BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES-PIERRE. — One of the greatest poets of 19th-century France, born in Paris on 9 April 1821, died there on 31 August 1867. His father was said to have worn the cassock before the Revolution; his mother, thirty-five years younger than her husband, widowed in 1827, remarried a high-ranking officer. The poet attributed all his misfortunes to this second marriage. Intolerant of his stepfather’s presence, domestic strife sharpened his naturally skeptical, proud, and rebellious nature, and neither the discipline of school, a corrective sea voyage, nor the guardianship imposed on him for life—after he had begun to squander his fortune—could tame him. His resolve to dedicate himself to poetry led to a complete rupture with his family. From then until his death he lived in study and writing, amid lawsuits and candidacies for the Academy, illustrious friendships and degrading cohabitations, poetic coteries and libertine bands, alternately exalted and reviled, always beset by financial difficulties and expedients, his health steadily declining under the strain of disorder, need, excesses, bravado, and extravagance, until he was struck by paralysis in a church in Namur. Taken to a clinic in Paris, he died there fortified by the Sacraments.
Baudelaire’s major work is the poetic collection *Les Fleurs du Mal*, written “with fury and patience” over more than fifteen years and published in 1857. It was described as a descent into the hell of modern times. It was a new and unheard-of voice in the literature of the century. The poetry of Gautier and Sainte-Beuve, the extreme Romanticism of which Petrus Borel was an exponent, the Gothic literature of 18th-century England, dandyism, Byronic Satanism, the work of Poe whom he introduced to France and translated, and the writings of De Quincey all certainly influenced Baudelaire’s poetry, from which he drew elements, styles, and tones for his art; yet the *livre abominable* (as he called it) revealed a genius that, rising in the 19th century among Romantics, Parnassians, Realists first, and Symbolists and Decadents later, stood out as a renewer.
The book, the poet himself said, “starts from a Catholic idea.” The profound Christian sense of the work, its value as testimony, was robustly recognized not only by Catholic writers of his time and those who followed, but also by writers distant from or hostile to the faith, such as Flaubert, France, Gourmont, Gide, and Souday. That tragic poetry reaffirmed the reality of mystery and the supernatural in an age that had extinguished the stars, the responsibility of our acts against the deification of love and the consequent gratuity of sin; it exalted life as duty, effort, pain, and an account to be rendered. The poet was a thirster for ideals and spirituality, who sought in the stagnant mire of vice and in artificial paradises the lost path upward, without, alas, reaching the liberating conclusion. He passed through the hell of the modern world; both actor and judge, he retained, even in perversion, a vivid sense of evil and guilt, a consciousness of a corruption that partakes of fallen human nature. Torn between opposing, simultaneous postulations toward God and his opposite, partaking of evil yet yearning for good, immersed in boredom yet drawn by the ideal, bound by the chain of corrupting loves and thirsting for infinity, he sought to escape limiting reality by feigning arcane felicities in distant lands. Fascinated by the abyss, he invoked love and purifying suffering and the gift of prayer. In woman he saw an instrument of damnation, at once delighting in and horrified by this bond, unable to break its servile and sinful chain. Even in obscenity, he possessed a lucid awareness of the madness and vanity of the flesh doomed to rot; the ever-present sense of death, the precise concept of diabolical action, original sin, remorse, the life to come, and the necessity of reparation. A student and admirer of De Maistre, he owed to him some of the great guiding ideas and intellectual orientation that raised him so far, as a thinker, above the turpitudes of certain of his poems and the wanderings of his life.
Baudelaire’s other works are listed by critics as follows: *Du vin et du haschisch* (1851); *Les paradis artificiels* (1860); *Le spleen de Paris. Petits poèmes en prose* (1869); *Curiosités esthétiques* (writings on art); *L’art romantique* (writings on various literature); *Fournaux intimes* (*Fusées*, *Mon cœur mis à nu*); two novellas, his letters, translations from Poe, and various fragments.
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Baudissin, Wolf Wilhelm von.
Protestant theologian, exponent of the *Religionsgeschichtliche Schule*, born at Sophienhof near Kiel on 26 October 1847, died in Berlin on 6 February 1926. In 1874 he became *Privatdozent* in Old Testament studies at Leipzig, in 1876 associate professor, and in 1880 full professor at Strasbourg. He moved to Marburg in 1881 and to Berlin in 1900, where he taught until 1921. He specialized in the study of Semitic religions in relation to Israelite religion.
His principal works include: *Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte* (2 vols., Leipzig 1876–78); *Geschichte des alttestamentlichen Priestertums* (1878); *Einleitung in die Bücher des Alten Testaments* (1879); *Emmu-Aske-pios* (1879); *Adonis und Emunn* (1879); and above all *Kyrios als Gottesname im Judentum und seine Stellung in der Religionsgeschichte* (4 vols., 1879–1926), edited by Otto Eissfeldt.
