Recalling Traumas and Forgotten Memories of Political Defeat

Representations of the French Revolution of 1848 in Baudelaire's The Swan

Abstract

The bloody episodes of 1848 are an open wound in French history. Like any event with an air of civil war, it is extremely difficult to deal with the subject. Hence, we can think of the great repression that silences this revolutionary episode. In the immediate aftermath of the event, books and publications were banned from commenting on the murders. But worse than this kind of censorship is self-censorship and its slow process of collective forgetting. We will understand that it is the revolution and its sad unfolding from the central theme of Baudelaire's The Swan. In this poem, it is possible to follow the aesthetic options of the poet who fell into the Latin tradition and also knows how to apprehend the harshest modernity. The Swan is an allegorical meditation on Virgil and Andromache about the transformations of Paris and the degradations of the human condition in suburban areas. The reference to Antiquity justifies the role of this poem as a paradigm of religion between ancient and modern times and endows the whole with an insoluble tension that may be its deep significance.