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Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) |
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One of the greatest French poets of the 19th century, often called "the father of modern criticism," who shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay. In his own time Charles Baudelaire was largely ignored. With Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine he formed the so-called Decadents. A HARBOR is a charming abode for a soul weary of the struggles of life. The amplitude of the sky, the mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing colorations of the sea, the scintillating of the beacon-lights, form a prism marvellously adapted to entertain the eyes without tiring them. The slender forms of the ships, with their complicated rigging, to which the billows give harmonious oscillations, serve to maintain the taste for rhythm and for beauty. And, above all, there is a sort of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure for him who no longer has curiosity or ambition, in contemplating, couched in the turret or leaning on the pier, all the movements of those who depart and those who return, of those who still have the strength to will, the desire to travel or to acquire wealth. ('The Harbor,' translated by Joseph T. Shipley, in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by T. R. Smith, Boni & Liveright, 1919, p. 93) Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris, where he lived most of
his life. His father, François, was a sixty-year-old ex-priest and
widower when he married Caroline Dufaÿs, a penniless orphan, who was
twenty-six. François died in 1827. For some years Baudelaire was on
good terms with his stepfather, Major Jacques Aupick, but in the late
1830s they started to have difficulties. Aupick, who became a senator,
died in 1857. Baudelaire worshipped his mother and could not accept her
second marriage. Jean-Paul Sartre argued in his study on Baudelaire, that due to the sudden break with his mother and the grief it caused, Baudelaire "made the mortifying discovery that he was a single person, that his life had been given him for nothing." (Baudelaire by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Martin Turnell, New Directions Publishing Company, 1950, p. 17) In Mon Coeur Mis à Nu (1897, My Heart Laid Bare) Baudelaire wrote: "Sense of solitude from childhood. In spite of the family—and above all when surrounded by children of my own age—I had a sense of being destined to eternal solitude." (quoted in Baudelaire by Jean-Paul Sartre, pp. 17-18) Baudelaire was sent to boarding school. He studied at the Collège Royal, Lyon (1832-36), and Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris (1836-39), from where he was expelled. His intention from an early age was to live by writing, but still he enrolled as a law student in 1840 at the École de Droit. Probably at this time he became addicted to opium. He also contracted syphilis, which turned out to be lethal. During this period Baudelaire fell heavily into debt; he never finished his law studies. In 1841, Baudelaire was sent on a voyage to India, but he stopped off at Maurius. On his return to Paris in 1842, Baudelaire met Jeanne Duval, a woman of mixed race, who became his mistress and inspiration for his poem 'Black Venus'. Other women, who inspired his poems, were Mme Sabatier, and the actress Marie Daubrun, but for most of his life Baudelaire maintained a relationship with Jeanne. Baudelaire lived some years on his inheritance from his father. Two years later Baudelaire was deprived, by law, of control over this income by the Counseil Judicaire. After the decision, Baudelaire constantly turned to his mother when he needed money or worried about his health or was bored – and he was always burdened with debts, partly because he tried to keep up the extravagant lifestyle of a dandy. In the late 1840s, Baudelaire became involved in politics. He fought at the barricades during the revolution of 1848 and in the same year he also cofounded the journal Le Salut Public. He was associated with Proudhon and opposed the coup d'état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1851. After this tumultuous period, Baudelaire remained aloof from politics and adopted an increasingly reactionary attitude. In the 1850s he was involved with Marie Daubrun (1854-55) and Apollonie Sabatier (1857). Baudelaire published his first novel, the autobiographical La
Fanfarlo, in 1847. From 1852 to 1865 he was occupied in
translating Edgar Allan Poe's (1809-1849) writings.
Especially the essays of the American writer influnced his aesthetic
principles. The Argentine novelist and short-story writer Julio Cortázar claimed to believe "very seriously that Charles Baudelaire was
Edgar Allan Poe's double," since he produced quality translations
without a complete grasp of the English language.
