Charles-Pierre Baudelaire - The Painter of Modern Life

1. Seneca On the Shortness of Life
2. Marcus Aurelius Meditations
3. St Augustine Confessions of a Sinner
4. Thomas Kempis The Inner Life
5. Niccol Machiavelli The Prince
6. Michel de Montaigne On Friendship
7. Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract
9. Edward Gibbon The Christians and the Fall of Rome
10. Thomas Paine Common Sense
11. Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
12. William Hazlitt On the Pleasure of Hating
13. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto
14. Arthur Schopenhauer On the Suffering of the World
15. John Ruskin On Art and Life
16. Charles Darwin On Natural Selection
17. Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am So Wise
18. Virginia Woolf A Room of Ones Own
19. Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents
20. George Orwell Why I Write
21. Confucius The First Ten Books
22. Sun-tzu The Art of War
23. Plato The Symposium
24. Lucretius Sensation and Sex
25. Cicero An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
26. The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job
27. Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan
28. Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies
29. Baldesar Castiglione How to Achieve True Greatness
30. Francis Bacon Of Empire
31. Thomas Hobbes Of Man
32. Sir Thomas Browne Urne-Burial
33. Voltaire Miracles and Idolatry
34. David Hume On Suicide
35. Carl von Clausewitz On the Nature of War
36. Sren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling
37. Henry David Thoreau Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
38. Thorstein Veblen Conspicuous Consumption
39. Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus
40. Hannah Arendt Eichmann and the Holocaust
41. Plutarch In Consolation to his Wife
42. Robert Burton Some Anatomies of Melancholy
43. Blaise Pascal Human Happiness
44. Adam Smith The Invisible Hand
45. Edmund Burke The Evils of Revolution
46. Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature
47. Sren Kierkegaard The Sickness unto Death
48. John Ruskin The Lamp of Memory
49. Friedrich Nietzsche Man Alone with Himself
50. Leo Tolstoy A Confession
51. William Morris Useful Work v. Useless Toil
52. Frederick Jackson Turner The Significance of the Frontier in American History
53. Marcel Proust Days of Reading
54. Leon Trotsky An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
55. Sigmund Freud The Future of an Illusion
56. Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
57. George Orwell Books v. Cigarettes
58. Albert Camus The Fastidious Assassins
59. Frantz Fanon Concerning Violence
60. Michel Foucault The Spectacle of the Scaffold
61. Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching
62. Writings from the Zen Masters
63. Thomas More Utopia
64. Michel de Montaigne On Solitude
65. William Shakespeare On Power
66. John Locke Of the Abuse of Words
67. Samuel Johnson Consolation in the Face of Death
68. Immanuel Kant An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
69. Joseph de Maistre The Executioner
70. Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater
71. Arthur Schopenhauer The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion
72. Abraham Lincoln The Gettysburg Address
73. Karl Marx Revolution and War
74. Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Grand Inquisitor
75. William James On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
76. Robert Louis Stevenson An Apology for Idlers
77. W. E. B. Du Bois Of the Dawn of Freedom
78. Virginia Woolf Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
79. George Orwell Decline of the English Murder
80. John Berger Why Look at Animals?
81. Chuang Tzu The Tao of Nature
82. Epictetus Of Human Freedom
83. Niccol Machiavelli On Conspiracies
84. Ren Descartes Meditations
85. Giacomo Leopardi Dialogue Between Fashion and Death
86. John Stuart Mill On Liberty
87. Charles Darwin Hosts of Living Forms
88. Charles Dickens Night Walks
89. Charles Mackay Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions
90. Jacob Burckhardt The State as a Work of Art
91. George Eliot Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
92. Charles Baudelaire The Painter of Modern Life
93. Sigmund Freud The Wolfman
94. Theodor Herzl The Jewish State
95. Rabindranath Tagore Nationalism
96. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Imperialism
97. Winston Churchill We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End
98. Jorge Luis Borges The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise
99. George Orwell Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
100. Chinua Achebe An Image of Africa

In all social circles, and even in art circles, there are people who go to the Louvre, walk quickly past a large number of most interesting though secondary pictures, without throwing them so much as a look, and plant themselves, as though in a trance, in front of a Titian or a Raphael, one of those which the engravers art has particularly popularized; then they go out satisfied, as often as not saying to themselves: I know my gallery thoroughly. There are also people who, having once read Bossuet and Racine, think they have got the history of literature at their fingertips.

Happily from time to time knights errant step into the lists critics, art collectors, lovers of the arts, curious-minded idlers who assert that neither Raphael nor Racine has every secret, that minor poets have something to be said for them, substantial and delightful things to their credit, and finally that, however much we may like general beauty, which is expressed by the classical poets and artists, we nonetheless make a mistake to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance, the description of manners.

I am bound to admit that, for several years now, society has shown some improvement. The value that todays collectors attach to the delightful engraved and coloured trifles of the last century shows that a reaction has begun in the direction needed by the public; Debucourt, the Saint-Aubins and many others have achieved mention in the dictionary of artists worthy of study. But these represent the past, whereas my purpose at this moment is to discuss the painting of our contemporary social scene. The past is interesting, not only because of the beauty that the artists for whom it was the present were able to extract from it, but also as past, for its historical value. The same applies to the present. The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

I have here in front of me a series of fashion plates, the earliest dating from the Revolution, the most recent from the Consulate or thereabouts. These costumes, which many thoughtless people, the sort of people who are grave without true gravity, find highly amusing, have a double kind of charm, artistic and historical. They are very often beautiful and wittily drawn, but what to me is at least as important, and what I am glad to find in all or nearly all of them, is the moral attitude and the aesthetic value of the time. The idea of beauty that man creates for himself affects his whole attire, ruffles or stiffens his coat, gives curves or straight lines to his gestures and even, in process of time, subtly penetrates the very features of his face. Man comes in the end to look like his ideal image of himself. These engravings can be translated into beauty or ugliness: in ugliness they become caricatures; in beauty, antique statues.