French Literature · 1 books
Charles Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821, in Paris, and died on August 31, 1867, in Paris, in the nursing home where he had spent the last months of his life unable to speak, paralyzed by the consequences of the syphilis and the general physical deterioration that had been destroying him for years. He was forty-six years old. The single collection of poetry he published in his lifetime, Les Fleurs du mal — first published in 1857, immediately prosecuted, six poems suppressed by court order, and subsequently revised and expanded — is now recognized as one of the foundational texts of modern poetry in any language, the work that opened the door through which Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and eventually the entire Symbolist tradition walked.
His father, François Baudelaire, died when Charles was six years old. His mother, Caroline Dufaÿs, remarried quickly — within a year — and her second husband was the career officer Jacques Aupick, who would eventually rise to the rank of general and become the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and then to Spain. Baudelaire’s relationship with his stepfather was permanently hostile. He found in Aupick everything he most disliked: authority, military regularity, bourgeois confidence, the expectation of a respectable career. The resentment was mutual and lifelong.
He attended school in Lyon and then in Paris, where he was an intelligent and literate student who was eventually expelled — the precise circumstances are unclear — and who passed his baccalaureate in 1839. His stepfather tried to manage his life. Baudelaire resisted. Concerned about the young man’s associates and habits, Aupick arranged to send him on a sea voyage to India in 1841; Baudelaire did not complete the voyage, disembarking at the island of Réunion and returning to France. But the voyage gave him experiences and images — the sea, tropical light, specific flora and fauna — that appear throughout his poetry.
On reaching twenty-one he came into his father’s inheritance. He began spending on an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, on art, on clothes — he cultivated the dandy style with deliberate precision — and on the life of a literary man. Within a few years his family became alarmed enough at the rate of expenditure to have him placed under legal guardianship, which meant that for the rest of his life he received his income in limited installments through a notaire rather than controlling it directly. This arrangement was both a practical irritant and an enduring humiliation.
His primary relationship was with Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born actress and dancer whom he met around 1842 and with whom he maintained an on-and-off connection for most of his adult life. She appears in his poetry — as the “Black Venus” of the cycle of poems addressed to her — in terms that are complex, sensual, and in their treatment of race and desire, representative of attitudes that belong to their time and that present difficulties for contemporary readers. He also had significant relationships with the actress Marie Daubrun and with the society woman Apollonie Sabatier, the “White Venus” of another cycle of poems.
His working life was that of a literary journalist and critic as well as a poet. He wrote art criticism of genuine importance — his essays on the Salon exhibitions of 1845 and 1846, and his essay The Painter of Modern Life, published in 1863, which introduced the idea of the flâneur and argued that the experience of modern urban life was itself a proper subject of serious art — remain influential. He translated the complete prose fiction of Edgar Allan Poe into French, a project that occupied him from the 1850s into the 1860s; his translations are considered major literary works in their own right, and they shaped the French reception of Poe profoundly.
Les Fleurs du mal presented, in verse of formal control that his critics acknowledged even when they prosecuted him, a world saturated with beauty and corruption, spleen and idealism, the sacred and the profane — often simultaneously. The famous opening poem invites the reader into the complicity of the enterprise: you who read this, you recognize what I am describing. The collection moved through the registers of erotic desire, religious aspiration, spiritual ennui, and the particular quality of Paris — the city Baudelaire saw as the supreme subject of modern poetry, with its crowds, its prostitutes, its sunsets, its pervasive sense of time passing and beauty decaying.
He died on August 31, 1867. He was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, in the tomb of his mother and General Aupick.
His influence is measurable. Without Baudelaire there is no French Symbolism; without French Symbolism there is no Anglo-American modernist poetry; without those movements, the entire shape of twentieth-century literature is different. He understood that modernity — the specific experience of living in cities, in time, in a world without stable religious foundations — required a new kind of poetry, and he wrote it.
The prosecution of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 was one of the more instructive overreactions in literary history: the six poems ordered suppressed were the poems dealing most explicitly with erotic subject matter, and the court’s action ensured that the collection received attention that it might otherwise have taken years to accumulate. Baudelaire contested the suppression and argued, unsuccessfully, that the poems in question were morally serious rather than pornographic. The suppressed poems were not legally restored in France until 1949. They are now among the most anthologized in the French tradition. The case illustrates, with unusual precision, how institutions that suppress art tend to reveal more about their own anxieties than about the work they are targeting.
At Classics Retold, we have published new translations of Baudelaire’s major work in editions designed to bring his formal precision and his thematic range into English with the same seriousness he brought to the French. These translations offer contemporary readers access to one of the writers who most changed what poetry was understood to be.
