Charles Baudelaire
From Philosopedia
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (9 April 1821 - 31 August 1867)
Baudelaire, the French poet who influenced western poetry so greatly, is known for his religious mysticism and feelings of inner despair. He came from a Catholic aristocratic family but became a revolutionary who fought at the barricades in 1848.
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Baudelaire's Writing
Baudelaire developed symbolism, symbolic correspondences among sensory images such as colors, sounds, and scents. Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857, enlarged in 1861 and 1868) was the only book of his published while he lived, and its appearance shocked the public and was condemned particularly by religionists. It included “Les Litanies de Satan.” Its opening line: "It is the devil that pulls the strings that move us."
Baudelaire in his poetry, however, could be said to be revealing himself as a seeker of God without religious beliefs, seeking his own meanings of existence.
Beauty and corruption, he held, are inseparable, and such a theme combined with the alleged obscenity of his work led to his further condemnation. He did succeed as a critic, translating Edgar Allan Poe and bringing him to an accepting French public.
Baudelaire’s criticism was published posthumously as Curiosités esthétiques (1868) and L’Art romantique (1869). His poetic prose pieces also were published posthumously as Petits Poèmes en prose (1869).
“In Charles Baudelaire’s poetry,” writes William O. Thweatt, “the cult of grief and of the satanic alternates with a dream of absolute purity. Art itself also becomes an absolute.”
In his portrayal of the Devil, Baudelaire included touches of ancient beauty. As for supernaturalism, he teasingly reasoned,
- Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine. . . . God is the only being who does not have to exist in order to reign.
Some cite such a passage when calling Baudelaire a mystic, others call him an atheist, and still others are content to call him a rationalist who introduced symbolism.
Edna St. Vincent Millay translated his Flowers of Evil (1936).
Baudelaire's Life
His father, François, died in 1827 and his mother married a career soldier, Jacques Aupick. Although Baudelaire enrolled as a student of law at the École de Droit, where he made his first literary contacts, he spent his time living "a free life" in the Latin Quarter and contracting syphilis, the venereal disease that killed him later. It was a time when he wrote his own epitaph:
- Here lies, for having too much dwelled in street girls’ holes,
- A young fellow who now inhabits the kingdom of moles.
Aupick, in an attempt to save him from the life he was living, sent him in 1841 on a voyage to India. But Baudelaire jumped ship in Mauritius and by 1842 had made his way back to France.
Receiving an inheritance in April 1842 of 18,055 francs, some shares of farmland, and four pieces of property in Paris, he returned to his previous haunts, spent freely on clothes, books, paintings, expensive food and wines, hashish, and opium. A mulatto, Jeanne Duval, not only became his mistress but dominated his life for the next twenty years, inspiring such of his works as La Chevelure, for he was turned on by her exotic-erotic flowing black hair.
His inheritance was exhausted after two years, and he accumulated debts that crippled him to the point that in 1844 his family imposed a legal arrangement that made him a legal minor who could receive only nominal annual allowances. This made him financially dependent upon his mother and exacerbated his growing detestation of his stepfather. It was widely reported that while participating in the riots that overthrew King Louis-Philippe and installed the Second Republic, one uncorroborated account had him brandishing a gun and urging the insurgents to shoot Generl Aupick, who then was director of the École Polytechnique.
In 1848, discovering the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire - who had learned English when a child - completed translations of his work that brought him income for the rest of his life. Baudelaire also began studying the work of the conservative theorist Joseph de Maistre, who, together with Poe, "impelled his thought in an increasingly antinaturalist and antihumanist direction," according to at a French critic whose views were backed by religionists. From the mid-1850s Baudelaire would regard himself as a Roman Catholic, though his obsession with Original Sin and the Devil remained unaccompanied by faith in God's forgiveness and love, and his Christology was impoverished to the point of nonexistence.
When the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published in June 1857, 13 of its 100 poems were immediately arraigned for offences to religion or public morality. After a one-day trial on August 20, 1857, six of the poems were ordered to be removed from the book on the grounds of obscenity, with Baudelaire incurring a fine of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs. The six poems were first republished in Belgium in 1866 in the collection Les Èpaves ("Wreckage"), and the official ban on them would not be revoked until 1949. Owing largely to these circumstances, Les Fleurs du mal became a byword for depravity, morbidity, and obscenity, and the legend of Baudelaire as the doomed dissident and pornographic poet was born.
Death
Many of his writings were unpublished at the time of Baudelaire's death, and those that had been published were out of print. This was soon to change, however. In the early 1860s critics began to recognize Baudelaire’s influence in the writing of the next generation of poets, and these younger artists dedicated some of their poems to him. The future leaders of the Symbolist movement who attended his funeral were already describing themselves as his followers, and by the 20th century he was widely recognized as one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century.
Mallarmé, on 1 February 1865, published an article in L’Artiste in which he described the ability of Les Fleurs du mal to “[draw him] into a surprising landscape which lives in my eye with the intensity of those created by profound opium.”
Toward the end of 1865, Verlaine published his important review of Baudelaire, an article that increased the reputation of both its author and its subject.
Although a cenotaph by de Charmoy is found in Paris’s Montparnasse cemetery, Baudelaire is buried elsewhere in the cemetery next to his mother and stepfather. His final epitaph contains only the death date, 31 August 1867.
Bibliography
- Salon de 1845, 1845
- Salon de 1846, 1846
- La Fanfarlo, 1847
- Les fleurs du mal, 1857
- 1845 s 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
{BDF; CE; EU, Vivien Thweatt; JM; JMR; RAT; TRI; TYD}
