Few terms, especially associated with this particular proper name, are likely to strike us as so tautologically self-evident, as calling for less circumspection than these two: Baudelaire and modernity. What do we mean, “Baudelaire’s modernity”? Would this not simply be a periodicity (say, the Second Empire), or an aesthetic (say, the poem in prose)? Following the trace of the signifier through its elaboration in Baudelaire’s aesthetic essays and verse poetry, however, what emerges takes the form of a catachresis: la modernité functions for Baudelaire as the name (à défaut d’être un concept) for a direct, if stressed, relationship between art and the material - or matter - of history and as the site of a critically oppositional poetic politics which insists on the unsettledness of the present, its open-ended contingency. It is a name for History as the cut, or césure, of Revolution. Une histoire qui fait mal.