A Way of Being: Baudelaire and the Soul of Denude

In 1864, Charles Baudelaire published a very short prose poem that opens with a command: Il faut être toujours ivre. One must always be drunk. The provocation is deliberate. Yet the poem itself is barely a page long, and within a few lines Baudelaire has already enlarged drunkenness beyond wine, making room for poetry and virtue too. We return to it because it says, more economically than we could, what Denude is for.

A misreading worth correcting

Enivrez-vous means, most directly, “get drunk.” It can therefore be tempting to read Baudelaire’s poem simply as a celebration of wine or excess. But wine is only the first term in a sequence, and the sequence is the point: de vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. On wine, poetry or virtue, as you please.

Baudelaire places the appetite of the body, the appetite of the imagination and the appetite of the conscience on the same line, and treats them as different expressions of a single need. The drunkenness he describes is not simply escape from life. It is absorption in something that enlarges it. The opposite of this state is not sobriety but indifference: the flat, grey attention of a person who is present in a room and absent from their own life.

Read this way, the poem is not merely an invitation to excess. It is an argument against a particular kind of poverty, in which days pass unattended.

The weight of Time

The poem begins with a burden. Time, Baudelaire says, is a weight that “breaks your shoulders and bends you towards the earth.” It is one of the most physical images in his prose: not time as an abstraction, but time as load, something we carry every hour and feel most in the body.

His diagnosis is that we cannot put the burden down, since we cannot stop time. What we can do is change our relationship to it. The remedy is sans trêve, without respite, and the word matters. He does not recommend an occasional holiday from ordinary life. He asks for a permanent condition, a way of moving through hours so that they are filled rather than merely endured.

This is where Denude and Baudelaire meet most closely. We do not think of attention as a technique for productivity, or of beauty as a leisure activity for the weekend. We think of them as the only adequate answer to the fact that our time is short and is passing whether or not we notice it. To fill our time with what gives life meaning is not an indulgence. It is the sensible response to the human situation.

Three intoxications

Baudelaire's list is deliberately short. Wine, poetry, virtue. Each is worth a moment, because together they sketch a whole view of a well-lived life.

Wine stands for pleasure at its most immediate: the senses, the table, the shared evening, the craft of something made well and enjoyed slowly. It is the intoxication of the present moment, and it is not something to apologise for. A civilisation that cannot delight in a good meal or a good vintage has usually lost something else as well.

Poetry stands for the imagination and for everything made with care: language, image, music, architecture, the whole world of human making. It is the intoxication of meaning. To be absorbed in a poem, a painting or a vaulted ceiling is to have the ordinary interrupted by something larger than the ordinary.

Virtue is the surprising third term, and the most demanding. That the poem places goodness beside wine and verse tells us that Baudelaire, so often cast as the poet of decadence, understood that a life given to what is right can itself be a source of exhilaration. Virtue here is not dutifulness. It is a form of being fully alive, of giving oneself to something worthy of the gift.

The phrase à votre guise then closes the door on any single answer. Baudelaire does not tell us which intoxication to choose. He insists only that we choose. The variety of Denude's subjects, from art and architecture to craftsmanship, music, faith, conversation and place, is a long answer to that same “as you please.”

The moment of waking

The most human passage in the poem comes in the middle. Baudelaire imagines the drunkenness failing. You wake on the steps of a palace, or on the grass of a ditch, or in the “mournful solitude” of your room, and the fire has gone out.

He does not pretend this will not happen. The palace and the ditch are set side by side, one of the most levelling gestures in the poem, since the loss of attention comes to the privileged and the poor alike. What matters is the instruction he gives for that moment: ask. Ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that flees, groans, rolls, sings and speaks, what time it is.

And the whole world answers with one voice: Il est l'heure de s'enivrer. It is time to get drunk.

The startling phrase matters because, by this point in the poem, Baudelaire has already told us what he means: with wine, with poetry or with virtue. Drunkenness has become larger than alcohol. It is a way of being claimed completely by something capable of lifting the weight of ordinary time.

This is, in effect, the argument for a publication like ours. Denude exists for the moment of waking. It is a place to return to when the ordinary has dulled us, a quiet reminder that beauty, knowledge and virtue are still there, that the wind and the star and the clock are still speaking. We do not shout. We ask, and we listen, and we pass on what we hear.

Against the erosion of attention

Baudelaire wrote for a Paris of newspapers, boulevards and crowds, a city discovering speed and noise. It is striking how little his diagnosis has aged. Our own century has industrialised distraction far beyond anything he could have imagined, and the “martyred slaves of Time” are now, quite literally, at the mercy of feeds and notifications.

Against that, the Denude ideal is stated simply: to pay attention, to seek depth over noise, and to let art, architecture, craftsmanship, music, faith, conversation and place interrupt the ordinary passage of time. That is our word, not Baudelaire's; he never asks us to interrupt time, only to stop feeling its weight. But the two aims meet: his drunkenness and our interruption are both ways of breaking the day's flatness.

A cathedral does this. So does a well-made chair, a piece of music heard properly, a conversation that runs past its expected end. Each is a small act of resistance against indifference, and each leaves a person slightly more awake than they were.

Why we translate it ourselves

There is one further detail worth dwelling on. Denude publishes its own translation of the poem alongside Baudelaire's French, and this is not incidental.

Translation is one of the purest forms of attention. To translate a text well, one must read it more slowly than almost any other reader, weigh each word, hear the rhythm and decide what can be carried across and what must inevitably change. It is also, for a publication rooted in the conversation between France and Britain, a natural gesture: two languages, two traditions, one shared appetite for depth.

Ivre, s'enivrer and enivrez-vous carry the literal language of drunkenness. We have therefore chosen not to smooth that language away. “Intoxicated” is possible in English, but to a modern ear it can sound clinical, suggesting impairment by alcohol or drugs. Baudelaire’s language is more supple than that: wine is real, but so are poetry and virtue.

For that reason, our translation keeps the more direct “drunk” and “get drunk.” The English is deliberately startling, just as the French is. The lines that follow then do the work Baudelaire intended, transforming drunkenness from a merely alcoholic state into a metaphor for being wholly given over to something beyond oneself.

The soul of Denude

If a publication has a soul, it is not found in its layout or its list of contributors. It is found in what it believes a good life consists of, and in what it asks of its readers. Denude believes that a good life is one lived awake. It believes that beauty, knowledge and virtue are not decorations on existence but its substance. And it believes that attention, freely and generously given, is the rarest and most valuable thing we have to offer.

Baudelaire put it in two paragraphs and a closing refrain. We have spent our editorial life trying to earn the right to repeat it.

So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk. Get drunk without ceasing. On wine, on poetry or on virtue, as you please.