Charles Baudelaire: life, literary works and death

We explain who Charles Baudelaire was, what his main literary works were and why he was the greatest of the “damned poets” of 19th century France.

Baudelaire wrote several important collections of poetry, such as The flowers of Evil.

Who was Charles Baudelaire?

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet and essayistconsidered the most important author of the European symbolist movement and the most famous of the “damned poets” of 19th century France, as they were called by the poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). He is also considered the initiator of modernity in Western poetry.

Celebrated by his contemporaries, Baudelaire was also a prominent literary translator and art criticwhose work had a strong influence on later authors. His Short poems in prosefor example, was one of the most innovative literary experiments of the time. His collection of poems was also very famous The flowers of Evilcensored at the time for being considered contrary to morality and good customs.

Baudelaire’s work has been studied by important critics and philosophers, such as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), George Bataille (1897-1962) and Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), among others.

Birth and youth of Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire Born in Paris on April 9, 1821the only son of the former seminarian and drawing teacher Joseph-François Baudelaire and his second wife, Caroline Dufaÿs. His father was also an amateur painter and poet, and it was he who introduced young Charles to art during his early years.

In February 1827, Charles’s father passed away.The child and his mother lived alone for 18 months on the outskirts of Paris until Caroline married the French military man Jacques Aupick (1789-1857).

In 1831, Aupick was sent to Lyon, where Charles began his formal education at the Collège Royal. Five years later, the family returned to Paris and Charles entered the prestigious boarding school Lycée Louis-le-Grand, until his expulsion in 1839 due to disciplinary reasons. The following year, however, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law.

At that time he began to experiment with his first verses and to frequent the Parisian bohemian scene in the Latin Quarter.There he made his first literary friends: Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) and even Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). He frequented bars and brothels and also contracted syphilis, which would eventually kill him at the age of forty-six.

With the idea of ​​removing his stepson from this environment, Aupick decided to send him on a trip to India in 1841, but Charles abandoned the ship on the island of Mauritius and returned to France in February of the following year. The trip, however, served to expand his poetic imagination and provide him with new and exotic references. One of his first and most famous poems, “The Albatross,” was written at that time..

Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval

Painted here by Édouard Manet, Jeanne Duval was Baudelaire’s greatest muse.

Back in France, At the age of twenty-one, Baudelaire returned to artistic and bohemian circlesand met Jeanne Duval (c. 1820-c. 1862), a French actress and dancer originally from Haiti, with whom he began a passionate love affair. It is often said that she was the only woman Baudelaire loved as much or more than his own mother.

Duval, moreover, was not only his lover, but also his muse. Baudelaire dedicated numerous poems to her in which he called her “lover of lovers” and “black Venus”, and made her the symbol of dangerous beauty and sexuality.Some of these poems are “The Balcony”, “The Hair”, “Even So Unsatisfied” and “The Dancing Snake”.

Duval and Baudelaire were together for almost 20 yearseven when she began to lose her sight, probably due to syphilis. There are portraits of Duval made by painters who were friends of Baudelaire, such as Baudelaire’s reclining loverby Édouard Manet (1832-1883). The poet himself drew it on several occasions.

In 1842, Baudelaire received his father’s inheritance, estimated at around 100,000 gold francs, a small fortune.In just two years the poet spent half of the money on liquor, extravagant meals, books, prostitutes and works of art, and was also a frequent victim of moneylenders and swindlers.

Until his mother, alarmed by such extravagance, decided to place the inheritance under the guardianship of a judicial notary, which marked the beginning of a period of conflict between Charles and her. Baudelaire was declared legally incapable of managing himself and was assigned a maintenance allowance that was not enough to pay his debts and maintain his lifestyle.

Tensions between Baudelaire and his family worsened over the next few years, until In 1846 the poet completely broke off relations with his stepfather, whom he had been referring to for some time as “the general”During these years, on the other hand, he composed most of his literary work and published his first writings on art.

The flowers of Evil

Baudelaire’s most famous book of poems first appeared in 1857.

