"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" (; 1938) is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. "Paris, Capital of 19th Century" is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades ProjectâÂÂthe construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during HaussmanizationâÂÂappear as leitmotifs in both essays.
The cycle of reflections collected as "Central Park" was written during the period that Benjamin was working on "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" and amounts to a series of tertiary meditations on the subject that didn't make it into the final draft.
"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" is organized into three sections: (1) La Bohème (2) The Flâneur (3) Modernity. Each section is devoted to a large scale historical phenomenon of which Baudelaire plays the part of the exemplar or specimen.
In "La Bohème", Benjamin looks at the relationship between "professional conspirators" or "professional revolutionists" and the social milieu of Bohèmian circles in Paris. The first section begins with a meditation on the genre of physiognomiesâÂÂpamphlets describing stereotyped social groupings in ParisâÂÂand how Baudelaire's poems complement this genre, even as they transcend it. In a summary of the section, Michael Jennings writes: "For Benjamin, the bohemians were not primarily artistes starving in garrets-think of Rodolfo and Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme-but a motley collection of amateur and professional conspirators who imagined the overthrow of the regime of Napoleon III, France's self-elected emperor. In the opening pages of the essay, Benjamin establishes relays between the tactics employed by these figures and the aesthetic strategies that characterize Baudelaire's poetic production."
In "The Flâneur" examines the relationship between the isolated urban individual and the crowd, looking at the ways in which the architectural changes and shifts in urban planning in Paris during the 19th century interact with and reflect the evolution of modernist perceptions and begin to crystallize into a new paradigm of consumerist sensibility.
Per Michael Jennings:
The final movement of the essay, "Modernity" marshalls and deploys the conceptual terminology that Benjamin has developed in the first two sections to make an argument that the cultivation of personal "taste" and the romanticization of "art for art's sake" are, in fact, a forms of repressive desublimation wherein individuals sacrifice personal wisdom or experience and in exchange are able to navigate and to 'enjoy' the process of shopping for mass-produced commodity products.