The French Revolution brought in its wake not merely a far more fluid society than that which preceded it, but also a radically different image of the self. Under the pervasive influence of Enlightenment thinkers on the one hand, and Rousseau on the other, individuals began to define themselves not so much in terms of national or social position but with regard to smaller family units, emphasising less inherited class than acquired wealth and position. Poetry reflected that radical swing towards the appreciation of individual values, resulting in an outpouring of highly personal poetry, which explored feelings and emphasised the importance and uniqueness of each human being. But the Revolution transformed poetry in other more formal ways. The concept of what language was fitting for poetry had gradually led to a stultification of the genre, a highly limited vocabulary, and forms of speech that were now held to be inadequate, not merely to express the range of emotions that were central to individual experience, but also to convey the unprecedented changes in material life, as the Industrial Revolution began to transform what had been until then a largely rural society. The red beret that revolutionaries had sported was now to be placed on the dictionary, with poets enhancing their word hoards from a wide variety of sources, and bringing together, in clashing but liberating juxtaposition, high and low registers, the language of the universities and that of the streets.

Criticism, for Baudelaire, whether of art, music or literature, was at its best when it was amusing, poetic and impassioned, and when it was driven by an urgent intellectual desire to deduce the reasons that justify the emotion these arts aroused (OC II 127). That emotion was at times so intense as to provoke a physical reaction: thus, recalling the first time he read the works of the poet, novelist and critic Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire asserts that his admiration for Gautier's skill was strong enough to create in him a kind of nervous convulsion (OC II 118). Finding a way of understanding that reaction, and conveying it in writing, dominates much of his criticism, giving it its particular savour and edge.

Indeed, to understand those reactions and to represent a work well, Baudelaire asserts in an article published in 1851, you need to get inside its skin. This expression, which he puts in italics to signify its novelty, had recently been created by an actor explaining his technique for conveying characters (OC II 1094). It is typical of Baudelaire's interest in the modern and his ability to transfer concepts created for one genre to another different genre that he seizes with such energy and acumen on this term from the theatre. In his literary criticism, Baudelaire constantly attempts to get inside the skin of the work he is reviewing, devoting considerable intellectual energy to analysing the writings of his contemporaries, not merely the well known, like Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier, but also lesser-known figures such as the worker poet, Pierre Dupont, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, whose Elégies (1819) was the first volume of Romantic poetry published in France.

Writing to Louis de Cormenin in June of 1844, the twenty-two-year-old Flaubert sketches an ideal society of 'good lads, all men of letters, living together and gathering two or three times a week to eat a good meal washed down with a good wine, while savouring some succulent poet' ['bons garçons, tous gens d'art, vivant ensemble et se réunissant deux ou trois fois par semaine pour manger un bon morceau arrosé d'un bon vin, tout en dégustant quelque succulent poète' (Cor. i 209)]. Friendship, the pleasures of the table, the delights of conversation, above all talk devoted to literature: these are all central to Flaubert's personality, all the more important for someone who chose to lead an existence that was primarily solitary. These are also the motifs that run through his correspondence like brightly coloured threads, even when the general fabric grows dark with the pessimism of his later years.

While the eighteenth century allowed a considerable degree of intellectual freedom to women in the upper echelons of society, the Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath mushroomed forth a series of depictions of the Republic, symbolized by woman as devouring virago, driving young men into the destruction of conflict and war. Intimately connected with such iconography, the removal of women's suffrage, in 1793, remains a potent symbol of just what fraternité can mean. The puritanism of Napoleon's public ethics used the changing iconography of the times in an attempt to restrict women to roles connected with children, the Church and the kitchen. The Napoleonic code of 1805 formalized the dichotomy between masculine public space and female private space, assigning to women the legal and metaphorical role of minors in the new society, controlling the way they dressed and the kinds of work they could do. Typical of this restriction of women's freedom was the suppression of the 1792 divorce law in 1816: divorce would not be made legal again until 1884. Adultery was punishable by imprisonment, with the female offender technically liable to remain incarcerated for as long as the husband wanted. As the century progressed and as women came to be seen as possessing a powerful role as consumers in an increasingly industrialized state, their intellectual and physical freedoms went through various revolutions reflected in a wide range of genres.