This edition contains all of Walter Benjamin's texts on Charles Baudelaire, a key figure in the German thinker's work. For Benjamin, Baudelaire is the protagonist of the theater of modernism, through whose figure, as through a prism, shines a network of Benjaminian concepts and metaphors that reveal the characteristics of 19th-century culture: flâneur, allegory, spleen, bohemia, prostitute, bourgeois, fashion, crowd, and so on. It was in his series of essays on Baudelaire that Benjamin formulated the key ideas of his own cultural-historical anthropology, which has had a profound influence on modern understandings of culture.