 Benjamin’s thinking of ‘the modern’ [die Moderne] is his most important theoretical contribution to the historical study of cultural forms. Frequently mistranslated in early English-language editions of his writings as ‘modernism’, and still often rendered as ‘modernity’ (although Benjamin tended to retain Baudelaire’s coinage, la modernité, when making that reference), die Moderne designates both a formal temporal structure and the diverse range of its historical instances—past and present. Baudelaire is the main writer through whom Benjamin thought ‘the modern’; not as might be expected, with reference to the canonical account of modernité in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1859/60), but with regard to what Benjamin called the ‘theory’ of the modern first set down in ‘The Salon of 1845’: “the advent of the true new (die Heraufkunft des wahrhaft Neunen)” (SW 4, 45–6, translation amended; GS 1.2, 580). 