BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES-PIERRE. - One of the greatest poets of the French nineteenth century, b. in Paris on 9 April 1821, d. there on 31 August 1867. Of his father it was said that he had worn the cassock before the Revolution; his mother, thirty-five years younger than her husband, left a widow in 1827, remarried a high-ranking officer. To this marriage the poet attributed all his misfortunes. Intolerant of his stepfather's presence, the domestic discord sharpened his dysphoric, haughty and rebellious nature, nor could the discipline of boarding school tame it, nor a corrective voyage by sea, nor a guardianship measure to which he had to submit for his entire life, after he came of age and began to squander his assets. His determination to devote himself to poetry led to a complete break with his family. From then until his death he lived studying and writing, between a lawsuit and a candidacy for the Academy, illustrious friendships and degrading cohabitations, coteries of poets and bands of libertines, exalted and reviled, amid continual financial difficulties and expedients, always in failing health, which disorder, want, excesses, bravado and extravagances worsened year by year until the attack of paralysis that struck him in a church in Namur. Taken to Paris to a clinic, he died there fortified by the Sacraments.
B.'s major work is the poetry 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 of which Petrus Borel was the exponent, the black literature of the English eighteenth century, dandyism, Byronic Satanism, the work of Poe, whom he revealed to France and translated, the writings of De Quincey, certainly influenced B.'s poetry, from which he drew elements, manners and tones for his art; but the livre abominable (as he called it) revealed a genius who rises in the nineteenth century, among Romantics, Parnassians, Realists first, Symbolists and Decadents afterward, as a renewer.
The book, the poet himself said, "starts from a Catholic idea." Its intimate Christian sense, its value as testimony à rebours, was recognized not only by the Catholic writers of the time and by those who came later, but also by writers far from the faith or hostile to it, such as a Flaubert, a France, a Gourmont, a Gide, a Souday. That tragic poetry reaffirmed the reality of mystery and of the supernatural in the century that extinguished the stars, the responsibility of our acts against the deification of the human and the consequent gratuitousness; it exalted life as duty, effort, sorrow, an account to be rendered. The poet was a seeker of the ideal and of spirituality, who sought in the death of the swamp 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; actor and judge at once, he always kept alive, even in perversion, the sense of evil and of guilt, the awareness of a corruption that partakes of fallen human nature. Between the opposing, simultaneous postulations toward God and His contrary; partaking of evil and at the same time yearning for good; immersed in boredom and drawn by the ideal; bound to the chain of depraving loves and thirsting for the infinite, he sought to escape from limiting reality by feigning arcane felicities in distant lands. Fascinated by the abyss, he invoked love and purifying sorrow and the gift of prayer. In woman he saw an instrument of damnation in which he alternately took pleasure and was horrified, without managing to break the servile and sinful bond. He had, even in obscenity, a most lucid awareness of the insanity and vanity of the flesh promised to putrefaction; the ever-impending sense of death, the precise concept of diabolical action, of original sin, of remorse, of otherworldly justice, of necessary reparation. A student and admirer of De Maistre, he owed to him certain great guiding ideas and the intellectual orientation that raised him so high, as a thinker, above the turpitudes of certain of his poems and the aberrations of his life.
B.'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 (1860); Curiosités esthétiques (art writings); L'art romantique (writings on various literature); Journaux intimes (Fusées, Mon coeur mis à nu); two novellas, the letters, the translations from Poe, various fragments.