BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES

BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES (1821–1867), French poet.

Charles Baudelaire's short life spanned only the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Born in Paris on 9 April 1821, he was five years old when his father died and not yet seven when his mother was remarried to Jacques Aupick, a military officer who eventually became a general, an ambassador, and a senator. Having envisioned a diplomatic career for his stepson, Aupick opposed Baudelaire's vocation for literature and put a stop to his bohemian student years by sending him on a voyage to India in 1841. But Baudelaire so resented this exile from Paris that he interrupted the trip at the island of Reunion and returned home several months earlier than planned. Upon inheriting his father's fortune in 1842, Baudelaire plunged into an extravagant life as a dandy among artists and writers until his mother, appalled to find nearly half his inheritance spent in just two

years, appointed a legal guardian to manage his affairs. Baudelaire remained under this humiliating guardianship for the rest of his life, perennially unable to live within his means and given to begging frequent loans from his mother. His health progressively deteriorated, undermined throughout the 1850s by the syphilis he had contracted in 1839 as well as by his use of alcohol and laudanum. In 1864, Baudelaire went to Belgium in an unsuccessful attempt to earn an income from public lectures and to find a publisher for his collected works. He was still living in Brussels when, in the spring of 1866, he suffered a stroke that resulted in aphasia and partial paralysis. His mother brought him back to Paris, where he died on 31 August 1867.

Although Baudelaire was known within French literary circles, he did not achieve widespread celebrity during his lifetime. His posthumous fame grew steadily, however. Both a reasonably complete edition of his works and a fairly reliable biography appeared within a few years of his death; among others, symbolist authors of the 1880s and surrealist writers of the 1920s recognized him as a major precursor. Paul Valéry emphasized in 1924 that Baudelaire was one of very few French poets to attain genuinely international stature, and his reputation has never diminished.

poet

Baudelaire is principally admired today for Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil), the sole volume of poetry that he authored. Although he began writing poems for it in the early 1840s, the collection was not published until June 1857. Within two weeks, it was first attacked in the press for its alleged immorality, then denounced by government censors as an affront to public decency. When the case was tried a month later, the court condemned Baudelaire to pay a fine and suppress six of the poems. In 1861, he published a second edition of Les fleurs du mal; originally composed of one hundred poems grouped into five sections, it now included 126 poems divided into six sections ("Spleen and Ideal," "Parisian Scenes," "Wine," "Flowers of Evil," "Revolt," "Death"). Following Baudelaire's claim during the trial that the book's meaning and moral implications were implicit in its structure as a whole rather than explicit in individual poems or sections, various scholars have debated the possibility of discovering what Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly posited in 1857 as its "secret architecture."

From the mid-1850s on, Baudelaire also composed and published short texts that he described as poetry in prose, a genre he did much to found. A group of twenty prose poems appeared in 1862 in La Presse, together with a preface dedicating them to his friend Arsène Houssaye, the journal's literary director, and linking them to the complex rhythms of modernity in "enormous cities." Baudelaire intended eventually to prepare a larger collection of prose poems as a counterpart to Les fleurs du mal, but this project remained unfinished at his death. The fifty poems in prose now collected under the title Le Spleen de Paris (Paris spleen) were first published together among Baudelaire's posthumous complete works in 1869.

translator

By far the most immediately lucrative of Baudelaire's literary endeavors—and those most appreciated by his contemporaries—were his translations of works by Edgar Allan Poe, whose reputation Baudelaire established in France. He discovered "The Black Cat" in 1847 and started translating Poe's short stories, poems, and essays for literary reviews the following year. His collected translations later appeared in five volumes: Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary stories) in 1856, with five more editions issued by 1870; Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (New extraordinary stories) in 1857, with three more editions by 1865; Les Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym (The adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym) in 1858; Eurêka in 1863; and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (Grotesque and solemn stories) in 1865. In addition to his work on Poe, Baudelaire made a free, elaborately glossed translation of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of a English Opium Eater, publishing this as part of the book Les paradis artificiels (Artificial paradises) in 1860.

critic, essayist, and autobiographer

Although he began composing poems early in his life, Baudelaire actually launched his career in letters as an art critic; his first substantial publications were reviews of the Salons of 1845 and 1846, both of which—like his subsequent reviews of the 1855 Exposition Universelle and the 1859 Salon—were notable for their eloquent praise of Eugène Delacroix. His art criticism culminated with a ground-breaking exploration of the esthetics of modernism in "Le peintre de la vie moderne" (The painter of modern life, 1863). Baudelaire showed equal acumen for scrutinizing other contemporary figures, and his critical corpus includes important essays on Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Wagner. His impulsion toward self-scrutiny first appeared in La Fanfarlo (Fanfarlo), the 1847 novella whose main character resembles the young Baudelaire, and critical introspection also provided part of the impetus for the extensive reflections on substance use and abuse (wine, hashish, and opium) that he published between 1851 and 1860. Beginning in 1859, Baudelaire made notes toward a series of autobiographical projects entitled "Fusées" (Rockets), "Mon Cœur mis à nu" (My heart laid bare), and "Pauvre Belgique!" (Poor Belgium!), but he was unable to complete any of them before his death.

Baudelaire's works have been widely read, taught, glossed, and translated since the late nineteenth century. They continue to stimulate much interest, particularly in their reflections on urban life, their inquiry into the dynamics of memory, and their stringent questioning of the ties between ethics and esthetics in modern art.

See alsoAvant-Garde; Flâneur; Paris; Symbolism.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Claude Pichois. 2 vols. Paris, 1983–1985.

Baudelaire, Charles. Correspondance. Edited by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler. 2 vols. Paris, 1973.

Secondary Sources

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London, 1997. Translation of Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (1955). Celebrated study of relations between Baudelaire's work and social conditions in nineteenth-century Paris.

Lloyd, Rosemary. Baudelaire's World. Ithaca, N.Y., 2002. A thoughtful, highly readable discussion of the main themes running through Baudelaire's writing, together with helpful reflections on reading Baudelaire's poetry in translation.

Pichois, Claude. Baudelaire. Additional research by Jean Ziegler. Translated by Graham Robb. London, 1989. Translation of Baudelaire (1987). An excellent biography, comprehensive and scrupulously researched.

Valéry, Paul. "Situation de Baudelaire." In Oeuvres by Paul Valéry, edited by Jean Hytier. Vol. 1, pp. 598–613. Paris, 1957. Presented as a lecture in 1924, this essay was the first to analyze Baudelaire's rise to the status of a canonical author.

Margaret Miner