ABSTRACT
La Fanfarlo is a self-portrait of the Romantic artist in ironical mode; the Salon de 1846 a meditation on Romanticism and the cultural crisis of the mid-century as reflected in the visual arts, which Charles Baudelaire uses to state his own aesthetic creed at the outset of his career. In the Salon, Baudelaire is primarily concerned with the implications of personal and collective self-doubt in the aesthetic sphere. Human liberty, Baudelaire admonishes, adopting the tone and the vocabulary of the moral theologian, is more effective in avoiding the occasions of sin than in resisting them. In Baudelaire's own view, irony, that is Romantic irony, is a 'fundamental ' aspect of modern literature. Other reasons for Baudelaire's cult of Delacroix relate of course to the differences between art and literature. The irony of Baudelaire's fictional 'self-portrait' is profoundly comic, that is, in the tragi-comic sense defined in De l'essence du rire.
