Charles Baudelaire Biography and List of Works

One of the greatest French poets of the 19th century, who formed with Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine the so-called Decadents. Baudelaire was the first to equate modern, artificial, and decadent. In LE PEINTRE DE LA VIE MODERNE (1863) Baudelaire argued in favour of artificiality, stating that vice is natural in that it is selfish, while virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. The snobbish aesthete, the dandy, was for Baudelaire the ultimate hero and the best proof of an absolutely purposeless existence. He is a gentleman who never becomes vulgar and always preserves the cool smile of the stoic.

"There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself."
(from Mon Coeur Mis À Nu, 1897)

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris. He studied at the Collège Royal, Lyon (1832-36) and Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris (1936-39), from where he was expelled. His intention from an early age was to live by writing, but still he enrolled as a law student in 1840 at the École de Droit. Probably at this time he became addicted to opium. He also contracted syphilis, which turned out to be lethal. During this period Baudelaire fell heavily into debt; he never finished his law studies.

"There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill to create."
(from Mon Coeur Mis À Nu)

In 1841 Baudelaire was sent on a voyage to India, but he stopped off at Mauritius. On his return to Paris in 1842, Baudelaire met Jeanne Duval, a woman of mixed race, who became his mistress and inspiration for his poem 'Black Venus'. From 1842 Baudelaire lived on his inheritance from his father. Two years later Baudelaire was deprived, by law, of control over this income by the Counseil Judicaire.

In the late 1840s Baudelaire became involved in politics. He fought at the barricades during the revolution of 1848 and in the same year he also co-founded the journal Le Salut Public. He was associated with Proudhon and opposed the coup d'état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1851. After this tumultuous period, Baudelaire remained aloof from politics and adopted an increasingly reactionary attitude. In the 1850s he was involved with Marie Daubrun (1854-55) and Apollonie Sabatier (1857).

Baudelaire published his first novel, the autobiographical LA FANFARIO in 1847. From 1852 to 1865 he was occupied in translating Edgar Allan Poe's writings. When his LES FLEURS DU MAL appeared in 1857 all involved - author, publisher, and printer - were prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy. "Hypocrite reader - my double - my brother!" In the work Baudelaire set mental games and perverse pleasures against a squalid urban backdrop. For Baudelaire, love was the essence of the forbidden, the fall of man, the loss of innocence - "faire l'amour, c'est faire le mal", he wrote. But love is also the highest pleasure, doing evil intentionally is a source of lust. He felt sympathy for the prostitute, who revolts against the bourgeois family.

The remaining years of Baudelaire's life were darkened by despair and financial difficulties. He returned to Paris in 1864 from an extended stay in Brussels and stayed in a sanatorium. He died in Paris of aphasiac and hemiplagiac on August 31, 1867, in his mother's arms.

Although Baudelaire is chiefly known from his poems, his critical essays have also the gained attention of researchers. His essays on art have been published under the collective title CURIOSITÉS ESTHÉTIQUES, and those on literature and music under the title L'ART ROMANTIQUE. Baudelaire's starting point for his aesthetic analysis was the lived experience, not principles of aesthetics or abstract preconceptions about the beautiful. He was impressed by Wagner's music, enthusiastic of Poe and fascinated by the suggestiveness of caricatures. As a subjective idealist, he was unsympathetic to Courbet and to developments in French landscape painting that would lead to impressionism. This was seen in his negative attitude towards Édouard Manet (1832-83), whose works also were frequently rejected by the salon jury. However, Manet found a defender from his friend Émile Zola.

LA BEAUTÉ

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, òu chacun s'est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poête un amour
Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.

Je trône dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris;
J'unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes;
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes;
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.

Les poêtes, devant mes grandes attitudes,
Que j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amant,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:
Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!

For further reading: Baudelaire the Critic by Margaret Gilman (1943); Baudelaire by Enid Starkie (1957), The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830-1900 by Alfred Edward Carter (1958); Baudelaire by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (1989); Charles Baudelaire Revisited by Lois Boe Hyslop (1992); Baudelaire by Joanna Richardson (1994) - See also: Joris Karl Huysmans, Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey.

Books by Charles Baudelaire