Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic and translator, and one of the figures usually credited with launching modern poetry. He worked in the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote in French, and remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand Symbolism and Decadence. His lasting importance lies in giving a name to the fleeting experience of urban life and in arguing that art should try to capture it.

He was born in Paris in 1821 into a comfortably off family. His father, a civil servant who also painted, died in 1827, when Charles was five. His mother soon remarried Jacques Aupick, a soldier who would rise to general and serve as a diplomat. Baudelaire never got on with his stepfather, and the feeling of losing his mother's exclusive attention shaped much of his adult life. He studied in Lyon and at the Louis-le-Grand lycée in Paris, where he proved restless and hard to discipline. After a spell studying law and a life of bohemian drifting, his family sent him on a voyage towards India in 1841. The journey ended at Mauritius, and he returned to France without reaching his destination. The sea, the ports and the exotic scenes he glimpsed later found their way into his poetry.

Back in Paris he fell into a life of debt, excess and a turbulent relationship with Jeanne Duval, who inspired some of his most intense poems. He took part in the revolution of 1848 and wrote for a radical newspaper, though his interest in politics did not last. He first attracted notice as an art critic with his review of the Salon of 1845, which championed Delacroix. He also wrote a short novel, La Fanfarlo (1847), his only sustained work of fiction, and devoted much of his energy to translating Edgar Allan Poe, whose French versions are still widely read.

His major book, Les Fleurs du mal, appeared in 1857 and caused a scandal. Its subjects were sex, death, melancholy and the corrupt city, handled with precise language and carefully controlled verse. Its publication led to a prosecution for offending public morals; he was fined, and six poems were ordered removed, although a revised edition with new poems followed in 1861. Around the same time he began the prose poems, which were published in full in 1869, after his death. He also wrote Artificial Paradises, a study of hashish and opium influenced by Thomas De Quincey, and art essays such as The Painter of Modern Life, which focused on the illustrator Constantin Guys.

His final years were marked by hardship. He lived in Brussels from 1864 to 1866, trying and failing to earn a living by giving lectures. Syphilis brought progressive paralysis and aphasia; he suffered a seizure in a church in Namur in 1866 and died in Paris in August 1867. He was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. His legacy is considerable. He is regarded as one of the fathers of modern poetry, and his notion of modernity as something fleeting shaped Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and much later criticism.