​In this veritable full-scale examination of every aspect of life in Belgium, Baudelaire’s perspectival eye catches a world in a glance. The poet’s plethora of notes and vast collection of related newspaper clippings (summarized within) reveal to us the inner workings of his mind, what Blake called the artist’s Infernal workshop. 
 
Belgium Stripped Bare is an aesthetico-diagnostic litany of often vitriolic observations whose victory is found in the act of analysis itself, in the intoxication of diagnosis, just as great comedians exult in caustic and biting observations of society, a slap in the face of the status quo.