What Baudelaire Means to Me

Abstract

I first encountered Baudelaire as an A-level student. Sadly, the teaching of French at my school focussed more on language than literature. Compounded with the strangely affectless quality about the texts my teachers chose for us to read in class, it is a wonder I have much interest in French literature at all. At school, we drudged stolidly through passages of L’Étranger and Thérèse Desqueroux with little sense of excitement. That only came later at university, when a supplementary class on Flaubert’s ‘Un Coeur Simple’ opened doors for me.