Baudelaire was a French poet who wrote his major work, Les Fleurs du Mal, in the 1850s. His work anticipated many of the themes which modern writers (many immensely influential in his own right) would explore, such as the modern big city, the crisis of morality, and the decay or displacement of religious feeling; he was one of the first to write poems embedded in modernity (Burton).

The modernity in which he was embedded was that of mid 19^th Century Paris. Industrialization brought enormous social change to Paris in the form of urbanization. Benjamin, in his essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” is interested in how this change – as well as the decline of religion – makes its mark in the framework of perception put forth in Les Fleurs du Mal and other writings of Baudelaire (of which there are few). He uses Baudelaire as a guide to the way the modern man of 1850s Paris perceives art and time and desire and other people and as a guide to how the modern man’s perception of these things differs from the perception of people pre-modernity.

To this end he fixes on a number of motifs in Baudelaire’s poetry. In my summary I will not have time to touch on each one; I will keep it to the six that are most directly involved with Benjamin’s overall purpose in the essay. I have put these motifs in bold. They are: the artistic process as a duel; love at last sight in the crowd; the experience of time in gambling; the scent and its failure before the spleen; eyes that do not return one’s gaze; and the poet who loses his halo.

i.

Benjamin begins by remarking that Baudelaire’s book of lyric poems, Les Fleurs du mal, was written with “the least indulgent readers” in mind as its audience (156). By this audience he means mainly people living in modernizing, industrializing Europe; they are the least indulgent readers because the modern conditions of life have made them less inclined to focus, more given to “sensual pleasures” than contemplative ones, and “familiar with the “spleen” which kills … receptiveness” (155). (We’ll come back to this later.) Then Benjamin introduces an important point: the experience of living is mainly the product of the convergence of information we have already accumulated, often unconsciously, in our memory. Industrialization and the “spleen” tend to make this “experience” harder to access and weaker. The relationship between the two is one of Baudelaire’s subjects in Les Fleurs du mal.

ii.

To explain what he means by “experience” better – and here he uses the German word erfahrung – Benjamin turns to the French late 19^th and early 20^th Century writer, Proust. In his enormous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust described two different forms of memory. Voluntary memory is the habitual, utilitarian memory that we use to store facts and basic sketches of our past, which have little or no power to show us what our past felt like. Involuntary memory is the memory that makes the feeling of past events surge up in our mind vividly when a present sensation corresponds with a sensation in the past; only chance, a chance correspondence, can set it in motion (158). Experience (erfahrung) in the time of Baudelaire owes more to involuntary memory than to voluntary memory.

Benjamin argues that involuntary memory only truly becomes relevant among people who are isolated and estranged from experience, ie, in a more secular, industrialized age (158). Before secularization and industrialization, ritual did something very similar to involuntary memory, but for the collective: it “triggered recollection” of a collective past, aligning past and present to create a rich and usually religious experience (159). The difference is that ritual does not happen by chance; it has the feeling power of involuntary memory but happens on a more or less predictable schedule.

iii.

Proust says that only what I am not conscious of can enter involuntary memory (160-1). Freud adds that consciousness actively tries to protect me from too much or threatening stimuli (sights, emotions, etc.) (161). The hurt or impairment that I experience when I am overstimulated is called shock. The less readily my consciousness shields me, the more traumatic the shock. Finally, the French writer Valéry provides a thought to tie Proust’s and Freud’s together: recollection, he says, gives me “time for organizing the reception of stimuli which [I] initially lacked” (161-2). In other words, when I experience a shock my consciousness is not prepared for, it pushes the threatening stimuli into something like my involuntary memory; and in dreams and recollections that dip into involuntary memory, I process the threatening stimuli, bringing it under the belated control of consciousness (162).

iv.

The more efficiently consciousness protects me against stimuli, the less my impressions of stimuli enter into experience (erfahrung). My consciousness’s shock defense sacrifices the integrity of the contents of the impressions to the effort of assigning the incident to a precise point in time, of making the incident “a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis)” (163). A “sudden start” confirms the failure of the shock defense when I have no time to reflect on what has happened.

