Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August
31, 1867) was one of the most influential French
poets of the nineteenth Century. He was also an
important critic and translator.

Life and work

Baudelaire was born in Paris. His father, who was
a senior civil servant and an amateur artist, died
in 1827, and in the following year his mother
married a lieutenant colonel named Aupick, who
later became a French ambassador to various
courts. Baudelaire was educated in Lyon and at the
Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. On gaining his
degree in 1839 he decided to embark upon a
literary career, and for the next two years led a
somewhat irregular life. It is believed he
contracted syphilis about this time. To straighten
him out, his guardians, in 1841, sent him on a
voyage to India. When he returned to Paris, after
less than a year\'s absence, he was of age; but in
a year or two his extravagance threatened to
exhaust his small inheritance, and his family
obtained a decree to place his property in trust.


His art reviews of 1845 and 1846 attracted
immediate attention for the boldness with which he
propounded his views: many of his critical
opinions were novel in their time, but have since
been generally accepted. He took part with the
revolutionaries in 1848, and for some years was
interested in republican politics, but his
permanent convictions were aristocratic and
Catholic. Baudelaire was a slow and fastidious
worker, and it was not until 1857 that he produced
his first and most famous volume of poems, Les
fleurs du mal. Some of these had already appeared
in the Revue des deux mondes, when they were
published by Baudelaire\'s friend Auguste Poulet
Malassis, who had inherited a printing business at
Alencon. The poems found a small but appreciative
audience, but greater public attention was given
to their subject matter. The principal themes of
sex and death were considered scandalous, and the
book became a by-word for unwholesomeness among
mainstream critics of the day. Baudelaire, his
publisher, and the printer were successfully
prosecuted for creating an offense against public
morals. In the poem \"Au lecteur\" (\"To the
Reader\") that prefaces Les fleurs du mal,
Baudelaire accuses his readers of hypocrisy and of
being as guilty of sins and lies as the poet:

    ... If rape or arson, poison, or the knife
    Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
    Of this drab canvas we accept as life—
    It is because we are not bold enough!

        (Roy Campbell\'s translation)

Six of the poems were suppressed, but printed
later as Les Epaves (Brussels, 1866). Another
edition of Les fleurs du mal, without these poems,
but with considerable additions, appeared in
1861.

His other works include Petits Poèmes en prose; a
series of art reviews published in the Pays,
Exposition universelle; studies on Gustave
Flaubert (in Lartisge, October 18, 1857); on
Théophile Gautier (Revue contemporaine, September,
1858); various articles contributed to Eugene
Crepet\'s Poètes francais; Les Paradis
artificiels: opium et haschisch (1860); and Un
Dernier Chapitre de l\'histoire des oeuvres de
Balzac (1880), originally an article entitled
\"Comment on paye ses dettes quand on a du
génie\", in which his criticism turns against his
friends Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and
Gerard de Nerval.

Baudelaire had learned English in his childhood,
and Gothic novels, such as Lewis\'s The Monk,
became some of his favorite reading matter. In
1846 and 1847 he became acquainted with the works
of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he found tales and
poems which had, he claimed, long existed in his
own brain, but had never taken shape. From this
time till 1865 he was largely occupied with his
translated versions of Poe\'s works, which were
widely praised. These were published as Histoires
extraordinaires (1852), Nouvelles histoires
extraordinaires (1857), Aventures d\'Arthur Gordon
Pym (see The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym),
Eureka, and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses
(1865). Two essays on Poe are to be found in his
Oeuvres complètes (vols. v. and vi.).

Meanwhile his financial difficulties increased,
particularly after his publisher Poulet Malassis
went bankrupt in 1861, and in 1864 he left Paris
for Belgium, partly in the hope of selling the
rights to his works. For many years he had a
long-standing relationship with a Mulatto woman,
whom he helped to the end of his life. He had
recourse to opium, and in Brussels he began to
drink to excess. Paralysis followed, and the last
two years of his life were spent in \"maisons de
santé\" in Brussels and in Paris, where he died on
August 31, 1867. Many of his works were published
posthumously.

He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse,
Paris.


Influence

Baudelaire is one of the most famous decadent
poets, but before the 20th century, when his work
underwent considerable re-evaluation, he was
generally considered by many to be merely a drug
addict and a very vulgar author.


Bibliography

    * Salon de 1845, 1845
    * Salon de 1846, 1846
    * La Fanfario, 1847
    * Les fleurs du mal, 1857
    * Les paradis artificiels, 1860
    * Réflexions sur Quelques-uns de mes
Contemporains, 1861
    * Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, 1863
    * Curiosités Esthétiques, 1868
    * L\'art romantique, 1868
    * Le Spleen de Paris/Petits Poémes en Prose,
1869
    * Oeuvres Posthumes et Correspondance
Générale, 1887-1907
    * Fusées, 1897
    * Mon Coeur Mis à Nu, 1897
    * Oeuvres Complètes, 1922-53 (19 vols.)
    * Mirror of Art, 1955
    * The Essence of Laughter, 1956
    * Curiosités Esthétiques, 1962
    * The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays,
1964
    * Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, 1964
    * Arts in Paris 1845-1862, 1965
    * Selected Writings on Art and Artist, 1972
    * Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire,
1986
    * Critique d\'art; Critique musicale, 1992