On Some Motifs in Baudelaire

TL;DR: Baudelaire does not appear to have been a devotee of gambling, although he had words of friendly understanding, even homage, for those addicted to it as mentioned in this paper, and the motif which he treated in his night piece “Le Jeu” was part of his view of modern times.

Abstract: Baudelaire does not appear to have been a devotee of gambling, although he had words of friendly understanding, even homage, for those addicted to it. e motif which he treated in his night piece “Le Jeu” was part of his view of modern times, and he considered it as part of his mission to write this poem. e image of the gambler became in Baudelaire the characteristically modern complement to the archaic image of the fencer; both are heroic gures to him. Ludwig Borne looked at things through Baudelaire’s eyes when he wrote: “If all the energy and passion … that are expended every year at Europe’s gambling tables … were saved, they would suce to fashion a Roman people and a Roman history from them. But that is just it. Because every man is born a Roman, bourgeois society seeks to de-Romanize him, and that is why there are games of chance and parlor games, novels, Italian operas, and fashionable newspapers.” Gambling became a stock diversion of the bourgeoisie only in the nineteenth century; in the eighteenth, only the aristocracy gambled. Games of chance were disseminated by the Napoleonic armies, and they now became part of “fashionable living and the thousands of unsettled lives that are lived in the basements of a large city,” part of the spectacle in which Baudelaire claimed he saw the heroic-“as it is characteristic of our epoch.”