Abstract
The dreams and images of an age are mythical transfigurations of its contradictions, conflicts and lacerations: Baudelaire’s Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, is the dream of modernity. The text shows how Walter Benjamin interprets the dream in order to awaken consciousness: awakening the present means saving that potential of destruction and of redemption buried beneath the ruins of modernity. The awakening, which illuminates a new conception of history, is not a return to the past but rather a unique way to access the present, a time that Benjamin calls Jetztzeit.