Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
Baudelaire is distinctive in French literature also in that his skills as a prose writer virtually equal his ability as a poet. His body of work includes a novella, influential translations of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, highly perceptive criticism of contemporary art, provocative journal entries, and critical essays on a variety of subjects.
His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire’s work has had a tremendous influence on modernism, and his original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. More than a talent of 19th-century France, Baudelaire is one of the major figures in the literary history of the world.
Early life
Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on 9 April 1821, and baptized two months later at Saint-Sulpice Roman Catholic Church. His father, Joseph-François Baudelaire (1759–1827), a senior civil servant and amateur artist, who at 60, was 34 years older than Baudelaire’s 26-year-old mother, Caroline (née Dufaÿs) (1794–1871); she was his second wife.
Joseph-François died during Baudelaire’s childhood, at rue Hautefeuille, Paris, on 10 February 1827. The following year, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts.
Baudelaire’s biographers have often seen this as a crucial moment, considering that finding himself no longer the sole focus of his mother’s affection left him with a trauma, which goes some way to explaining the excesses later apparent in his life. He stated in a letter to her that, “There was in my childhood a period of passionate love for you.” Baudelaire regularly begged his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner.
Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded. At 14, he was described by a classmate as “much more refined and distinguished than any of our fellow pupils … we are bound to one another … by shared tastes and sympathies, the precocious love of fine works of literature.”
Baudelaire was erratic in his studies, at times diligent, at other times prone to “idleness”. Later, he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law, a popular course for those not yet decided on any particular career. He began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. He also began to run up debts, mostly for clothes.
Upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother “I don’t feel I have a vocation for anything.” His stepfather had in mind a career in law or diplomacy, but instead Baudelaire decided to embark upon a literary career. His mother later recalled: “Oh, what grief! If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather, his career would have been very different … He would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we should have been happier, all three of us.”
His stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India in 1841 in the hope of ending his dissolute habits. The trip provided strong impressions of the sea, sailing, and exotic ports, that he later employed in his poetry. Baudelaire later exaggerated his aborted trip to create a legend about his youthful travels and experiences, including “riding on elephants”.
On returning to the taverns of Paris, he began to compose some of the poems of “Les Fleurs du Mal”. At 21, he received a sizable inheritance but squandered much of it within a few years. His family obtained a decree to place his property in trust, which he resented bitterly, at one point arguing that allowing him to fail financially would have been the one sure way of teaching him to keep his finances in order.
Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender, going through much of his inheritance and allowance in a short period of time. During this time, Jeanne Duval, a Haitian born actress became his mistress. She was rejected by his family. His mother thought Duval a “Black Venus” who “tortured him in every way” and drained him of money at every opportunity. Baudelaire made a suicide attempt during this period.
He took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and wrote for a revolutionary newspaper. However, his interest in politics was passing, as he was later to note in his journals.
In the early 1850s, Baudelaire struggled with poor health, pressing debts, and irregular literary output. He often moved from one lodging to another to escape creditors. He undertook many projects that he was unable to complete, though he did finish translations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
Upon the death of his stepfather in 1857, Baudelaire received no mention in the will but he was heartened nonetheless that the division with his mother might now be mended. At 36, he wrote to her: “believe that I belong to you absolutely, and that I belong only to you.” His mother died on 16 August 1871, outliving her son by almost four years.
Publishing career
His first published work, under the pseudonym Baudelaire Dufaÿs, was his art review “Salon of 1845”, which attracted immediate attention for its boldness. Many of his critical opinions were novel in their time, including his championing of Delacroix, and some of his views seem remarkably in tune with the future theories of the Impressionist painters.
In 1846, Baudelaire wrote his second Salon review, gaining additional credibility as an advocate and critic of Romanticism. His continued support of Delacroix as the foremost Romantic artist gained widespread notice. The following year Baudelaire’s novella La Fanfarlo was published.
