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 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.
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