Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire's father died in February of 1827. Baudelaire and his mother lived together on the outskirts of Paris from this point. In writing to her in 1861, referring to this time, he wrote "I was forever alive in you; you were solely and completely mine." This time together ended when Caroline married a career soldier named Jacques Aupick, who rose to the postion of General and later served as French embassador to the Ottoman Empire and Spain before becoming a senator under the Second Empire.



Baudelaire began his education at the Collège Royal in Lyons when Aupick was posted there, transfering to the prestigious Lacèe Louis-le-grand when the family returned to Paris in 1836. It was during this time that Baudelaire began to show promise as a student and a writer. He bagan to write poems, which were not well received by his masters, who felt that was was an example of precocious depravity, adopting affections that they deemed unsuited to his age. Moods of intense melancholy also developed and Baudelaire began to see himself as being solitary by nature. In April 1839 he was expelled from school due to his consistant acts of indiscipline.



Eventually Baudelaire became a nominal student of law at the École de Droit. In reality, he was actually living a "free life" in the Lattin Quarter. Here he made his first contacts in the literary world, and also contracted the veneral disease that eventually took his life.



In an attempt to draw his stepson away from the company he was keeping, Aupick sent him on a voyage to India in June of 1841. Baudelaire jumped ship in Mauritius and eventually made his way back to France in February of 1842. The voyage and his exploits after jumping ship enriched his imagination, and brought a rich mixture of exotic images to his work.



Baudelaire received his inheritance in April 1842 and rapidly proceeded to dissipate it on the lifestyle of a dandified man of letters, spending freely on clothes, books, paintings, expensive food and wines, and, not least, hashish and opium, which he first experimented with in his Paris apartment at the Hôtel Pimodan (now the Hôtel Lauzun) on the Île Saint-Louis between 1843 and 1845. It was shortly after returning from the South Seas that Baudelaire met the mulatto woman known as Jeanne Duval, who, first as his mistress and then, after the mid-1850s, as his financial charge, was to dominate his life for the next 20 years. Jeanne would inspire Baudelaire's most anguished and sensual love poetry, her perfume and, above all, her magnificent flowing black hair provoking such masterpieces of the exotic-erotic imagination as "La Chevelure" ("The Head of Hair").



Baudelaire's continuing extravagance exhausted half his fortune in two years, and he also fell prey to cheats and moneylenders, thus laying the foundation for an accumulation of debt that would cripple him for the rest of his life. In September 1844 his family imposed on him a legal arrangement that restricted his access to his inheritance and effectively made of him a legal minor. The modest annual allowance henceforth granted him was insufficient to clear his debts, and the resulting state of permanently straitened finances led him to still greater emotional and financial dependence on his mother and also exacerbated his growing detestation of his stepfather. The agonizing moods of isolation and despair that Baudelaire had known in adolescence, and which he called his moods of "spleen," returned and became more frequent.



Baudelaire had returned from the South Seas in 1842 determined as never before to become a poet. From then until 1846 he probably composed the bulk of the poems that make up the first edition (1857) of Les Fleurs du mal He refrained from publishing them as separate texts, however, which suggests that from the outset he had in mind a coherent collection governed by a tight thematic architecture rather than a simple sequence of self-contained poems. In October 1845 he announced the imminent appearance of a collection entitled Les Lesbiennes ("The Lesbians"), followed, at intervals after 1848, by Les Limbes ("Limbo"), the stated goal of which was to "represent the agitations and melancholies of modern youth." Neither collection ever appeared in book form, however, and Baudelaire first established himself in the Parisian cultural milieu not as a poet but as an art critic with his reviews of the Salons of 1845 and 1846. Inspired by the example of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, he elaborated in his Salons a wide-ranging theory of modern painting, with painters being urged to celebrate and express the "heroism of modern life." In January 1847 Baudelaire published a novella entitled La Fanfarlo whose hero, or antihero, Samuel Cramer, is widely, if simplistically, seen as a self-portrait of the author as he agonizedly oscillates between desire for the maternal and respectable Madame de Cosmelly and the erotic actress-dancer of the title.



Thereafter little is heard of Baudelaire until February 1848, when he is widely reported to have participated in the riots that overthrew King Louis-Philippe and installed the Second Republic; one uncorroborated account has him brandishing a gun and urging the insurgents to shoot General Aupick, who was then director of the Ècole Polytechnique. Such stories have led some to dismiss Baudelaire's involvement in the revolutionary events of 1848-51 as mere rebelliousness on the part of a disaffected (and still unpublished) bourgeois poet. More recent studies suggest he had a serious commitment to a radical political viewpoint that probably resembled that of the socialist-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Baudelaire is reliably reported to have taken part both in the working-class uprising of June 1848 and in the resistance to the Bonapartist military coup of December 1851; the latter, he claimed shortly afterwards, ended his active interest in politics. Henceforth his focus would be exclusively on his writing.



