• Born April 09, 1821 in Paris
• Died August 31, 1867 in Paris
• Country: France

Biography

Though Baudelaire himself produced very few works and was considerably more appreciated after his death than during his lifetime, he was one of the most significant influences in both England and France as a critic and an inspiration. He was one of the first to declare "l'Art pour l'Art," Art for Art's Sake, what was to become the primary tenet of the Aesthetic (and later the Decadent) movement and a distinct contradiction from the school of thought that art's purpose is to enlighten and improve individuals or society. Similarly, his combination of gritty realism and metaphor combined with symbols and patterns was adopted by the Symbolist movement. After the deaths of his parents while he was still young, he led a turbulent life, perhaps in reaction to their strict upbringing. He inherited his father's large fortune in 1842, but spent so much of it so extravagantly over the next two years that relatives were able to put the remaining capital in a trust, from which he received only an allowance. He supplemented this by writing art criticism and later by translating the works of Poe and de Quincy, whom he greatly admired. His first and strongly autobiographical novel La fanfarlo appeared in 1847 and was followed ten years later by his most famous work, the poetry collection Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil). The book's erotic contents, enhanced by its hedonistic amorality, resulted in a conviction of obscenity. Undaunted, he produced an expanded version in 1861 and later published a volume of prose poems, a new genre in France. He also continued to write articles, many of which were published after his premature death from venereal disease.

His more erotic poems have attracted many song composers, particularly Fauré, Debussy, Vierne, Sorabji, and Duparc in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Frans Vuursteen in the later twentieth. ~ Ann Feeney, All Music Guide

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The French author Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) was the poet of the modern metropolis and was one of the first great French precursors of the symbolists. He has also been recognized as one of the 19th century's finest art critics and translators.

Charles Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821, in Paris. His father, Joseph François Baudelaire, had been a friend of the philosophers C. A. Helvétius and A. N. de Condorcet and tutor to the young sons of the Duc de Choiseul Praslin. His mother, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays Baudelaire, was born in London in exile in 1793 and died at Honfleur in 1871. In February 1827, when Baudelaire was not yet 6, his father's death led to a period of very close intimacy with his mother, for whom the boy felt a passionate love. Her remarriage near the end of the following year to the handsome officer Jacques Aupick must have seemed to her son a cruel betrayal. Baudelaire's stepfather, a capable and resolute man, rose to the rank of general, was named minister to Turkey in 1848 and ambassador to Spain in 1851, and in 1853 became a senator. But his nature was different from Baudelaire's, and he took a very dim view of his stepson's desire to be a poet.

Baudelaire was expelled from the Lycée Louis le Grand in 1839 before receiving his baccalaureate degree, but he managed to obtain it later that year. He registered for legal studies in Paris and for a time led a dissipated, bohemian existence in the Latin Quarter, where he probably contracted syphilis, which later caused his death. He may also have begun taking opium and hashish during these years. In 1841 his worried parents arranged a sea voyage to India to draw the young poet out of his dissolute environment. His ship sailed from Bordeaux but was damaged in a storm, and Baudelaire apparently went no farther than the island of Mauritius, to the east of Madagascar. He returned home, however, with ineffaceable memories of exotic lands and seas.

When he was 21, Baudelaire inherited a modest fortune from his father's estate, but his extravagance soon led to the appointment of a legal guardian whose conscientious control of his finances drove the poet nearly to despair. A long affair with a multiracial woman who called herself Jeanne Duval added to his suffering, though she seems to have been the person, along with his mother, whom Baudelaire loved most in life. She was his "Black Venus" and the inspiration for some of his most beautiful and most despairing poems. Other women frequently celebrated in his verses were the voluptuous Madame Sabatier ("la Présidente") and green-eyed Marie Daubrun.

Baudelaire's significant early publications were two essays of art criticism (Le Salon de 1845 and Le Salon de 1846) and two volumes of translations from the tales of Poe in 1856 and 1857. At the end of June 1857 appeared Les Fleurs du mal, his greatest work, for which Baudelaire was tried for offenses against religion and public decency. He was found guilty of the second charge and sentenced to pay a fine of 300 francs and to remove six poems from his collection.

As the years passed, ill health and financial problems added to Baudelaire's miseries. In 1864 he went to Belgium to deliver a series of lectures that ended in dismal failure. He suffered further terrifying attacks of illness, and he began to pray - " to set out his sentinels for the night." In the midst of all this unhappiness he learned that Jeanne Duval might be going blind. Finally, in March 1866, he fell while visiting a church at Namur, Belgium, with friends. A few days later he was found dazed in a café and taken home, where he was later discovered paralyzed and aphasic. In July 1866 he was brought back to Paris and placed in a rest home. He died in his mother's arms on Aug. 31, 1867, and was buried 2 days later in the family vault in Montparnasse Cemetery, where a somber monument was unveiled to his memory in 1902.