Keeping this in mind, Benjamin introduces the first ‘motif’ from the title: Baudelaire represents the creative process as a duel. In his poem “Le Soleil” (The Sun), it’s a “fantasque escrime” (curious fencing) where he stumbles and collides with a crowd of ideas and words; elsewhere it’s “a duel in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright” (163). Moreover, in the dedication of his collection of prose poems, called Spleen de Paris, he explicitly links his poetic task to shocks and shocks to “giant cities” and their “web of … interconnecting relationships” (165). So it is contact with the masses that gives Baudelaire the shocks he duels with. Who are these masses? Simply, the people on the street. These crowds of people, Benjamin argues, are everywhere in Baudelaire’s poetry, but “hidden”, a “phantom crowd” that other crowds interchange with (165).

v-vii.

To give a sense of people’s impressions in the mid 19^th Century of the overpopulation of cities, Benjamin cites Engels. Coming from provincial Germany to industrialized London, Engels describes a crowd of people whose “creative faculties … [remain] inactive and [are] suppressed,” and who push past one another with “brutal indifference” (166-7). Benjamin invites comparison between this description and the one Edgar Allan Poe, an early 19^th Century American writer, gives in his story, “The Man of the Crowd”: in this story, the people in the crowd are inhuman, conforming, self-absorbed, and/or solitary despite being surrounded by others; and they move almost mechanically because really, they are moved by the crowd (171). Baudelaire translated Poe’s story, thought it represented the crowd well, and even equated his own position – that of a flâneur, an idler and connoisseur of the street – to that of the Man of the Crowd (172). On the last point, however, Benjamin disagrees. He argues that the flâneur in Baudelaire has more composure than the “manic” Man of the Crowd; he has elbow room, leisure, time; he belongs to a historical period slightly before the period of the Man of the Crowd (172-3).

The flâneur still experiences similar shocks due to overpopulation and the fleeting impressions it gives. But though, in Baudelaire, the flâneur often sees the crowd as inhuman and antagonistic, he also joins in it and even takes pleasure in it; his relationship with the crowd is ambivalent (172). The example Benjamin gives, also the second major motif he addresses, comes from Baudelaire’s poem, “À une Passante” (To a Passerby). In the poem a woman “en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse” (in deep mourning – majestic grief) is carried past the narrator by the crowd (168-9). Fascinated, he falls in “love … at last sight [my bold]” with her, as Benjamin puts it; he crumples with a pang of longing (168-9). The crowd both brings the flâneur an object of desire and pulls it away instantaneously. Moreover, Baudelaire never mentions the crowd in the poem, only its effects of noise and movement; he is in a sense alienated from it, like the Man of the Crowd, because of its chaos.

viii.

Benjamin cites Valéry again, who says that “the inhabitant of the great city centers … reverts to a state of savagery – that is, of isolation” (174). The comforts of technology make us less dependent on others and as a result, isolate us. They also bring us “closer to mechanization” (174); as Marx argues, labor changes forms from practice (where the laborer learns from experience (erfahrung) to perfect his craft) to drill (unskilled labor which is sealed off from erfahrung and must coordinate with the machine’s repetitive motions) (176). Benjamin argues that this change in labor is mimicked by a change in the experience of the city street itself, a change evident in Poe’s story through the “mimetic shock absorber”-like smiles of frustrated pedestrians and their mechanical movements, a change also present in Baudelaire’s work (176). Just as the unskilled laborer follows the jolts of the machine to perform labor without erfahrung, the person on the street experiences the shocks of the crowd, is desensitized, and finds it difficult to translate them into erfahrung because so much of the information is fleeting and alien. At the same time as these changes – still the mid 19^th C – the “jolt” spreads also to the arts: photography (at least in its most basic form) is the drill to painting’s practice; film, through montage, establishes “shocks … as a formal principle” (175).

ix.

Baudelaire doesn’t know anything about industrial processes and workers, but he studies a corresponding process for the flâneur: gambling. Benjamin quotes from the French philosopher Alain to show that, just as the work of an unskilled laborer consists of repetitive motions that each have no impact on the consecutive one, “no game is dependent on the preceding one” in gambling (177). The gambler, like the unskilled laborer, feels that the act of playing is pointless in itself; each game is an incomplete piece, not the whole (177). And in games of chance the mechanism of the dice or deck dictates the emotions of the players perhaps more than labor does the laborer (178). Finally, Benjamin makes the additional point that a gambler’s desire to win is “not a wish in the strict sense of the word” (178). What he means is: a wish (by his definition) needs erfahrung to be a proper wish; it needs to be fulfilled in the course of one’s life somewhat in the same sense as unprocessed stimuli needs to be worked out through recollection in order to become experience (erfahrung) (179).

