We aren’t now so badly situated to face up to the truth of these just sentences. There’s a good chance they will turn disastrous. Perhaps the condition of clairvoyance which they demonstrate was much less a gift of some observer than the irremediable distress of the solitary in the midst of crowds. Is it too audacious to claim that these are the same crowds which, these days, are shaped by the hands of dictators? As for the ability to glimpse a few kernels of resistance in these servile crowds kernels that the revolutionary masses of forty-eight and the communards formed it was not to be so for Baudelaire. Despair was the price of this sensitivity belonging to the first one to approach the big city, the first one to be seized by it with a shudder, a sensitivity which we, dealing with multiple and far too precise threats, no longer even know how to feel.