In 1847 Baudelaire had discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Overwhelmed by what he saw as the almost preternatural similarities between the American writer's thought and temperament and his own, he embarked upon the task of translation that was to provide him with his most regular occupation and income for the rest of his life. His translation of Poe's Mesmeric Revelation appeared as early as July 1848, and thereafter translations appeared regularly in reviews before being collected in book form in Histoires extraordinaires (1856; "Extraordinary Tales") and Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (1857; "New Extraordinary Tales"), each preceded by an important critical introduction by Baudelaire. These were followed by Les Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym (1857), Eurèka (1864), and Histoires grotesques et sèrieuses (1865; "Grotesque and Serious Tales"). As translations these works are, at their best, classics of French prose, and Poe's example gave Baudelaire greater confidence in his own aesthetic theories and ideals of poetry. Baudelaire also began studying the work of the conservative theorist Joseph de Maistre, who, together with Poe, impelled his thought in an increasingly antinaturalist and antihumanist direction. From the mid-1850s Baudelaire would regard himself as a Roman Catholic, though his obsession with original sin and the Devil emained unaccompanied by faith in God's forgiveness and love, and his Christology was impoverished to the point of nonexistence.



Between 1852 and 1854 Baudelaire addressed a number of poems to Apollonie Sabatier, celebrating her, despite her reputation as a high-class courtesan, as his madonna and muse, and in 1854 he had a brief liaison with the actress Marie Daubrun. In the meantime Baudelaire's growing reputation as Poe's translator and as an art critic at last enabled him to publish some of his poems. In June 1855 the Revue des deux mondes published a sequence of 18 of his poems under the general title of Les Fleurs du mal. The poems, which Baudelaire had chosen for their original style and startling themes, brought him notoriety. The following year Baudelaire signed a contract with the publisher Poulet-Malassis for a full-length poetry collection to appear with that title.



When the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published in June 1857, 13 of its 100 poems were immediately arraigned for offences to religion or public morality. After a one-day trial on August 20, 1857, six of the poems were ordered to be removed from the book on the grounds of obscenity, with Baudelaire incurring a fine of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs. The six poems were first republished in Belgium in 1866 in the collection Les Èpaves ("Wreckage"), and the official ban on them would not be revoked until 1949. Owing largely to these circumstances, Les Fleurs du mal became a byword for depravity, morbidity, and obscenity, and the legend of Baudelaire as the doomed dissident and pornographic poet was born .



The failure of Les Fleurs du mal, from which he had expected so much, was a bitter blow to Baudelaire, and the remaining years of his life were darkened by a growing sense of failure, disillusionment, and despair. Shortly after his book's condemnation, he had a brief and apparently botched physical liaison with Apollonie Sabatier, followed, in late 1859, by an equally brief and unhappy reunion with Marie Daubrun. Although Baudelaire wrote some of his finest works in these years, few were published in book form. After publishing his earliest experiments in prose poetry, he set about preparing a second edition of Les Fleurs du mal.



In 1859, while living with his mother at Honfleur on the Seine River estuary, where she had retired after Aupick's death in 1857, Baudelaire produced in rapid succession a series of poetic masterpieces beginning with "Le Voyage" in January and culminating in what is widely regarded as his greatest single poem, "Le Cygne" ("The Swan"), in December. At the same time, he composed two of his most provocative essays in art criticism, the Salon de 1859 and Le Peintre de la vie moderne ("The Painter of Modern Life"). The latter essay, inspired by the draftsman Constantin Guys, is widely viewed as a prophetic statement of the main elements of the Impressionist vision and style a decade before the actual emergence of that school. The year 1860 saw the publication of Les Paradis artificiels, Baudelaire's translation of sections of the English essayist Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater accompanied by his own searching analysis and condemnation of drugs. In February 1861 a second, and greatly enlarged and improved, edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published by Poulet Malassis. Concurrently Baudelaire published important critical essays on Theophile Gautier (1859), Richard Wagner (1861), Victor Hugo and other contemporary poets (1862), and Delacroix (1863), all of which would be collected after his death in L'Art romantique (1869). The tantalizing autobiographical fragments entitled Fusèes ("Rockets") and Mon coeur mis à nu ("My Heart Laid Bare") also date from the 1850s and early '60s.



In 1861 Baudelaire made an ill-advised and unsuccessful attempt to gain election to the French Academy. In 1862 Poulet-Malassis was declared bankrupt; Baudelaire was involved in his publisher's failure, and his financial difficulties became desperate. By this time he was in a critical state both physically and psychologically, and feeling what he chillingly called "the wind of the wing of imbecility" pass over him. Abandoning verse poetry as his medium, Baudelaire now concentrated on writing prose poems, a sequence of 20 of which was published in La Presse in 1862. In April 1864 he left Paris for Brussels in the hope of persuading a Belgian publisher to publish his complete works. He would remain in Belgium, increasingly embittered and impoverished, until the summer of 1866, when, following a collapse in the Church of Saint-Loup at Namur, he was stricken with paralysis and aphasia from which he would never recover. Baudelaire died at age 46 in the Paris nursing home in which he had been confined for the last year of his life.



At the time of Baudelaire's death, many of his writings were unpublished and those that had been published were out of print. This was soon to change, however. The future leaders of the Symbolist movement who attended his funeral were already describing themselves as his followers, and by the 20th century he was widely recognized as one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century.



( information source: veinotte.com