BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES-PIERRE. – One of the major poets of nineteenth-century France, born in Paris on 9 April 1821, died there on 31 August 1867. It was said of his father that he had worn the cassock before the Revolution; his mother, thirty-five years younger than her husband, was widowed in 1827 and remarried a senior officer. The poet attributed all his misfortunes to this marriage. Unable to tolerate the presence of his godfather, domestic discord intensified his dysphoric, proud, and rebellious nature; nor could he be tamed by the discipline of boarding school, a corrective voyage at sea,
or a protective arrangement to which he had to submit for the rest of his life, after, upon reaching adulthood, he began to squander his property. His resolve to devote himself to poetry led to a complete break with his family. From then until his death he lived studying and writing, amid a lawsuit and a candidacy for the Academy, illustrious friendships and degrading cohabitations, circles of poets and bands of libertines, exalted and reviled, amid continual financial difficulties and expedients, always in poor health, which disorder, need, excesses, bravado, and extravagances worsened year by year until the attack of paralysis that struck him in a church at Namur. Brought to Paris to a clinic, he died there fortified by the Sacraments.
B.’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 defined 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 horrific Romanticism represented by Petrus Borel, the black literature of eighteenth-century England, dandyism, Byronian Satanism, the work of Poe, whom he revealed to France and translated, and the writings of De Quincey certainly influenced B.’s poetry, from which he drew elements, modes, and tones for his art; but the livre abominable (as he called it) revealed a genius who rises in the nineteenth century, among the Romantics, Parnassians, and Realists first, and then the Symbolists and Decadents, as a renewer.
The book, the poet himself said, “proceeds from a Catholic idea.” Its intimate Christian meaning, its value as an à rebours testimony, was recognized not only by the Catholic writers of the time and by those who came afterward, but also by writers distant from the faith or hostile to it, such as Flaubert, France, Gourmont, Gide, and Souday. That tragic poetry reaffirmed the reality of mystery and the supernatural in the century that extinguished the stars, the responsibility of our actions against the deification of the human and the consequent gratuity; it exalted life as duty, effort, suffering, and an account to be rendered. The poet was a framework of ideal and spirituality, who sought in the deathly mire of vices and in artificial paradises the lost path upward, without unfortunately reaching the liberating conclusion. He passed through the hell of the modern world; at once actor and judge, he always retained, even in his perversion, a vivid sense of evil and guilt, an awareness of a corruption that partakes of fallen human nature. Amid opposing, simultaneous claims toward God and his contrary; sharing in evil and at the same time yearning for good; immersed in boredom and drawn toward the ideal; bound to the chain of depraved loves and thirsting for infinity, he sought to escape from limiting reality by imagining mysterious happiness 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 in which he alternately took pleasure and felt horror, without managing to break its servile and sinful bond. Even in obscenity, he possessed an exceptionally lucid awareness of the insanity and vanity of flesh destined for putrefaction; an ever-impending sense of death, and a precise conception of diabolical action, original sin, remorse, supernatural justice, and necessary reparation. A student and admirer of De Maistre, he owed him several major guiding ideas and the intellectual orientation that raised him so far, as a thinker, above the turpitudes of certain of his poems and the wanderings of his life.
B.’s other works are listed by critics as follows: Du vin et du harchisch (1851); Les paradis artificiels (1860); Le spleen de Paris. Petits poèmes en prose (1860); Curiosités esthétiques (writings on art); L'art romantique (writings on various literary subjects); Journaux intimes (Fusées, Mon coeur mis à mí); two novellas, letters, translations from Poe, and various fragments.
nold, Maurice, Thérive, Martineau, Guillain de Bénouville. Among the Italian contributions cf.: L. Foscolo-Benedetto, L'architecture des Fleurs du mal, in Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 1912; B. Croce, B., in Poesia e non poesia, Bari 1923, pp. 252–65; E. Somaré, Saggi bandelairiani, Milan 1923; C. Muoni, C. B., Rome 1927; M. Bonfantini, Vita, opere e pensieri di C. B., Novara 1927; F. Casati, B., Brescia 1936 and 1944; A. Pellegrini, B., Milan 1938; G. R. Ceriello, Saggi di varia letteratura, Milan 1942; and, in addition, translations and introductions to the principal works, articles and critical notes by G. di Belito, G. Raimondi, R. Bacchelli, G. Alberti, and others. The most recent critical works on B. are the following: Fr. Demp, B. und das Christentum, Marburg 1939; G. Polverini, L'estetica di C. B., Bari 1943; J. Massin, B. entre Dieu et Satan, Paris 1945; J. Pommier, Dans les chemins de B., there 1945; F. Léon-Doudet, C. B. et l'esprit classique, there 1946; P. Arnold, Le Dieu de B., there 1947; B. Fondane, B. et l'expérience du gonfler, there 1947; J.-P. Sartre, B., there 1947; G. Macchia, B. critico, Rome 1947; id., B. e la poetica della malinconia, Naples 1948; M. Rocca, L'idealismo di B., Padua 1948; G. Blin, Le sadisme de B., Paris 1948.