ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Baudelaire and on the relations between the economical and the maternal in his work. Considering both his literary work and letters in the light of Walter Benjamin’s and other scholars’ writings on him, this chapter proposes the hypothesis of an identification between the mother, the “conseil judiciaire,” and the “counterfeit coin” of Baudelaire’s homonymous prose poem. Through this identification, the chapter exposes the intricate knots between the economical and the psychological in Baudelaire’s work and how it is this intricacy—what Benjamin called allegory—that ultimately defines Baudelairian literature, and the modernism that he influenced.