The Flowers of Evil
Baudelaire was a slow and very attentive worker. However, he often was sidetracked by indolence, emotional distress and illness, and it was not until 1857 that he published Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), his first and most famous volume of poems. Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes (Review of Two Worlds) in 1855, when they were published by Baudelaire’s friend Auguste Poulet-Malassis. Some of the poems had appeared as “fugitive verse” in various French magazines during the previous decade.
The poems found a small, yet appreciative audience. However, greater public attention was given to their subject matter. The effect on fellow artists was, as Théodore de Banville stated, “immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxious fear”. Gustave Flaubert, recently attacked in a similar fashion for Madame Bovary (and acquitted), was impressed and wrote to Baudelaire: “You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism…You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist.”
The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous for the period. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and wine. Notable in some poems is Baudelaire’s use of imagery of the sense of smell and of fragrances, which is used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.
The book, however, quickly became a byword for unwholesomeness among mainstream critics of the day. Some critics called a few of the poems “masterpieces of passion, art and poetry”, but other poems were deemed to merit no less than legal action to suppress them. J. Habas led the charge against Baudelaire, writing in Le Figaro: “Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid.” Baudelaire responded to the outcry in a prophetic letter to his mother:
“You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people. Moreover, since I was terrified myself of the horror that I should inspire, I cut out a third from the proofs. They deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don’t care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron.”
Baudelaire, his publisher and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals. They were fined, but Baudelaire was not imprisoned. Six of the poems were suppressed, but printed later as Les Épaves (The Wrecks) (Brussels, 1866). Another edition of Les Fleurs du mal, without these poems, but with considerable additions, appeared in 1861. Many notables rallied behind Baudelaire and condemned the sentence. Victor Hugo wrote to him: “Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars…I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might.” Baudelaire did not appeal the judgment, but his fine was reduced. Nearly 100 years later, on 11 May 1949, Baudelaire was vindicated, the judgment officially reversed, and the six banned poems reinstated in France.
In the poem “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”) that prefaces Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire accuses his readers of hypocrisy and of being as guilty of sins and lies as the poet:
… If rape or arson, poison or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life—
It is because we are not bold enough!
(Roy Campbell’s translation)
L’Albatros appears in the 1861 second edition of Les Fleurs du mal. It was inspired by a sea voyage to Bourbon Island (now Réunion) that Baudelaire took with his stepfather at the age of 20. The poet was forced to go on the trip as punishment for squandering his father’s inheritance and despised the experience. Nevertheless, the trip did influence much of his work.
Final years
Baudelaire next worked on a translation and adaptation of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Other works in the years that followed included Petits Poèmes en prose (Small Prose poems); a series of art reviews published in the Pays, Exposition universelle (Country, World Fair); studies on Gustave Flaubert (in L’Artiste, 18 October 1857); on Théophile Gautier (Revue contemporaine, September 1858); various articles contributed to Eugène Crépet’s Poètes français; Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch (French poets; Artificial Paradises: opium and hashish) (1860); and Un Dernier Chapitre de l’histoire des oeuvres de Balzac (A Final Chapter of the history of works of Balzac) (1880), originally an article “Comment on paye ses dettes quand on a du génie” (“How one pays one’s debts when one has genius”), in which his criticism turns against his friends Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval.
For Baudelaire, the love of Beauty and sensual love are two specific examples of man’s capacity for original sin. In Les Fleurs du mal Beauty is a compelling but often terrible phenomenon described in terms of hard, lifeless matter. He doesn’t just treat Beauty as an abstract phenomenon, but also writes about individual women.
Baudelaire’a three love cycles reflect his experiences with three different women – Duval, Daubrun and Mme Sabatier. Discussions of his love poems are often organized around the poems associated with each woman. It is not always clear; however, which poem are associated with whom.
