War & Peace Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire doesn’t build a moral hierarchy here so much as a pantheon of dangerous vocations. Priest, soldier, poet: three roles that claim authority over the deepest human thresholds - meaning, death, and imagination. The line is blunt enough to sound like a manifesto, but its real charge is the way it compresses entire institutions into verbs: to know, to kill, to create. Respect is earned not by virtue, but by proximity to ultimate powers.

The priest “knows” in the old sense: he polices mystery, interprets suffering, names sin and salvation. It’s not gentle knowledge; it’s an administrative knowledge that organizes a community’s fear. The soldier “kills” with state permission, making violence not a breakdown of order but one of its tools. Baudelaire’s cynicism flickers here: modern society may pretend to be guided by reason, but it still runs on consecration and coercion.

Then he crowns the poet as the equal of those two. That’s the provocation. To “create” isn’t a hobby; it’s an intervention in reality, a rival form of priestly interpretation and military force. In mid-19th-century France - with revolution in living memory, censorship in the air, and bourgeois respectability tightening its grip - Baudelaire frames the artist as someone who doesn’t merely describe the world but competes with the powers that define it.

The subtext is admiration laced with dread: these are the three figures who can reorder your inner life. Everyone else, in Baudelaire’s cold accounting, just manages the furniture.