Charles Baudelaire  

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"It is not necessary to demonstrate at length that Baudelaire was a degenerate subject. He died of general paralysis, after he had wallowed for months in the lowest depths of insanity. But even if no such horrible end had protected the diagnosis from all attack, there would be no doubt as to its accuracy, seeing that Baudelaire showed all the mental stigmata of degeneration during the whole of his life. He was at once a mystic and an erotomaniac, an eater of hashish and opium; he felt himself attracted in the characteristic fashion by other degenerate minds, mad or depraved, and appreciated, for example, above all authors, the gifted but mentally-deranged Edgar Poe, and the opium-eater Thomas de Quincey. He translated Poe's tales, and devoted to them an enthusiastic biography and critique, while from the Confessions of an Opium-Eater, by De Quincey, he compiled an exhaustive selection, to which he wrote extravagant annotations." --Degeneration, Max Nordau

"After spending long hours turning over a collection of bawdy prints, you fall into a great spell of melancholy" --Baudelaire

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Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet and art critic1 best-known for his collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal and his dark romanticism. He was also a translator, most notably of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He was romantically involved with Madame Sabatier and Jeanne Duval; and member of the Club des Hashischins.

He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (in Le peintre de la vie moderne) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.


Life and work

Baudelaire was born in Paris. His father, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, died early in Baudelaire's life in 1827. In the following year, his mother Caroline married a lieutenant colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various courts. Baudelaire was educated in Lyon and at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Upon 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 that he contracted syphilis during this period. In the hope of reforming him, his guardians, sent him on a voyage to India in 1841, although he never actually arrived there. When he returned to Paris, after less than a year's absence, he was of age; but within a couple of years his extravagance threatened to exhaust his small inheritance, and his family obtained a decree to place his property in trust. It was in this period that he met Jeanne Duval, who was to become his longest romantic association.

His art reviews of 1845 and 1846 attracted immediate attention for their boldness: many of his critical opinions were novel in their time, but have since been generally accepted. He took part in the revolutionaries in 1848, and for some years was interested in republican politics, but his political convictions spanned the anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the history of the Raison d'Ėtat of Giuseppe Ferrari, and ultramontane critique of liberalism of Joseph de Maistre. 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 ("The Flowers of Evil"). Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes (Review of Two Worlds), when they were published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis, who had inherited a printing business at Alençon. The poems found a small 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 offence 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:

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)





He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.



In the English-speaking world, Edmund Wilson credited Baudelaire as providing an initial impetus for the Symbolist movement, by virtue of his translations of Poe. In 1930 T.S. Eliot, while asserting that Baudelaire had not yet received a 'just appreciation' even in France, claimed that the poet had 'great genius' and asserted that his 'technical mastery which can hardly be overpraised ... has made his verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own language.'




  • Baudelaire is referenced in Edward Albee's one act play The Zoo Story. The character Jerry asks Peter who his favorite authors are: J.P. Marquand or Baudelaire? Peter responds, "Baudelaire [...] is by far the finer of the two."
  • Baudelaire is referenced in Amiri Baraka's play "Dutchman". The character Clay claims he once considered himself a black Baudelaire.
  • Baudelaire is referenced in Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Subterraneans, where Kerouac compares the main character to Baudelaire's contrast in his works and in real life.
  • Barry Perowne features Baudelaire as a main character in his novel A Singular Conspiracy, featuring a hypothetical meeting with Edgar Allan Poe during the months in 1844 unaccounted for in Poes' Life; as Poe (under an assumed identity) designs a conspiracy to expose Aupick to blackmail to free Charles' patrimony.
  • H.P. Lovecraft begins his story Hypnos with a line of verse attributed to Baudelaire: if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.
  • The first chapter of the novel The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad opens quoting Baudelaire's verses: ...D'autre fois, calme plat, grand miroir / De mon désespoir.

See also

Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Charles Baudelaire" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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