Les Paradis artificiels Reading Order

What is Baudelaire's argument about intoxication in Les Paradis artificiels?

Baudelaire's argument in Les Paradis artificiels is more nuanced than the simple celebration or condemnation of intoxication that most contemporary readers expected. He begins by acknowledging the genuine states of heightened perception that intoxication produces — the sense of expanded consciousness, the intensification of beauty, the dissolution of ordinary temporal boundaries — and describes them with a precision and beauty that is itself one of the finest pieces of writing he produced. But he argues that these states are illusory in a specific sense: they give the intoxicated person the impression of a spiritual elevation and expanded self that is not real, not worked for, and therefore not genuinely transformative. The artificial paradise is a simulacrum of the genuine paradise that Baudelaire believes is possible only through suffering, discipline, and genuine spiritual struggle. The poet who takes hashish to see beautiful visions is like the painter who uses photographs instead of drawing from life: the vision is there, but the capacity to understand and transform it — which requires the resistance of the material — is not. This argument connects directly to Les Fleurs du mal, where the 'ideal' is always won against the resistance of 'Spleen'; the artificial paradise is the shortcut that bypasses the resistance and therefore also bypasses the genuine achievement.