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**Baudoinville, Apostolic Vicariate of.** - It was erected, under the name of Upper Congo, in January 1887, with territory taken from the Apostolic Vicariate of Tanganyika. From this vicariate, some White Fathers, at the request of Leopold II, had been sent by Lavigerie to the territory of the new independent State of the Belgian Congo, settling at Mpala. Its boundaries were subsequently altered with the missions, to align them with the political frontiers of the British and German colonies. The beginnings of the mission owe much of their success to the skill and zeal of the former captain of the Papal Zuavi, Joubert, who protected the nascent Christian communities against the attacks of Arab slave-traders. Owing to the insecurity of the country, the mission suffered greatly from the devastations wrought by sleeping sickness, then by the 'Spanish flu' in 1918 (10,000 deaths), and, given the proximity of German East Africa, from the repercussions of the war of 1914–18. In more recent decades, Protestantism and the intensive industrialisation of the country have caused the missionaries no little concern. Despite great difficulties (secret societies among the pagans, Islam, and Protestantism), the response has been encouraging. From about a thousand Catholics in 1890, the number had risen to 58,580 (with 37,215 catechumens) by 1945, out of a total population of approximately 450,000 souls, spread over an area of 95,000 sq km.
The vicariate of Upper Congo changed its name to the present one of B. in 1939. The mission is provided with primary, secondary, and vocational schools, and a normal school, as well as charitable or social welfare works (mutual aid societies, savings banks, boatmen’s corporations). The latest statistics (1945) give 37 White Fathers, 11 brothers of the same Society, 44 White Sisters; there are 19 indigenous priests, 14 indigenous Sisters of St Joseph, and 709 catechists; 650 male and female teachers.
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**Baudot, Jules.** - Benedictine, b. at Notre-Dame-de-l'Isle (Eure) on 4 Aug. 1857, d. at the abbey of St Michael de Farnborough on 24 Dec. 1929.
Rather a compiler and populariser than a rigorous researcher and critic, besides an assiduous collaboration with various liturgical periodicals and numerous articles for the *Dictionnaire de Théologie catholique* and for the *Dictionnaire d’Archéologie chrétienne et de Liturgie*, he published from 1908 to 1914 some twenty booklets on liturgical topics in the series *Science et Religion* (Paris): *Le missel, Le bréviaire* (Italian trans., Rome 1909), *Le pontifical, Le martyrologe*, etc. He contributed to the *Bibliothèque catholique des sciences religieuses* a new treatise: *Le bréviaire* (Paris 1929); but his two principal works are: the *Dictionnaire d’hagiographie* (ibid. 1925) and *Vies des Saints et des Bienheureux selon l’ordre du calendrier* (12 vols., ibid. 1935 and following). Death overtook him when he had reached the saints of 15 May in his composition. The publication of the manuscript and the continuation of the work passed to the Benedictines of Paris, who have so far issued six volumes.
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**Baudot, Prosper.** - French Jesuit, b. at Saint-Dié (Vosges) in 1846, entered the novitiate in 1872, exercised his ministry at Nancy and Paris; d. at Vevey (Switzerland) on 31 March 1918. His meditations have enjoyed very wide circulation: *Les évangéliques, Vie de Jésus-Christ méditée* (Lille 1909; 1943, 1,449th thousand; Italian trans., Milan 1924).
He devoted himself chiefly to the assistance of priests: *La clergé, Solitudes: Recueil de retraites mensuelles sacerdotales* (Paris 1901); *Documents de ministère pastoral; Manuel à l'usage du clergé* (2nd ed., 2 vols., ibid. 1909); *Les évangéliques du prédicateur; Manuel homilétique d'évangile* (ibid. 1909); *Carnet d'évangile à l'usage des confesseurs* (ibid. 1913).
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**Baudouin, Louis-Marie, Venerable.** - Priest, b. at Montaigu on 2 Aug. 1765, d. at Chavagnes on 12 Feb. 1835. Vicar at Luçon, he was imprisoned by the revolutionaries but managed to take refuge in Spain. On his return to France he was appointed curate at Jonchère in 1800, where he founded the Congregation of the Sons of Mary Immaculate (v.). After his transfer to Chavagnes, he met Sr S. Benoît and in 1801 founded the Institute of the Ursulines of Jesus (v.). In 1812 he was appointed rector of the major seminary and vicar general at La Rochelle, then at Luçon. In 1825 he retired to Chavagnes, where he wrote several ascetical works. His cause of beatification was introduced on 7 Sept. 1871.
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**Baudrand, Barthélémy.** - Ascetical writer, b. at Névache (Hautes-Alpes) in 1701, Jesuit in 1721, subsequently professor, preacher, and rector, d. at Vienne on the Rhône in 1787.
After the suppression of the Jesuits, he devoted himself to the composition of ascetical works. The first book,