"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" is organized into three sections: (1) La Bohème (2) The Flâneur (3) Modernity. Each section is devoted to a large scale historical phenomenon of which Baudelaire plays the part of the exemplar or specimen.
In "La Bohème", Benjamin looks at the relationship between "professional conspirators" or "professional revolutionists" and the social milieu of Bohèmian circles in Paris. The first section begins with a meditation on the genre of physiognomies—pamphlets describing stereotyped social groupings in Paris—and how Baudelaire's poems complement this genre, even as they transcend it.[2] In a summary of the section, Michael Jennings writes: "For Benjamin, the bohemians were not primarily artistes starving in garrets-think of Rodolfo and Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme-but a motley collection of amateur and professional conspirators who imagined the overthrow of the regime of Napoleon III, France's self-elected emperor. In the opening pages of the essay, Benjamin establishes relays between the tactics employed by these figures and the aesthetic strategies that characterize Baudelaire's poetic production."[1]
In "The Flâneur" examines the relationship between the isolated urban individual and the crowd, looking at the ways in which the architectural changes and shifts in urban planning in Paris during the 19th century interact with and reflect the evolution of modernist perceptions and begin to crystallize into a new paradigm of consumerist sensibility.[2]
Per Michael Jennings:
The flâneur strolls through the urban crowd as prosthetic vehicle of a new vision; the department store as phantasmagoric space of display and consumption; the commercialization and final alienation of the intelligentsia; the prostitute as concatenated image--of death and woman, 'seller and sold in one'; the gradual denaturing of art as it is subsumed by commodification and fashion, and the replacement of experience by the new concept of information.[1]
The final movement of the essay, "Modernity" marshalls and deploys the conceptual terminology that Benjamin has developed in the first two sections to make an argument that the cultivation of personal "taste" and the romanticization of "art for art's sake" are, in fact, a forms of repressive desublimation wherein individuals sacrifice personal wisdom or experience and in exchange are able to navigate and to 'enjoy' the process of shopping for mass-produced commodity products.[2]