Jeanne Duval was a mixed-race person and a sometime actress who, according to Baudelaire, didn’t understand and in fact undermined his poetry and whose attraction was powerfully physical. Baudelaire met Duval in the early 1840s and lived with her periodically, but by the late 1840s he was writing to his mother that life with her had become a duty and a torment. Nonetheless, it was not until 1856 that they broke up; the rupture was at her instigation, and even afterward Baudelaire continued to support her financially: as usual, his was not the conventional response to a situation.
Baudelaire’s relations with Marie Daubrun were less extended. She was a blonde, Rubenesque actress who seems never seriously to have reciprocated Baudelaire’s fascination for her. Baudelaire had met her in the late 1840s or early 1850s but probably did not become intimately involved with her until around 1854. Their sporadic connection ended when Marie left Baudelaire to go back to Theodore de Banville.
Apollonie Sabatier represented a different sort of attraction from that of Jeanne and Marie. She was a model and the mistress of various men, one of whom left her a stipend that secured her independence. Her position as an independent woman who had a history with men placed her in the demimonde, the “half-world” that is neither part of “le monde”, the world of social acceptability and prominence, nor part of the underworld of prostitutes. She was much admired as a tasteful, witty and intelligent woman.
On the one hand he experienced animal love and a sense of duty with Jeanne; on the other hand, he felt platonic love for Mme Sabatier and jet he betrayed her. His relations with women were far from entirely pleasant.
By 1859, his illnesses, his long-term use of laudanum, his life of stress, and his poverty had taken a toll and Baudelaire had aged noticeably. But at last, his mother relented and agreed to let him live with her for a while at Honfleur. Baudelaire was productive and at peace in the seaside town, his poem Le Voyage being one example of his efforts during that time. In 1860, he became an ardent supporter of Richard Wagner.
His financial difficulties increased again, however, particularly after his publisher Poulet Malassis went bankrupt in 1861. In 1864, he left Paris for Belgium, partly in the hope of selling the rights to his works and to give lectures. His long-standing relationship with Jeanne Duval continued on-and-off, and he helped her to the end of his life.
Baudelaire’s relationships with actress Marie Daubrun and with courtesan Apollonie Sabatier, though the source of much inspiration, never produced any lasting satisfaction. He smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess.
Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed. After more than a year of aphasia, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church. The last year of his life was spent in a semi-paralyzed state in various “maisons de santé” in Brussels and in Paris, where he died on 31 August 1867. His funeral was held at the Saint-Honoré d’Eylau church, with a few dozen persons in attendance. Baudelaire is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.
Many of Baudelaire’s philosophical proclamations were considered scandalous and intentionally provocative in his time. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, drawing criticism and outrage from many quarters. Along with Poe, Baudelaire named the arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre as his maître à penser and adopted increasingly aristocratic views. In his journals, he wrote:
“There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. […] There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.”
Influence and legacy
Baudelaire’s influence on the direction of modern French (and English) language literature was considerable. The most significant French writers to come after him were generous with tributes; four years after his death, Arthur Rimbaud praised him in a letter as “the king of poets, a true God”.] In 1895, Stéphane Mallarmé published “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire”, a sonnet in Baudelaire’s memory. Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, stated that, along with Alfred de Vigny, Baudelaire was “the greatest poet of the nineteenth century”.
In the English-speaking world, Edmund Wilson credited Baudelaire as providing an initial impetus for the Symbolist movement by virtue of his translations of Poe. In 1930, T. S. Eliot, while asserting that Baudelaire had not yet received a “just appreciation” even in France, claimed that the poet had “great genius” and asserted that his “technical mastery which can hardly be overpraised … has made his verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own language”. In a lecture delivered in French on “Edgar Allan Poe and France” (Edgar Poe et la France) in Aix-en-Provence in April 1948, Eliot stated that “I am an English poet of American origin who learnt his art under the aegis of Baudelaire and the Baudelairian lineage of poets.” Eliot also alluded to Baudelaire’s poetry directly in his own poetry. For example, he quoted the last line of Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur” in the last line of Section I of The Waste Land.