('"William Wilson" as a Microcosm of Julio Cortázar's Poe Translations:
Horror in the Doubling of the Human Will' by Emron Esplin, in Translated Poe, edited by Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato, 2014, pp. 258-259) In
Poe, Baudelaire found a kindred spirit, whose concept of
beauty was closely connected with melanchly, lost happiness, and
regret. Baudelaire argued that return to the lost Eden is the aim of every lyrical poet. (Baudelaire: A Fire To Conquer Darkness by Nicole W Jouve, Macmillan, 1980, p. 122) Before Poe died in 1849,
he learned that his stories were being translated in France, but he was
unaware that it was Baudelaire who had taken up this task. Moreover,
Poe was spared from feeling discomfort about the fact, that at the
beginning, Baudelaire's English was no good at all. Baudelaire
translated forty-six tales and in a separate edition The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
To improve his English, Baudelaire frequented a wine boutique favoured
by British ladies and gentlemen, and chatted with them. ('Poe
Translated by Baudelaire: The Reconstruction of an Identity' by Anne
Garrait-Bourrier, in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Volme 4, Issue 3, 2002) Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil)
appeared on June 1857, and in July the Ministry of the Interior banned
the volume, accusing the author of "outrage to public decency". All
involved – author, publisher, and printer – were prosecuted and found
guilty of obscenity and blasphemy. Six poems were deleted from the book: 'Lesbos,' 'Femmes damnées – Delphine et Hippolyte,' 'Le léthé,' 'À celle qui est trop gaie,' 'Les Bijoux,' and 'Les Métamorphoses du vampire'. In the prefatory poem of The Flowers of Evil Baudelaire makes his reader as guilty of sins and lies as the poet: "Ennui! Daydreaming of the guillotine, / Grows misty-eyed, a hookah in his fist. / Reader, you know this armchair terrorist – / Yes, you – you hypocrite – my nest of kin!" ('To the Reader,' in Complete Poems by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Walter Martin, Routledge, 2002, p. 5) As a contrast to the morbid images of Parisian life 'Invitation to a Voyage' calls to a distant land: "There, all is gravitas and grace, Passion, magnificense and peace." (Ibid., p. 141)
A cat lover, Baudelaire incorporated some of the felines in the work
('Cat'):
"It puts to rest the anguished mind / And passes on ecstatic news; / No
need for words - he has his mews / For poetry, as I have mine." (Ibid., p. 133) Baudelaire himself was once described by his friend
Théophile Gautier as "A voluptuous wheedling cat, with velvety
manners." (The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield by Katharine M. Rogers, 2001, pp. 64-65) Baudelaire was the first to equate modern, artificial, and
decadent. Himself he saw as a fallen angel. Love meant the loss of
innocence – "faire l'amour, c'est faire le mal," he wrote. But love is
also the highest pleasure, doing evil intentionally is a source of
lust. He felt sympathy for the prostitute, who revolts against the
bourgeois family. "The most prostituted being is the being beyond
compare, is God, since he is the soul supreme for every individual,
since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love." (from My Heart Laid Bare (Mon Coeur Mis à Nu), in (Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, p. 235) Baudelaire argued in Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne (1863, The Painter of Modern Life) in favor of artificiality, stating that vice is natural in that it is selfish, while virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. The snobbish aesthete, the dandy, was for Baudelaire the ultimate hero and the best proof of an absolutely purposeless existence: he is a gentleman who never becomes vulgar and always preserves the cool smile of the stoic. The second edition of The Flowers of Evil, lacking the condemned pieces but with new poems was published in 1861. At that time Baudelaire was also known as a critic. Among his friends was Édouard Manet (1832-83), whose works were frequently rejected by the salon jury. Manet also found a defender from Émile Zola. Goya's etchings inspired some of Baudelaire's poems in Les fleurs du mal. "Goya is always a great and often a terrifying artists," Baudelaire said. "To the gaiety, the joviality, the typically Spanish satire of the good old days of Cervantes he unites a spirit of far modern, or at least one that has been far more sought after in modern times". (The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Press. 1970, p. 191) In 1862 a minor stroke or some other sudden sign of
deteriorating health gave him a "warning" of the consequences of
alcohol, opium, and hashish. In the same year Manet painted Jeanne's
portrait, 'La Maïtresse de Baudelaire'. The remaining years of
Baudelaire's life were darkened by despair and financial difficulties.