Baudelaire, in what is the third main motif Benjamin addresses, represents the gambler as a sort of modern hero. This motif is the equation between how time is experienced in gambling and how time is experienced when consciousness ruthlessly shuttles information into erlebnis (179-80). In his poem “L’Horloge” (The Clock), Time figures as “un joueur avide / Qui gagne sans tricher, à tout coup” (a rabid gambler / Who wins always without cheating); if the type of time through which wishes are fulfilled in the above sense is a sort of heaven, then the type of time in “L’Horloge” and gambling is a sort of hell where no one “is allowed to complete anything [he has] started” (179). In another poem, “Le Jeu” (Gambling), Baudelaire depicts this hell. Here Baudelaire watches the gamblers and envies them the narcotics with which they “submerge”, as Benjamin puts it, “the consciousness that has delivered them to the march of the second-hand” (180).

x.

Proust points out: the days covered by Baudelaire are few and significant – days of “completing time”, in Benjamin’s words – days that involve not experience but recollection (remember Valéry) (181). The substance of these days is the correspondances. Correspondances is the word Baudelaire uses for the data of remembrance, through which past experience “seeks to establish itself in crisis-proof form” (182). This activity, according to Benjamin, is “only possible within the realm of the ritual”; and because of the decline of ritual with (among other things) the decline of religion and the rise of big cities and mechanization, Baudelaire faces “powerful counterforces” to writing poetry in this way (182). But the poems where he fails to restore the past are as good as the ones where he succeeds.

One such poem is “Le Goût du néant” (The Taste for Nothingness). In the line, “Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur” (Spring, the Beloved, has lost its scent), Baudelaire signifies with the lightest touch an enormous loss. “The scent,” Benjamin writes, “is the inaccessible refuge of the mémoire involontaire”; the recognition of a scent provides more consolation, more restoration of the past, than that of other senses, because scent is harder to associate with other senses consciously and voluntarily, and sinks more immediately to the level below consciousness (184). To lose this consolation leaves Baudelaire at the mercy of the time of “L’Horloge” and “Le Jeu”; the lines that direct follow “Le Printemps…” are: “Et le temps m’engloutit minute par minute, / Comme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur” (And, minute by minute, Time engulfs me, / As the snow’s measureless fall covers a motionless body”) (184). He is, to use Benjamin’s words, “past experiencing”, in the clutches of his own spleen, hyperconscious of the passage of time but only as it contributes to his rage at the absence of erfahrung (184-5). Another poem, one of the “Spleen” poems, evokes this absence and rage again with a clear reference to the rituals to which he has become deaf, a reference in the form of church bells that howl maddeningly as though lost (185).

xi.

The aura of an object is “the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, tend to cluster around the object” (186). It is aura that modernization and mechanization cause to decline; with regard to the utilitarian object this decline comes about through the decline of the laborer’s “experience, which [would otherwise leave] traces of the practiced hand” on the object (186). It is easy to see how the camera ushers in this decline: it tends to extend the range of the mémoire volontaire and thus to reduce “the scope for the play of the imagination” (186).

Baudelaire believes that photography cannot have a claim to art because only “[that] on which man has bestowed the imprint of his soul” can be art (186). Valéry adds that art “reflects back at us that of which our eyes will never have their fill” (187). Each one means roughly that art requires aura to be art. Now Benjamin takes a quote from the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis – “perceptibility … is a kind of attentiveness” – to help show that aura takes its power in part from the sense it gives an observer that the object is returning his gaze (188). Objects in dreams, sensations that spark involuntary memories, and beautiful and sacred objects do so; yet the camera does not, which is why daguerreotypy was “felt to be inhuman … even … deadly” by its early observers (188).

