his hand at drama.
Plagued by debt and averse to the compromises of the theatrical world, Baudelaire nevertheless had to adapt to its rules and financial imperatives. Having grasped how the system worked, he drafted outlines (“The Drunkard”, “The End of Don Juan”) and dialogued scenes (“Idéolus”, “The Marquis of the 1st Hussars”) solely to secure a comfortable advance on royalties. Yet right from the start, theatre directors such as Hippolyte Hostein (at the Gaîté) or Marc Fournier (at the Porte-Saint-Martin) doubted his playwriting projects. His rough drafts raised questions—and even frightened people—rather than seducing them. In a letter from November 1854, Hostein reminded Baudelaire, not without condescension, that he needed to present plays in the vein of Pixérécourt (the king of melodrama in the first half of the 19th century) to satisfy his “audience of schoolchildren” rather than “professors”—pointing out that so-called “progressive” plays did not make a penny.
The fact is that Baudelaire, during that turbulent yet exceptional literary decade (1850–1860), wanted to rethink the theatre just as he had rethought poetry. Far from hammy actors and servile, greedy directors, he dreamed of a magical theatre endowed with a symbolism inherited from ancient drama, complete with masks, megaphones, and cothurni[1], under the Apollonian gaze of the chandelier and—in a stroke of irony, ambiguity, or disdain for genre boundaries—gender-neutral. While anticipating the “masculine-feminine neuter” of Antonin Artaud’s later Théâtre de Séraphin (1946), he sought first and foremost to describe the visual and acoustic mechanics of a new, non-textual language—the forerunner of Artaud’s own “language by signs[2]”: a theatricality reinvented within a forest of symbols.
In the meantime, Baudelaire strove to capture the attention of renowned actors (Tisserant, Rouvière). Yet he set himself apart by pioneering a theme of cruelty in which his protagonist, enslaved by hubris (excess) and a personal passion (woman, wine, etc.), premeditates and commits the irreparable, forcing the spectator to experience his damnation on earth by proxy. In The Theatre of Séraphin (“Artificial Paradises”), Baudelaire would summarize his Pascalian view of the idler haunted by evil: “He wanted to act the angel, and he has become a beast.” But his dream of a mythical spectacle that would transform the profane spectator into an initiate via the stage—the mirror of the soul—ultimately fizzled out.
Indeed, in a materialistic society obsessed with speculation and profit, Baudelaire’s idea stood not a shadow of a chance: a life-and-death struggle between God and Satan, lost in advance for his Promethean hero who is ultimately struck down by lightning. In the Baudelairian absolute, the magic of the symbols and the chandelier was meant to abolish the boundary between stage and auditorium, so that the spectator’s identification with the hero would reach a dizzying height. “We are damned, but this damnation is sometimes synonymous with intoxication,” the author seems to tell us, growing increasingly isolated amidst vaudeville, operetta, and melodrama. In 1864, he would go into exile in Belgium to make a living from lectures (unsuccessfully), utterly disgusted with Parisian artistic life.
Published eighty years later, Antonin Artaud’s Le théâtre de Séraphin translates Baudelaire’s correspondences between theatre and dream into a contemporary language—that of the body, articulated through breath and cry: “And this double is more than an echo; it is the memory of a language whose theatre has lost the secret. [...] In the theatre, poetry and science must henceforth be one. [...] And with the hieroglyph of a breath, I wish to recover an idea of sacred theatre.”
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[1] Charles BAUDELAIRE: Œuvres complètes, “My Heart Laid Bare”, “My Opinions on the Theatre”, Gallimard, coll. de La Pléiade, 1987, p. 682.
[2] Antonin ARTAUD: The Theatre and Its Double, Gallimard, 1985, p. 169.
The 19th-century French theatrical landscape was dominated by the conventions of melodrama and the commercial demands of the Second Empire. Playwrights often navigated a tension between artistic innovation and the financial necessity of appealing to a public. Within this context, Baudelaire attempted to reconcile his poetic sensibilities with the stage, envisioning a symbolic, non-textual performance style that prioritized visual and acoustic mechanics over traditional dialogue. His efforts reflect a nineteenth-century preoccupation with the limits of realism and the desire to elevate the theatre into a space of metaphysical inquiry.
Baudelaire’s dramatic experiments prefigured later movements that sought to strip the stage of its purely literary constraints. By emphasizing the role of the body, the mask, and the symbolic gesture, he anticipated a shift toward a sacred or ritualistic theatre. His focus on the protagonist’s descent into damnation and the use of the stage as a mirror for the soul aligns with his wider literary concerns regarding the human condition. Readers interested in the evolution of modern performance theory may find it relevant to examine these early theatrical aspirations.