Charles Baudelaire

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Charles Pierre Baudelaire (9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet who also performed important work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Les Fleurs du mal, his most popular book of lyric poetry, explores the changing appearance of beauty in Paris during the mid-19th century.

Baudelaire's highly original prose-poetry style influenced a whole generation of writers, including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, among other poets.

He is credited with coining the word "modernity" (modernité) to describe the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in a metropolitan metropolis, as well as the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.

Early life

Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on 9 April 1821, and baptized at Saint-Sulpice Roman Catholic Church two months later. Joseph-François Baudelaire (1759-1827), a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was 34 years older than Baudelaire's mother, Caroline (née Dufa) (1794–1871). Joseph-François died in Baudelaire's youth at rue Hautefeuille, Paris, on February 10, 1827. Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts in the following year. Baudelaire's biographers have often thought this was a crucial time, considering that being no longer the sole focus of his mother's love left him with a traumatic disorder, which helps to explain the excesses that are later apparent in his life. "There was a period of intense affection for you" in my childhood, he wrote to her. Throughout his career, Baudelaire consistently begged his mother for money, with some even announcing that a lucrative publishing deal or journalistic commission was just around the corner.

Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded. He was praised and distinguished by a classmate at 14 years old, "much more refined and distinguished than any of our classmates"; we are linked to one another...by shared tastes and sympathies, the precocious love of fine literature has developed." Baudelaire was erratic in his studies, at times diligent, but then again prone to "idleness." He continued his studies at the Lycée Louis-Grand in Paris, learning law, a common course for those who haven't decided on a particular career. He began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. He also started accruing debts, mainly for clothes. "I don't feel I have a calling for anything" after earning his degree in 1839, he told his brother, "I don't feel I have a calling for something." Baudelaire's stepfather had a dream of either legislating or diplomacy, but instead, he embarked on a literary career. Later, his mother remembered: "Oh, what pain!" Charles may have wanted to be guided by his stepfather, but it would not have left a mark in literature, but we should have been happier, all three of us."

In 1841, his stepfather brought him on a trip to Calcutta, India, in the hopes of halting his dissolute habits. Strong impressions of the sea, sailing, and exotic ports that he later used in his poetry were shared during his trip. (Baudelaire later exaggerated his aborted trip to create a legend about his youth travels and adventures, including "riding on elephants." On his return to the taverns of Paris, he began to write some of "Les Fleurs du Mal"'s poems. He had a substantial inheritance at 21, but squandered a significant amount of it in a few years. His family got a law putting his house in trust, which he resent bitterly at one point, arguing that allowing him to fail financially would have been the only sure way to teach him to maintain his finances in order.

Baudelaire became known as a dandy and free-spender in artistic circles, going through a substantial portion of his inheritance and allowance in a short span of time. Jeanne Duval became his mistress during this period. He was rejected by his family. Duval's mother regarded him as a "Black Venus" who "tortured him in every way" and drained him of money at every opportunity. Baudelaire attempted suicide during this time.

He was active in the 1848 Revolutions and wrote for a socialist journal. However, his political interest was fading, as he later discovered in his journals.

Baudelaire suffered with inadequate health, looming debt, and uneven literary output in the early 1850s. He went from one lodging to another in order to avoid creditors. He took on several tasks that he was unable to complete, but he did finish translating Edgar Allan Poe's stories.

Baudelaire was given no mention in the will after his stepfather's death in 1857, but he was also delighted that the son's secrecy could now be mended. "I believe that I belong to you absolutely, and that I belong solely to you," he wrote to her at 36 years old. His mother died on August 16, 1871, outliving her son by nearly four years.

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Publishing career

His first published work under the pseudonym Baudelaire Dufa's name was his art review "Salon of 1845," which attracted immediate notice for its boldness. Many of his critical views were novel in their day, including his support for Delacroix, and some of his views seem to be in accordance with Impressionist painters' future theories.

Baudelaire wrote his second Salon study in 1846, gaining more traction as an advocate and critic of Romanticism. Delacroix's continued support as the leading Romantic artist has attracted acclaim. The novella La Fanfarlo by Baudelaire was published in the following year.

Baudelaire was a slow and highly attentive worker. However, he was often distracted by indolence, emotional distress, and sickness, and it wasn't until 1857 that he published Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), his first and most popular collection of poems. Any of these poems appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes (Review of Two Worlds), published in 1855 by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis. Several of the poems had appeared in various French journals during the previous decade.

The poems were received by a small yet devoted audience. However, greater public interest was paid to their subject matter. Théodore de Banville described the effect on fellow artists as "impressive, prosperious, triumphant, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxiety." Gustave Flaubert, who was recently attacked in a similar fashion as Madame Bovary (and later dismissed), was inspired and wrote to Baudelaire: "You have found a way to revive Romanticism...You are as unyielding as marble and penetrating as an English mist."

For the time, the key themes of sex and death were considered scandalous. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the city's graft, corruption, mistrust, the oppressiveness of living, and wine. Baudelaire's use of imagery of the sense of smell and fragrances in some poems is particularly notable, and it is used to induce feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.

The novel, on the other hand, became a byword for unwholesomeness among mainstream critics of the day. Some commentators referred to a few of the poems as "masterpieces of passion, art, and poetry," but others' poems were deemed to be more important than court action to ban them. In Le Figaro, J. Habas led the charge against Baudelaire: "Everything in it, including spying, is incomprehensible," says Le Figaro: "Everything in it is putrid." In a prophetic letter to his mother, Baudelaire responded to the outcry by writing a letter.

Baudelaire, his publisher, and the printer were successfully charged with making a crime against public morals. They were fined, but Baudelaire was not detained. Six of the poems were banned, but Les Épaves (The Wrecks) was published later in 1866 (Brussels, 1866). Les Fleurs du mal is another version of the Les Fleurs du mal, but with significant additions in 1861. Many celebrities rallied behind Baudelaire and condemned the punishment. "Your fleurs du mal shine and glisten like stars, and I applaud your vivacious spirit with all my might," Victor Hugo wrote to him. Baudelaire did not appeal the decision, but his fine was reduced. Baudelaire was restored nearly 100 years later, on May 11, 1949, the court was officially reversed, and the six banned poems were reinstated in France.

Baudelaire's poem "Au lecteur" ("To the Reader"), which prefaces Les Fleurs du mal, accuses his followers of hypocrisy and of being as guilty of sins and lies as the poet:

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