The life and work of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) must be viewed against the historical background of the crushing failure of the Paris revolution of 1848, in which soldiers massacred three thousand workers. In the elections that followed this unsuccessful working-class uprising, which Baudelaire and his fellow artists supported, the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine received 18,000 votes, while Louis Napoleon received fifteen million. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, it was an historical moment when ‘the extra-parliamentary masses of the bourgeoisie’ called upon the regime of the Second Empire ‘to destroy their speaking and writing segment, their politicians and literati’ in the interests of ‘strong government’. The new materialism of what Eric Hobsbawm terms The Age of Capital had little use for the Romantic role of the artist as ‘unacknowledged legislator’: scientific ‘progress’, economic determinants, and consumption become the ruling values of the modern world.