"Romanticism," says Baudelaire, "is a grace, heavenly or infernal, to whom we owe eternal stigmas."These stigmatizations are evident in the work of many of the writers studied by Baudelaire throughout his twenty years of militant criticism. Activist criticism, indeed, and the part of controversy is great there. Criticism of current events, too, because it is about his contemporaries that the lucid and prophetic glance of the poet is manifested above all. His analysis, always penetrating and full of verva, manages to grasp the lasting importance of the works of Wagner, Flaubert, Hugo and Gautier, among other artists. If the value of a critic rests on his flair, on his discernment, to say the least, on his judgment, then Baudelaire critical did not equal in the nineteenth century.