Les Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire's most famous work is his collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal, whose title means both "Flowers of Evil" and "Flowers of Suffering." Baudelaire believed that original sin pervades man's world, and a sense of theological evil looms over his thought like a cloud. But he proclaimed suffering "a divine remedy for our impurities" and wrote that "it is one of the prodigious privileges of Art that… suffering put to rhythm and cadence may fill the mind with a calm joy."

The first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) contains only 100 poems, and the posthumous edition of 1868 suffers from having been put in order by friends after the poet's death. Thus the second edition of 1861 (the last arranged by Baudelaire's own hand) is most useful for a study of his art. It comprises an introductory poem, "To the Reader, " which is a powerful indictment of the current society, and 126 poems divided into six sections: Spleen and Ideal, Parisian Sketches, Wine, Fleurs du mal, Revolt, and Death.

Baudelaire's imagination and moral nature were deeply rooted in his Catholic background, and though his gloomy conception of humanity doomed by original sin is not alleviated by any assurance of salvation, it is important to recognize that Baudelaire does keep for man's spiritual nature a dimension of eternity. Love in Baudelaire's poetry, as elsewhere in his writings, is seen most often in dark and despairing terms, and many of his epithets for woman are extremely cruel. His grim vision of love is evident, for example, in the hideous imagery of the poem called Voyage à Cythère and in Sed non satiata.

Poems concerned with esthetics, such a Correspondances, Les Phares (The Lighthouses), La Beauté, L'Idéal, and Hymne à la Beauté, reveal Baudelaire's very complex ideas on the beautiful. While greatly influenced by the esthetic concepts of romanticism, Baudelaire also recalls significant elements in the great neoclassic writings of the 17th century in his concern with the moral, psychological, and religious aspects of man's nature, in his relatively small vocabulary, and in his powerfully compressed expression.

It is in his subject matter and the range of his sensibility that Baudelaire seems most modern. His poems on spleen and ennui bear the accent of his age; and his poetic imagery, with its marvelous interplay of the senses - for example, Correspondances and Harmonie du soir (Evening Harmony) - introduces a powerful new sensuousness into French poetry and gives a new literary importance to odors and fragrance which will be exploited later in the novels of Zola and Proust.

Baudelaire's vision of Paris in the 18 poems of the Parisian Sketches includes what he called "the heroism of modern life." His Paris is a city of physical and spiritual and moral suffering, and the eyes of the men and women in the poems depicting it are full of unrest and sorrow. But over the great city are skies that make one think of eternity; and there is mystery and enchantment amidst the suffering.

In Les Fleurs du mal there are recurrent dominant images of ennui, time, and death. The clock is seen as a sinister god, terrifying and impassive (L'Horloge), and time is ultimately the victor over man. The last poem in Les Fleurs du mal is Le Voyage, representing death as a voyage that may lead to "something new."

Other Writings

Baudelaire's writings on the "artificial paradises" of wine, opium, and hashish mirror his concerns as artist and moralist. In his most famous writing on drugs, Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch (1860), the opium essay is based on Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater but Le Poème du haschisch is Baudelaire's own. He knew from experience the hallucinations of both drugs and apparently suffered the miseries of addiction to opium. He concludes that man cannot, without terrible danger, alter "the primordial conditions of his existence" - if the artificial paradises enhance imagination, they destroy the "precious substance" of the will.

In the Petits poèmes en prose (1869), sometimes called Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire developed the prose poem into an exquisite form. The volume's 50 examples of this genre depict mostly a world of lonely people: old women, artists, children, workmen, crowds, widows, clowns, cold and perverted lovers - the poor and cynical and bored men and women of the great city. But again, beyond the suffering and misery, one finds Baudelaire's understanding of the strange "heroism of modern life."

Among Baudelaire's Journaux intimes (Intimate Diaries) the most notable are the two notebooks called Fusées (Skyrockets) and Mon coeur mis ànu (My Heart Laid Bare), a title that Baudelaire took from Poe. They contain invaluable insights into the poet's inner world - his intellectual, ethical, religious, and esthetic speculations and his comments on love and women, boredom, and material progress. There is constant evidence of Baudelaire's moral and intellectual elegance, of his dandyism, and of his violent antipathy to the society of his day; but above all, one is conscious in these pages of his inner distress - his fears and longings and his sense of the loneliness of the human situation.

