Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire: The Man Who Named the Modern

On 21 June 1857 the publishers Poulet-Malassis and de Broise issued a book of exactly one hundred poems — a number chosen to match the cantos of Dante's *Divine Comedy*. Two months later, on 20 August, a French court convicted its author of outraging public morality and good conduct, fined him, and ordered six poems cut. The censorship stood for ninety-two years. On 11 May 1949 the conviction was reversed and the six poems restored, by which time nearly every serious poet writing in a European language was working in the idiom the book had invented.

A Stepfather He Could Not Forgive

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821 to Joseph-François Baudelaire, a senior civil servant and amateur artist thirty-four years older than his wife, and Caroline Dufaÿs, who was twenty-six. The father died in 1827. What his biographers treat as the decisive trauma followed: Caroline remarried Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, later a French ambassador, and her son never accepted it.

He was schooled in Lyon and then at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, reading law. A classmate remembered him at fourteen as "much more refined and distinguished than any of our fellow pupils." He was also, by every account including his own, ungovernable, and the refinement and the ungovernability turned out to be the same trait.

The Voyage That Never Reached Calcutta

In 1841 Aupick shipped his stepson to Calcutta to cure him of dissolution. Baudelaire got as far as Mauritius and Réunion, turned around, and spent the rest of his life enlarging the trip in conversation. At twenty-one he came into a substantial inheritance and disposed of it at speed. His family responded by obtaining a *conseil judiciaire*, a legal decree placing his money in trust and doling it out to him — a humiliation he resented for the remainder of his life and which kept him poor while nominally an heir.

Around this time he took up with Jeanne Duval, a French-born actress who became the long-term companion of his life and the subject of some of his most famous poems. His family loathed her; his mother called her a "Black Venus" who "tortured him in every way." The relationship broke and resumed until he died.

The Critic Before the Poet

Baudelaire arrived in print as an art critic, not a poet. "Salon of 1845," published under the name Baudelaire Dufaÿs, drew attention immediately for its nerve. He made himself the great advocate of Eugène Delacroix and the enemy of academic timidity. He was among the first writers to treat art criticism as literature rather than as journalism, and the habit of looking hard at pictures shaped the poems: *Les Fleurs du mal* works by juxtaposed images the way a painting does, not by argument.

One Hundred Poems, Six Removed

The book took a decade to find its title. He announced it first as *Les Lesbiennes* (1845–47), then as *Les Limbes* (1848–52), settling on *Les Fleurs du mal* by 1855; eighteen poems appeared in the *Revue des Deux Mondes* on 1 June that year. The 1857 edition arranged its hundred poems into five sections — "Spleen et Idéal," "Fleurs du Mal," "Révolte," "Le Vin," "La Mort" — a deliberate architecture rather than a gathering.

Gustave Bourdin denounced it in *Le Figaro*, and the prosecution followed. The charges were outraging religious morality and outraging public morality; the six condemned poems were later printed abroad as *Les Épaves* (1866). Victor Hugo, who understood what he was looking at, wrote to him: "Your *fleurs du mal* shine and dazzle like stars."

The second edition of February 1861 was the real book. Baudelaire dropped the six banned poems, added thirty-two new ones to reach 126, reorganised the whole, expanded the closing section "La Mort" from three poems to six and ended on "Le Voyage." Crucially he inserted a new section, "Tableaux parisiens," which turned the city itself into the subject. The critic Barbey d'Aurevilly called the result "a poetic work of the strongest unity" — not collected verses but a coherent structure.

Inventing Modernity

Baudelaire coined *modernité* to name the transient, fugitive, contingent experience of urban life, and argued in *Le Peintre de la vie moderne* (1863) — built around the illustrator Constantin Guys — that the artist's job was to extract the eternal from exactly that fleeting material. It is the founding document of a whole tradition. Marshall Berman called him the first Modernist.

Two other projects belong here. From 1847 to 1865 he translated Edgar Allan Poe obsessively, producing *Histoires extraordinaires* (1856) and *Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires* (1857) — versions so good they made Poe a major European author, and which Baudelaire undertook because he found in Poe ideas he believed already existed in his own head. And he effectively invented the prose poem in French with *Petits Poèmes en prose*, published as *Le Spleen de Paris*, a form built to carry the disjointed rhythm of the street.

Why Charles Is Called a Genius

The specific quality is structural rather than incantatory. What nobody else had was his ability to build a book of lyric poems as a single architecture — the Dantean hundred, the five-part arc from aspiration through vice and revolt to death, the 1861 revision that added an entire urban movement without breaking the design. Barbey d'Aurevilly's phrase, "a poetic work of the strongest unity," is the technical judgment that matters. Alongside it sits a second faculty: he identified, named and theorised a condition of experience — *modernité* — decades before anyone else noticed it was there, and did so in criticism as sharp as the verse. The testimony is unusually strong. Rimbaud called him "the king of poets, a true God"; Mallarmé wrote a commemorative sonnet; Proust ranked him among the century's greatest poets; T. S. Eliot said flatly that he had "great genius," credited him as foundational to his own development, and quoted him in *The Waste Land*; Walter Benjamin built an entire materialist history of the nineteenth century around him.

The counter-case is narrower but real. His output was small, and his reputation rests on essentially one book plus a body of criticism. Much of what now reads as revolutionary — the taste for corruption, the satanic gestures — was calculated provocation aimed at Second Empire respectability, and it dated faster than the formal innovation did. He was also a conventional prosodist in strict rhyme and metre; his break was in subject and structure, not technique. And a fair share of the mystique is biographical: the laudanum, the debts, the trial.

Brussels

By 1859 laudanum, poverty and stress had visibly aged him; his publisher's bankruptcy in 1861 finished his finances. He went to Belgium in 1864 to sell rights and lecture, and failed at both. A massive stroke in 1866 left him paralysed and aphasic, and he spent his last year in sanatoriums in Brussels and Paris, dying on 31 August 1867. A few dozen people came to the funeral at Saint-Honoré d'Eylau; he was buried at Montparnasse. His mother, who outlived him by four years, eventually conceded that "my son, for all his faults, has his place in literature." Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé had already made the point rather more forcefully.

Achievements

• Notable work: Les Fleurs du mal
• Notable work: Les Paradis artificiels
• Notable work: Le Peintre de la vie moderne
• Notable work: Reflections on Some of My Contemporaries
• Genres: elegy and Decadent movement