De la décrépitude comme catégorie esthétique : Baudelaire, Manet

In May 1865, Charles Baudelaire wrote to his friend Édouard Manet: “You are at the zenith regarding only the decay of your art.” This sibylline statement has been read at times as mockery, at others as an encouragement. This paper will focus back on the idea of decay, a difficult term whose interpretation has long been a source of controversy. Our position is that the expression has a meaning proper to itself, whose scope can be determined through its other uses by Baudelaire. The purpose of the study is to understand how the word became a category within an aesthetic lexicon prepared both by the sum of art criticism and by Baudelaire’s own poetics.