This edition compiles all of Walter Benjamin's writings on Charles Baudelaire, a key figure in the work of the German thinker. For Benjamin, Baudelaire is the main protagonist of the "modern" theater, through whose figure, like a prism, shines a network of Benjaminian concepts-metaphors that reveal the characteristics of 19th-century culture: the flâneur, allegory, spleen, bohemia, the prostitute, the bourgeois, fashion, the crowd, and so on.

It is in the series of essays on Baudelaire that Benjamin formulates the key ideas of his own cultural-historical anthropology, which has had a significant impact on contemporary understandings of culture.