ABSTRACT
Baudelaire was highly critical of what he considered to be the moral degradation of society in his time. It is significant that Baudelaire figures the transformation of 'barbarian' man into 'civilized' man in terms of a dulling of the senses. For the poet, as for Maistre before him, the immorality of civilized man was linked to his unawareness. According to Baudelaire, nineteenth-century morality was a direct consequence of this Rousseauean blindness to innate evil. Despite the importance attributed by Baudelaire to the reader's moral autonomy, however, many of the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris are explicitly didactic. The extrinsic character of the texts' morality is underlined by Hiddleston, who observes that, in some of the prose poems, there exists 'a gap which is difficult to overcome' between the description and the moral significance explicitly attributed to it.