Of Baudelaire's other volumes, the most significant are his translations from Poe: Histoires extraordinaires (1856), Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (1857), Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym (1858), Eureka (1864), and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (1865); his criticism of art, music and literature: Curiosités esthétiques (1868) and L'Art romantique (1869) and such miscellaneous writings as La Fanfarlo (1847); and his violent diatribes against Belgium and the Belgians, Amoenitates Belgicae (1925) and Pauvre Belgique (1952).

Further Reading

Among the most useful English translations of Baudelaire are William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (1954), and Francis Scarfe, Baudelaire (1961), both in English prose with bilingual texts, and Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr., Baudelaire as a Literary Critic: Selected Essays (1964) and Baudelaire, a Self-Portrait: Selected Letters … with a Running Commentary (1957). The best biography is Enid Starkie, Baudelaire (1958). Other valuable studies include W. T. Bandy, Baudelaire Judged by His Contemporaries (1933); Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire the Critic (1943); Percy Mansell Jones, Baudelaire (1952); Martin Turnell, Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry (1954); Marcel A. Ruff, Baudelaire (1955; trans., slightly abridged by Agnes Kertesz, 1966); Henri Peyre, ed., Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962); and Lois Boe Hyslop, ed., Baudelaire as a Love Poet and Other Essays (1969). An early study of unusual value is Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (1933; trans. 1949). Robert T. Cargo, Baudelaire Criticism, 1950-1967 (1968), provides a useful bibliography of scholarship with critical commentary.

For more information on Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, visit Britannica.com.

Baudelaire, Charles (Charles Pierre Baudelaire) (1821-67). French poet, art and literary critic, translator, and essayist. Following his father's death in 1827 and his mother's remarriage to Commandant (later General) Jacques Aupick in 1828, Baudelaire was educated at the Collège Royal de Lyon (1832-6) and the Collège Louis-le-Grand, from which he was expelled for indiscipline in 1839. He spent the next two years living what he later called a ‘vie libre’ in Paris, dissipating a good part of his paternal inheritance and making his first contacts in the literary-artistic milieu. An enforced voyage to Mauritius and Reunion (June 1841-February 1842) having failed to mend his ways, Baudelaire's access to what remained of his inheritance was restricted by the imposition of a conseil judiciaire in September 1844. By this time it seems likely that Baudelaire had written a substantial proportion of the poems that would later make up Les Fleurs du mal, most notably those inspired by Jeanne Duval, the mulatto (quarteronne) whom he seems to have met shortly after his return from the Indian Ocean.

It was not, however, as a poet that Baudelaire first attracted the attention of his contemporaries, but as the author of the novella La Fanfarlo (1847), whose central character, Samuel Cramer, is in large part a self-portrait, and of critical reviews of the Salons of 1845 and 1846. These, particularly in their enthusiastic defence of the work of Delacroix, placed Baudelaire in the forefront of mid-19th-c. critical thinking. During the Revolution of 1848 Baudelaire fought on the barricades in both the journées de février and the journées de juin [see Republics, 2]. In December 1851 he also took part in resistance to the military coup of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, and there seems little doubt that, at this stage of his career, Baudelaire was a dedicated left-wing republican.

Declaring himself to have been ‘physiquement dépolitiqué’ by the Bonapartist putsch, Baudelaire devoted much of the first half of the 1850s to translating the works of Poe, which he had first encountered in 1847. Published at regular intervals in reviews, the translations were collected in Histoires extraordinaires (1856) and Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (1857), each preceded by an important critical study by Baudelaire himself; further translations from Poe were published as Les Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym (1858), Eurêka (1863), and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (1865). In June 1855 Baudelaire published a sequence of 18 poems under the title Les Fleurs du mal in the Revue des deux mondes; some of the poems are inspired by Marie Daubrun, with whom Baudelaire had a liaison in 1854-5 (and again in 1859), and by Aglaé-Apollonie Sabatier, to whom he addressed a series of anonymous poems between 1852 and 1854, and with whom he had a brief, and apparently catastrophic, sexual relationship in 1857, shortly after the trial and condemnation of Les Fleurs du mal when it appeared in book form.

The publication, in August 1857, of six prose poems offered a foretaste of what would, in the 1860s, become Baudelaire's preferred literary form. In 1858-9 he returned to the subject of drug addiction that he had already treated in Du vin et du hachisch (1851), translating substantial parts of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater which, accompanied by a major essay (Le Poème du hachisch) and supporting commentary by Baudelaire, was published as Les Paradis artificiels in 1860.