At the same time that Eliot was affirming Baudelaire’s importance from a broadly conservative and explicitly Christian viewpoint, left-wing critics such as Wilson and Walter Benjamin were able to do so from a dramatically different perspective. Benjamin translated Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens into German and published a major essay on translation as the foreword.
In the late 1930s, Benjamin used Baudelaire as a starting point and focus for Das Passagenwerk, his monumental attempt at a materialist assessment of 19th-century culture. For Benjamin, Baudelaire’s importance lay in his anatomies of the crowd, of the city and of modernity. He says that, in Les Fleurs du mal, “the specific devaluation of the world of things, as manifested in the commodity, is the foundation of Baudelaire’s allegorical intention.”
François Porché published a poetry collection called Charles Baudelaire: Poetry Collection in memory of Baudelaire.
The novel A Singular Conspiracy (1974) by Barry Perowne is a fictional treatment of the unaccounted period in Edgar Allan Poe’s life from January to May 1844, in which (among other things) Poe becomes involved with a young Baudelaire in a plot to expose Baudelaires’ stepfather to blackmail, to free up Baudelaires’ patrimony.
Vanderbilt University has “assembled one of the world’s most comprehensive research collections on … Baudelaire”.
Works
- Salon de 1845, 1845
- Salon de 1846, 1846
- La Fanfarlo, 1847
- Les Fleurs du mal, 1857
- Les paradis artificiels, 1860
- Réflexions sur Quelques-uns de mes Contemporains, 1861
- Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, 1863
- Curiosités Esthétiques, 1868
- L’art romantique, 1868
- Le Spleen de Paris, 1869. Paris Spleen (Contra Mundum Press: 2021)
- Translations from Charles Baudelaire, 1869 (Early English translation of several of Baudelaire’s poems, by Richard Herne Shepherd)
- Œuvres Posthumes et Correspondance Générale, 1887–1907
- Fusées, 1897
- Mon Cœur Mis à Nu, 1897. My Heart Laid Bare & Other Texts (Contra Mundum Press: 2017; 2020)
- Œuvres Complètes, 1922–53 (19 vols.)
- Mirror of Art, 1955
- The Essence of Laughter, 1956
- Curiosités Esthétiques, 1962
- The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1964
- Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, 1964
- Arts in Paris 1845–1862, 1965
- Selected Writings on Art and Artists, 1972
- Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire, 1986
- Twenty Prose Poems, 1988
- Critique d’art; Critique musicale, 1992
- Belgium Stripped Bare (Contra Mundum Press: 2019)
L’Albatros
Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!
Musical adaptations
- Henri Duparc: “L’Invitation au voyage” (1870) and “La vie antérieure” (1884)
- Claude Debussy: Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire (1890)
- Léo Ferré: Les Fleurs du mal (1957), Léo Ferré chante Baudelaire (1967), and the posthumous Les Fleurs du mal (suite et fin) (2008)
- Serge Gainsbourg: “Baudelaire” (1962)
- Ruth White: Flowers of Evil (1969)
- Diamanda Galás: The Litanies of Satan (1982)
- Gérard Pape: La Tristesse de la lune (1986)
- The Cure: “How Beautiful You Are” (1987, on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me)
- Marc Almond: “Abel And Cain (Abel et Cain)” and “Remorse of the Dead (Remords posthume)” (1993, on Absinthe)
- Mark-Anthony Turnage: Two Baudelaire Songs (2003–04)
- Alcest: “Élévation” (2005, on Le Secret)
- Amesoeurs: “Recueillement” (2009, on Amesoeurs)
- Rotting Christ: “Les litanies de Satan” (2016, on Rituals)
- Pierre Lapointe: “Le serpent qui danse” (2022, on L’heure mauve)
- Mandy, Indiana: “Mosaick” and “The Driving Rain (18)” (2023, on I’ve Seen a Way)