This brings us to yet another motif in Baudelaire: his poems are full of instances where “the expectation roused by the look of the human eye is not fulfilled” (189). According to Benjamin, the other eyes, the eyes into which the poet’s eye looks but which do not and even cannot return the gaze, have the charm nonetheless of “defraying the cost of his instinctual desires” (189). The “cost” here is ostensibly the emotional attachment or the expectation of requital which Baudelaire would incur or inspire in pursuing a purely sexual encounter with someone. But he does not pay the cost to eyes which “illuminés ainsi que des boutiques … Usent insolemment d'un pouvoir emprunté” (lit up like shop windows … With insolence make use of borrowed power) (190). These eyes, and the “yeux fixes / Des Satyresses ou des Nixes” (fixed stare / Of Satyresses or of Nymphs), are probably those of a prostitute; but nearly everyone in the big city of the mid-19^th Century had eyes “overburdened with protective functions” and apt to assume remoteness in the many situations, such as streetcars and trains, where strangers have no reason to speak but nothing else to stare at but each other (190-1). It is to these eyes, Benjamin says, that Baudelaire surrenders, feeling “something like pleasure in the degradation of such abandonment” (191).

xii.

The final motif Benjamin speaks about concerns this very surrender. It is the motif of the poet who loses his halo. In a late prose piece, called “A Lost Halo”, a poet shows up at a disreputable establishment. The narrator is surprised - “You - here?” – and the poet explains that crossing the street “where death comes galloping at you from all sides” he made an awkward movement, his halo slipped off his head, and he decided not to risk injury by picking it up. The narrator suggests that he report the lost halo at the lost-and-found office, but the poet refuses; he likes “[going] incognito, [doing] bad things, and [indulging] in vulgar behavior like ordinary mortals,” and the thought of a bad poet adorning himself with the halo amuses him (192-3).

Benjamin finishes his essay with the reflection that Baudelaire’s poems in fact questioned the very possibility of lyric poetry in modernity (192). In them Baudelaire accepts – “consents to,” in Benjamin’s words – “the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock” and yet by portraying that disintegration in his poetry, he gave back meaning to a modernity which continually sought to shrug it off (194). Or, again, as Benjamin puts it: he gave “the weight of experience (Erfahrung)” to “something lived through (Erlebnis)” (194).

Mémoire Involontaire: Involuntary memory, Proust’s word for the type of memory that is not habitual or utilitarian, that resurrects the feeling of a past experience, and that happens by chance.

Mémoire Volontaire: Voluntary memory, Proust’s word for the type of memory that is habitual or utilitarian, that does not preserve or represent the past experience, and that we ourselves command.

Mémoire Pure: Pure memory, Bergson’s word for mémoire involontaire, except that Bergson does not view it as occurring only by chance.

Experience (erfahrung): the type of experience that is invested with meaning, that enriches you.

Experience (erlebnis): experience in the narrowest sense, without anything meaningful necessarily gleaned; simply the fact of being there at a precise point in time.

Shock: the impairment that comes from stimuli so numerous or threatening that they test or break the protective shield of consciousness.

Crisis: a break in the protective shield of consciousness

Shock Defense: the attempt of consciousness to cushion or protect against shocks, which tends to sacrifice erfahrung to erlebnis.

Flâneur: an idle man of leisure and connoisseur of the street, in 19^th C cities before or during the transition to high modernity.

Practice: a form of labor in which the laborer slowly perfects his activity: associated with erfahrung.

Drill: the fully mechanized labor of an unskilled worker, involving often one repetitive motion: associated with erlebnis.

Wish: a type of volition where time plays the role of completer, not destroyer, when the volition is fulfilled; the wish is preserved until fulfilment as erfahrung rather than shuttled back as erlebnis.

Correspondances: correspondences between present and past, where the data of the past revives by association with the data of the present; past experience (erfahrung) “seeking to establish itself as crisis-proof”.

Aura: “the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, tend to cluster around [an] object”; in some sense, what makes an object conducive to erfahrung.

Ritual: a set of activities which awaken aura, which trigger the data of mémoire involontaire and therefore in a sense meld mémoire involontaire and mémoire volontaire.

Spleen: a state of irritation or embitterment which tends to reduce all experience to erlebnis by an evervigilant shock defense. (It really means an organ, which in humoral medicine accounted for melancholy – Baudelaire extends its usage.)