The year 1859, most of the first half of which Baudelaire spent living with his recently widowed mother at Honfleur, was the most productive of the writer's later life, witnessing the composition, in rapid succession, of ‘Le Voyage’, ‘La Chevelure’, ‘Les Sept Vieillards’, ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, and, at the year's end, ‘Le Cygne’, as well as of the important study on Gautier, the Salon de 1859, and the first draft of the seminal essay on modern painting, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, published in 1863. The autobiographical notes collected under the titles Fusées and Mon cœur mis à nu also date from the late 1850s and early 1860s, as do the critical notices on contemporary poets which would be collected after his death in L'Art romantique (1869) under the title ‘Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains’. The same volume also contains the important essays ‘Richard Wagner et “Tannhäuser” à Paris’ (1861) and ‘L'Œuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix’ (1863).

After the publication of the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal in February 1861 Baudelaire wrote comparatively little verse poetry, and directed his efforts increasingly towards the writing of short prose texts—to call them ‘prose poems’ is, in many instances, misleading—which, after appearing in reviews during his lifetime, were published posthumously in book form under the title Petits poèmes en prose in 1869: Baudelaire's own title, Le Spleen de Paris, is greatly to be preferred. By the early 1860s Baudelaire's mental and physical health was in a critical state. A crise cérébrale in January 1860 was followed by a recrudescence in 1861 of the venereal infection from which he had suffered in the 1840s, and in January 1862 he felt what he chillingly called ‘le vent de l'aile de l'imbécillité’ pass over him. Having failed to gain election to the Académie Française in 1862 and beset, as ever, by financial problems, Baudelaire left Paris for Belgium in April 1864 to give a series of public readings from his work; apart from one brief visit to Paris and Honfleur he remained in Belgium for the next two years in search of material for his never-completed denunciation of the country and its people, Pauvre Belgique! In March 1866 he suffered a serious fall in the Église Saint-Loup at Namur, after which he was unable to speak or write. Brought back to Paris in July 1866, he spent the last year of his life in a Parisian nursing home.

Baudelaire occupies a pivotal position in the development of modern French writing, not just as the poet of Les Fleurs du mal, but as the proponent, in his critical writings, of a modern, and specifically urban, aesthetic based on what he called the ‘innombrables rapports’ and encounters of city life; Le Spleen de Paris may be seen as an actualization in words of the programme for painting elaborated in Le Peintre de la vie moderne. Baudelaire, wrote Laforgue, was the first poet to write of Paris ‘en damné quotidien de la capitale’; more than any other French poet of his time, he marks the transition from the romantic to a proto-modernist poetic style and stance, and his influence on subsequent poets, both French (notably Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Valéry) and foreign (Swinburne, Eliot, Rilke, and George amongst countless others), has been immense.

[Richard Burton]

Bibliography

• J.-P. Sartre, Baudelaire (1947)
• W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (tr. H. Zohn, 1973)
• C. Pichois and J. Ziegler, Baudelaire (1987)

(shärl bōdlâr') , 1821–67, French poet and critic. His poetry, classical in form, introduced symbolism (see symbolists) by establishing symbolic correspondences among sensory images (e.g., colors, sounds, scents). The only volume of his poems published in his lifetime, Les Fleurs du mal (1857, enlarged 1861, 1868; several Eng. tr., The Flowers of Evil), was publicly condemned as obscene, and six of the poems were suppressed. Later recognized as a masterpiece, the volume is especially remarkable for the brilliant phrasing, rhythm, and expressiveness of its lyrics. Baudelaire's erratic personality was marked by moodiness, rebelliousness, and an intense religious mysticism. His life was burdened with debts, misunderstanding, illness, and excesses, and his work unremittingly reflects inner despair. The main theme is the inseparable nature of beauty and corruption. A collection of poetic prose pieces was published posthumously as Petits poèmes en prose (1869). As poet and critic Baudelaire earned distinction in literary circles. Believing criticism to be a function of the poet, he wrote perceptive appraisals of his contemporaries. His criticism was collected posthumously in Curiosités esthétiques (1868) and L'Art romantique (1869). He felt a great affinity to Poe, whose works he translated and brought to the attention of the French public. One of the great figures of French literature, Baudelaire has also been a major influence in other Western poetry.

Bibliography

See his letters (tr. by S. Morini and F. Tuten, 1970), his intimate journal (tr. by C. Isherwood, 1947), and selected letters (tr. and ed. by L. B. and F. E. Hyslop, 1957); biography by E. Starkie (rev. ed. 1958), studies by J.-P. Sartre (1950, repr. 1972) and M. A. Ruff (1965).

IN BRIEF: n. - A French poet noted for macabre imagery and evocative language (1821-1867).

Quotes:

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."

"I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial."

"All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind."

"I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card."

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed."

"As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work."

See more famous quotes by Charles Baudelaire

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