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What is lacking in Peter Gay's account of modern art is a serious effort (or any effort) to explain that maniacal anti-bourgeoisie hatred which Baudelaire and, especially, Flaubert injected into modernism’s bloodstream. It was a hatred all the more ridiculous, and all the more dangerous, because it took the form of masochism: its artistic adherents being, after all, bourgeois themselves. Not a single aristocrat or prole in the entire bunch. Save for this obvious masochistic element, the emotion thus generated did not differ from Der Stürmer's subsequent loathing of Jews, or from Stalin’s eventual cheery talk of “exterminating the kulaks as a class.” Fortunately, mere historical accidents—of the kind that Marxists, with their infantile determinism, suppose to be impossible—prevented Baudelaire and Flaubert, at least, from acting on their own hate’s implications. http://www.takimag.com/1065/