He returned to Paris in 1866 from an extended stay in Brussels, where
he had lived at a hotel called Le Grand Miroir. From a graveyard he
captured a bat, which he kept in his room, feeding it bread and milk. During this miserable period he also visited Mechelen, Antwerp, Ghent, and Liège. Baudelaire was already seriously ill and he stayed in a sanatorium. His hatred against the Belgians Baudelaire poured in a pamphlet or travel book entitled Pauvre Belgique! He condemned the whole nation and especially the city of Brussels, its men, women, children, streets, food, customs, journalism, and politics. Baudelaire did not finish his book, an unique collection of insults, but its material has been printed in different editions. It was not until the birth of the EU, when Brussels started to provoke similar reactions. Baudelaire
died in his mother's arms on August 31, 1867, in a
Paris clinic. "We're obviously destined to love one another, to end our
lives as honestly and gently as possible," Baudelaire had written in a
letter to her (May 6, 1861). "And yet, in the awful circumstances in
which I find
myself, I'm convinced that one of us will kill the other. After my
death, you won't go on living that's clear. I'm the only thing you live
for." (Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude, translated and edited by Rosemary Lloyd, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986, p. 168) The
posthumous edition of Flowers of Evil appeared in 1868, and
added more than 25 new poems. T.S. Eliot, a religious person himself, saw that Baudelaire's Satanism was the product of partial belief. "It was once the mode to tie Baudelaire's Satanism seriously, as it is now the tendency to present Baudelaire as a serious and Cathohc Christian. . . . When Baudelaire's Satanism is dissociated from its less creditable paraphernalia, it amounts to a dim intuition of a part, but a very important part, of Christianity. Satanism itself, so far as not merely an affectation, was an attempt to get into Christiaty by the back door." (Selected Essays by T. S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, 1976, p. 421) Although Baudelaire is chiefly known from his poems, his
critical essays have also gained attention of researchers. His essays
on art have been published under the collective title Curiosités
Esthétiques, and those on literature and music under the title L'art
romantique. Baudelaire's starting point for his aesthetic
analysis was the lived experience, not principles of aesthetics or
abstract preconceptions about the beautiful. He condemned
philosophical poetry as "a false genre". Baudelaire was the most prominent advocate of the doctrine that art has value in itself ("l'art pour l'art"). In his important review of the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire stated: "In recent years we have heard it said in thousand different ways, 'Copy nature; just copy nature.' . . . And this doctrine (the enemy of art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts. . . ." (quoted in Modern Theories of Art, 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire by Moshe Barasch, New York University Press, 1990, p, 366) Baudelaire's general idea was that artists should paint only what they see and feel. Realism was "a disgusting insult thrown into the face of all analysts, a vague and elastic word which means for the vulgar not a new method of creation but the minute description of inessentials." (Ibid., p. 366) Baudelaire was impressed by Wagner's music, enthusiastic of Poe, fascinated by the suggestiveness of caricatures, but he noted the emergence of photography with disdain – it continued the belief in Nature. For further reading: La Mystique de Baudelaire by J. Pommier (1932); Baudelaire the Critic by Margaret Gilman (1943); Baudelaire by Enid Starkie (1953), The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830-1900 by Alfred Edward Carter (1958); Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Henri Peyre (1962); Baudelaire and the English Tradition by Patricia Clements (1985); Baudelaire by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (1989); Charles Baudelaire Revisited by Lois Boe Hyslop (1992); Baudelaire by Joanna Richardson (1994); Baudelaire by Henri Troyat (1994); High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting by David Carrier (1996); Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith by Susan Blood (1997); Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity, ed. by Patricia A. Ward (2001); Baudelaire and Photography: Finding the Painter of Modern Life by Timothy Raser (2015); Correspondences by Charles Baudelaire: a Critical Analysis by Karen Sasha Tipper (2016); The Aesthetic Life of Charles Baudelaire and His Influence on Oscar Wilde: the European Precursors of Spiritual Love by Karen Sasha Tipper (2017); Capital Letters: Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, and the Death Penalty by Ève Morisi (2020); Baudelaire et Jeanne: l'amour fou: récit by Brigitte Kernel (2021); The Beauty of Baudelaire: The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver by Roger Pearson (2021); Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence by Joseph Acquisto (2023) Selected works:
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