The three most important influences that Benjamin acknowledges in his essay are Proust, Valéry, and Marx. (These are certainly not the only influences; I do not list the others because they are too minor or incidental to treat in an entry of this length.)

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist who detailed the development of his own character and pursuit of beauty as well as the reorganization of his own aristocratic class under the forces of materialism in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. His artistic pursuits, like Baudelaire’s, were almost all crystallized into one work: À la recherche du temps perdu, a novel in seven volumes. Proust’s obsession was memory. He struggled nearly his entire life to reconstruct the things he had forgotten in the process of living, finding his voluntary memory utterly useless for the task and founding almost a personal religion revolving around art and the involuntary memory (Painter). Benjamin uses Proust’s concepts of memory extensively throughout this paper, and sees Baudelaire (as Proust did) somewhat as Proust’s precursor, shining the light on the ways the tools of modernity destroyed the tools of religion and ritual. It is Proust that teaches Benjamin to view Baudelaire as a poet of memory, and it is in conjunction with Proust’s commentary on photography that Benjamin reads Baudelaire’s reaction to photography and his designation of what is art.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a French critic and poet. He is known both for his poetry and for his astute psychological and political reflections (Gibson). Benjamin uses his more scientific observations about the process of re-organizing psychological stimuli after a shock to further explain and ground Proust’s almost mystical claims about involuntary memory. He also uses Valéry’s commentary on the isolating tendency of modern comforts to develop an idea of the causes of the fleeting and chaotic nature of the city Baudelaire speaks of. Finally, his characterization of art – as that which reflects back at us what our eyes will never have their fill of – helps to clarify Baudelaire’s views about photography and (though this is Benjamin’s term) aura.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German economist, sociologist and writer, famous for his critique of capitalism. Central to his ideas was the notion of technological determinism and of the alienating nature of capitalist production; as capitalism progresses, he argued, and labor becomes mechanized, workers become increasingly alienated from the things they produce and consumers become increasingly desensitized to the labor which has created what they consume (McLellan and Feuer). Benjamin’s essay is to some extent permeated by aspects of Marx’s thought such as technological determinism. He uses Marx’s distinction between drill and practice explicitly to build his argument of the deterioration of erfahrung in favor of erlebnis which occurs both in industry and in the rest of modern life. This key point in turn influences Benjamin’s thoughts on the spleen, time in gambling and at the factory, and the eye, in Baudelaire’s poetry.

Benjamin’s main argument is that Baudelaire’s poetry seeks to document the attempt of a modern individual to have some sort of erfahrung and the frustrations he faces in the attempt. The hypertrophy of consciousness when faced with the shocks of the crowded city tend to reduce impressions to merely something that has been lived through (erlebnis) before one has even the time to process them. He builds his concept of this function of consciousness through Freud, Valéry and Proust as well as through interpretation of Baudelaire’s poems. He builds an understanding of how this function of consciousness became as prevalent as it did on the basis of readings of Marx, Engels, Poe, Hoffman and Alain, as well as of the details of life in Paris in the time of Baudelaire. He builds his concept of the weapon Baudelaire uses to combat hyperconsciousness through Proust; he argues that this weapon, involuntary memory, only becomes relevant with the decline of ritual, on the basis of observations as to the nature and effects of modern technologies such as newspapers, streetcars, trains, photography and the like.

Benjamin’s argument is most powerful when he concerns himself directly with historical changes in technology and material conditions. While at times overblown or hasty – as when, in arguing the important point that involuntary memory only matters in a society of isolated individuals, the only agent of isolation he names is the newspaper – his thoughts on the concepts of shock, the indifference of the crowd, the aura, and the feeling of living in erlebnis-time are powerful and provocative. He gives the reader a strong sense of the historical position Baudelaire occupied; he makes clear the enormous change that has taken place with the decline of the aura.

In doing so, however, Benjamin often strays from the subject of Baudelaire. His readings hardly ever start with the text and though they may be astute, they may also be opaque. The passages that concern the eye in Baudelaire seem to have been written with the most indulgent audience in mind; terms like “distance” and “spell” are used to describe the allure both of the aura-less and aura-full eye but with no clear markers to explain which is which; the reason for Baudelaire’s masochistic pleasure in his own degradation is not given; the identity of the people whose eyes Baudelaire speaks of from one poem to the next is not conjectured from a fuller reading of the text, though it is important information. The essay would read better if Benjamin had written with his focus directed precisely on the change in conditions of perception up to and around Baudelaire’s time, and Baudelaire were one provider of evidence among many.

