Le paysage urbain, métaphore d’une beauté artefact
The Urban Landscape, a Metaphor for an Artifact of Beauty

Summary/Abstract: The present research concerns a well-known subject, beauty, but treated from a different point of view: a modern beauty, as a spatial metaphor of an artifact, an anthropomorphic beauty, relying on the Baudelairian collection Les Fleurs du mal, more precisely on the second part of the volume, Tableaux Parisiens. For Baudelaire, who initiated the birth of the great modern poetry, beauty is associated with modernity, but a new touch of urban beauty is emphasized. The goal of this article is the Baudelairian quest for truth, symbol of anthropomorphism (sometimes metaphorical, sometimes metonymic), which, later, will be the bane of the NewFrench Novel. We also propose to treat the Baudelairian city, a teeming city of dreams, as a spatial metaphor of modernity: the negative meaning of this space (the world of big cities, characterized by ugliness, sins, solitude, drugs, antidotes against daily banality, etc.), alongside abnormality, a metaphor for the revolt against the banality of the world and against tradition.

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