SOURCE: '"Une morale désagréable,'" in Baudelaire and "Le spleen de Paris," Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1987, pp. 33-61.

In the following excerpt, Hiddleston argues that Le spleen de Paris is a pessimistic work refuting the presence of moral order and divine providence in the world.

It was Baudelaire's stated intention in Le spleen de Paris to emphasize the random and accidental aspects of his thought and inspiration and to draw, or to give the impression of drawing, from his observation of Paris street scenes through the disillusioned eyes of a man afflicted by the ennui of a vast modern capital, an unpleasant moral lesson. His intention . . . was to show another Joseph Delorme, without the languor and the elegant melancholy, but with the added qualities of irony, bitterness, and modernity, 'accrochant sa pensée rapsodique à chaque accident de sa flânerie et tirant de chaque...