A useful and interesting new book has much to say on what Benjamin calls “the decline of the aura”: Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age”. In this book, Taylor lays out a history of the transition from the omnipresent (in Europe) Christianity of 1500 to the secularism of the present day, that is, from “a condition in which belief [in God and religion] was the default option … to a condition in which for more and more people unbelieving construals [of the world] seem at first blush the only plausible ones” (12). The main thing that has changed in these 500 years in Europe is not merely the death of God, but the reinvention of the preconditions of belief, and thus of the very way that people feel and experience the world (14). In this sense Taylor’s interests align very closely with Benjamin’s above.

The move toward secularization was a move from the “enchanted” to the “disenchanted” world (30). In the enchanted world, people felt themselves to be “porous” to the world; there was no clear line between the self and things, people, forces, or spirits, but the latter could easily enter or possess you; the meanings of things were not a thing of the mind but imbued in the things themselves; the order of nature was a manifestation of God and God lived throughout it; a time of the year had meaning according as it re-fulfilled a part of the Bible; and people had meaning according as they occupied a position in the great chain of being. In contrast, the disenchanted world is a world where people feel themselves to be bounded; things, people, the influences of one’s environment only affect you in the manner in which your mind, separate from them, receives and interprets their impressions; the meanings of things are in the mind; the order of nature is more likely simply the product of physics; a time of year has only the meaning we give it; people have meaning according as they give it to themselves (30-35). (These are very broad strokes: not everyone today believes everything in the second list; they are only examples meant to show the difference between the two.) The disillusionment, disenchantment, and as it is usually called today, the push toward greater human freedoms which gave us imperialism and capitalism along with social liberation, came at a certain cost: that there is meaning in things, people, events, the passage of time, is no longer a given. Each season of the year no longer brings back to life the sentiments and memories and forces which the enchanted worldview embedded in the season; people’s very sense of time does not partake in an order that transcends them. Proust speaks, in his novel, of the sense of being “out of time” when his involuntary memory creates a bridge between the present and the past: in the enchanted world this bridge that lifts you beyond time does not occur twelve or thirteen times in your life, it is (albeit often cloudedly) everpresent.

Taylor, our contemporary, has benefited from Benjamin’s work on this great change; he uses Benjamin’s term for the disenchanted sense of time – “homogeneous, empty time” – throughout his book. But while Benjamin, in his piece, works backward to 1850 and gestures toward what came before, Taylor begins at 1500 and works forward. By putting the two side by side, we see that the conditions Benjamin observes in Baudelaire’s work and which he attributes for the most part to technological change, are embedded in a longer slower change whose origin was in the heart of the Church itself. What began as an elite movement or movements toward a Christianity purified of paganism, what continued for a while as a top down reinvention of the Church and reinterpretation of the scripture, was carried on and intensified by the wave of technologies which a new conception of nature and of the human role in it unleashed. Intellectual movements which replaced the porous soul with the bounded self, which thereby bled the world of God of its aura, became outpaced by 1850 by the technologies of mechanical reproducibility, transportation, and communication, to name a few, which had much the same effect. One is inclined to think today that the pace has only gotten quicker, and technology’s hand in it the more efficient. Which leaves us with the strange conclusion that the determinism so broadly feared and felt today is one that our precursors chose.

Benjamin, Walter. “Illuminations.” Translated by Harry Zohn, Shocken Books, 1968.

Burton, Richard. “Charles Baudelaire.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, September 27, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Baudelaire. Accessed 11 December 2018.

Gibson, Robert. “Paul Valéry.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, October 26, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Valery. Accessed 11 December 2018.

McLellan, David and Lewis Feuer. “Karl Marx.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, November 22, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Marx. Accessed 11 December 2018.

Painter, George. “Marcel Proust.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, November 14, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marcel-Proust. Accessed 11 December 2018.

Taylor, Charles, and Charles TAYLOR. A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=3300068.