Between 1842 and 1846, Baudelaire announced the imminent appearance of two collections of poems: “Les lesbiennes” and “L’immbo”none of which ever materialized into book form. It was, however, his art reviews of the Salons of 1845 and 1846 that earned him a place in the Parisian cultural circuit. In them he outlined his own theory of painting, in which he urged artists to depict “the heroism of modern life.”

On the other hand, in 1847, he published a short novel entitled The Fanfarlowhose protagonist, Samuel Cramer, was a sort of alter ego. And, that same year, he discovered the works of the American Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), with whom he felt a deep identification. From then on, he devoted himself to translating Poe’s works into French, a task to which he devoted practically the rest of his life.. Between 1848 and 1865 his French versions of Extraordinary stories, The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym and Eurekaamong others, accompanied by a critical introduction by Baudelaire.

In 1848, the poet took part in the Parisian insurrection that deposed Louis Philippe I (1773-1850). According to uncorroborated sources, he was seen brandishing a pistol and urging the mob to lynch General Aupick, who was then director of the École Polytechnique in Paris. He also took part in the resistance against the 1851 self-coup of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873).

During the 1850s, Baudelaire had affairs with Apollonie Sabatier, an upper-class courtesan, and the actress Marie Daubrun, and he dedicated several poems to both of them. His first set of published poems, on the other hand, appeared in 1855 in the literary magazine Review of the Two Worlds: 18 texts organized under the title of The flowers of Evil.

Two years later, his collection of poems of the same name, the most famous of his works, was published and immediately censored for being considered contrary to the morals and good customs of the time. Six poems from the book were banned and Baudelaire had to face trial, where he was fined. Censorship of The flowers of Evil It began the legend of Baudelaire as a pornographic and perverted poet, and remained legally protected until 1949.

The publishing failure of his collection of poems was a hard blow for Baudelaire. Although he produced several of his masterpieces in the following years, very few were republished in book form.

Baudelaire’s final years

Baudelaire published his last texts in the 1860s. Portrait of Paul Nadar.

In 1857, Baudelaire’s mother was widowed again and moved with the poet to Honfleur, on the estuary of the Seine River. At that time, Baudelaire dedicated himself to the composition of some of his most celebrated poems, such as “The Swan” or “The Voyage”and a couple of years later to some of his most provocative essays on art: “Salon of 1859” and “The Painter of Modern Life”.

Another set of essays by Baudelaire was published in 1860: Artificial paradiseswhose texts had appeared in the magazine Contemporary ReviewIn this book, Baudelaire also pays tribute to the English writer Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) and his books Confessions of an English Opium Addict (1821) and Suspiria de profundis (1845).

The following year it was reissued The flowers of Evilthis time with thirty-five unpublished poemswhile some of his works appeared in several magazines Short poems in prosethe entirety of which was published posthumously in 1869. However, things were not going well for Baudelaire at the time: in 1861 he tried in vain to obtain a position at the Académie française, and in 1862 his publisher declared bankruptcy. In addition, his muse, Jeanne Duval, died that year.

In 1864, the poet undertook a trip to Belgium, hoping to convince foreign publishers to publish his work. He resided in Brussels for two years, During this time he gave a few lectures and suffered the first attacks of syphilis, which he had been suffering from for many years.In 1865 he suffered a stroke and in 1866 he had a stroke in front of the Church of Saint Loup in the city of Namur.

Death and legacy of Baudelaire

Baudelaire’s grave is located in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Back in Paris, Baudelaire succumbed to syphilis and was hospitalized. He lost his speech, but remained lucid during the year he spent in a nursing home, until his death on August 31, 1867.He was 46 years old.

He was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, next to his stepfather’s grave, and in November of that year his literary properties, including unpublished texts, were auctioned off. His books soon ceased to be printed.

Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s figure was immortalized after his death in various works by Édouard Manet and in photographs taken by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820-1910). Moreover, the symbolist poets of the new generation, many of whom attended his funeral, already considered him the father of modern poetry. At the beginning of the 20th century, Baudelaire was one of the key authors of the French 19th century..

Most of Baudelaire’s works, however, were published posthumously. In 1869 his Short poems in prose (also called Spleen of Paris)in 1872 its Intimate diaries and it was not until 1939 that the first…