Charles Baudelaire

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris on the 9th of April 1821, into a city that would both inspire and consume him. His father was a senior civil servant and amateur artist who died when Baudelaire was still a child. His mother remarried a military officer who would later rise to become a French ambassador. That remarriage would cast a long shadow. How does a child become the first Modernist? How does a poet who barely finished his law studies end up inventing the very word for modern life? And how does a book so scandalous it was prosecuted in court become the foundation of an entirely new tradition in literature? Those are the questions this documentary will trace.

• 2. The Wound of Childhood

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  Joseph-Francois Baudelaire died on the 10th of February 1827 at rue Hautefeuille in Paris, when his son was not yet six years old. The following year, Caroline Baudelaire married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick. Baudelaire's biographers have read this as a decisive rupture. Finding himself no longer the sole focus of his mother's affection, he was left, in their view, with a trauma that goes some way to explaining the excesses of his later life. Baudelaire himself wrote to her in a letter: "There was in my childhood a period of passionate love for you."

  At school in Lyon, a classmate described the young Baudelaire at fourteen as "much more refined and distinguished than any of our fellow pupils... we are bound to one another... by shared tastes and sympathies, the precocious love of fine works of literature." Yet his school record was uneven, swinging between diligence and what his teachers called idleness. At the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he studied law, the default course for young men without a clear direction.

  Upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother plainly: "I don't feel I have a vocation for anything." His stepfather had hoped for a career in law or diplomacy. His mother later reflected on that fork in the road: "He would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we should have been happier, all three of us."

  To redirect his son, Aupick sent Baudelaire on a voyage to Calcutta in 1841. He never reached India. He stopped on Mauritius and Reunion and turned back for Paris. He would later embroider this aborted journey into a personal legend, including stories of riding on elephants. The real import of the trip was the impressions it left of the sea and exotic ports, impressions that fed directly into his poetry.

• 3. Debts, Dandyism, and Duval

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  At twenty-one, Baudelaire received a sizable inheritance. He spent much of it within a few years. His family's response was to obtain a legal decree placing his remaining property in trust, a humiliation he resented for the rest of his life. He argued, with some logic, that being allowed to fail financially would have been the one sure way to teach him financial discipline.

  In artistic circles, he had become known as a dandy and a free-spender. Jeanne Duval, a French-born actress, became his mistress during this period. She was rejected by his family; his mother described Duval as a "Black Venus" who "tortured him in every way" and drained him of money. The relationship endured, on and off, until the end of his life. He helped her financially even when he had little to spare.

  He made a suicide attempt during these years. He took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and wrote for a revolutionary newspaper, though his interest in politics faded quickly. By the early 1850s, he was moving from lodging to lodging to escape creditors, struggling with poor health and irregular output.

  One project he did complete in these lean years was a series of translations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. In 1847, he had first encountered Poe's work and recognized something uncanny in it. He claimed that Poe's tales contained ideas that had long existed in his own brain but had never taken shape. This discovery would occupy him for nearly two decades.

• 4. The Flowers of Evil

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  Some poems from what would become Les Fleurs du mal had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes in 1855, published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet-Malassis. But the full collection did not appear until 1857, when Baudelaire was thirty-six. He was a slow and attentive worker, often derailed by illness, emotional distress, and what he called indolence.

  The poems found a small but appreciative audience. The wider public focused on the subject matter: sex, death, lesbianism, the corruption of the city, melancholy, wine, lost innocence, and the oppressiveness of living. Baudelaire's use of the sense of smell was notable throughout, deploying fragrance to evoke nostalgia and past intimacy. Gustave Flaubert, himself recently prosecuted over Madame Bovary, wrote to Baudelaire with admiration: "You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist."

  Not everyone agreed. J. Habas, writing in Le Figaro, declared: "Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid." Legal action followed. Baudelaire, his publisher, and the printer were successfully prosecuted for offenses against public morals. They were fined. Six poems were suppressed. Baudelaire did not appeal, but his fine was reduced. The banned poems were later printed separately as Les Epaves in Brussels in 1866.

  Baudelaire's response to the outcry was defiant. In a letter to his mother, he wrote: "This book, whose title says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it." He predicted the book would stand in memory beside the best poems of Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and even Byron. Victor Hugo wrote to him in support: "Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars... I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might."

  Nearly a hundred years later, on the 11th of May 1949, the judgment against Baudelaire was officially reversed and the six banned poems reinstated in France.

• 5. The World He Moved Through

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  Baudelaire's friendships were as combustible as his verse. He and Edouard Manet became constant companions from around 1855. Through the early 1860s they went on daily sketching trips together. Manet lent Baudelaire money and looked after his affairs. Baudelaire encouraged Manet to trust his own path and ignore critics: "Manet has great talent, a talent which will stand the test of time. But he has a weak character. He seems to me crushed and stunned by shock." When Manet's Olympia provoked scandal in 1865, Baudelaire worked privately to support his friend, though he was too ill to offer public defense.

  His relationship with painter Eugene Delacroix was equally charged. Baudelaire called him "a poet in painting" and wrote in his Salon of 1846: "As one contemplates his series of pictures, one seems to be attending the celebration of some grievous mystery... This grave and lofty melancholy shines with a dull light, plaintive and profound like a melody by Weber." Delacroix was appreciative but kept his distance, especially after the Les Fleurs du mal scandal. In private, he noted that Baudelaire "really gets on my nerves."

  Through the photographer and caricaturist Nadar, whose real name was Felix Tournachon, Baudelaire extended his social reach considerably. He wrote of Nadar: "Nadar is the most amazing manifestation of vitality." It was through Nadar that Baudelaire had first met Jeanne Duval, who had been Nadar's mistress around 1842. Nadar remained loyal to the end, writing Baudelaire's obituary notice in Le Figaro.

  With Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire shared a reverence for formal perfection and a preoccupation with death. He thought Gautier lacked deeper emotion but respected his mastery of language. He dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to him. Both poets had absorbed the view expressed by Heinrich Heine: "In artistic matters, I am a supernaturalist. I believe that the artist can not find all his forms in nature, but that the most remarkable are revealed to him in his soul."

• 6. Wagner, Poe, and the Art of Translation

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  Baudelaire had no formal musical training and knew little beyond Beethoven and Weber when he began reading about Richard Wagner. He studied reviews and essays about the composer before hearing a single note of his music. When he finally attended three Wagner concerts in Paris in 1860, the experience overwhelmed him. He wrote to Wagner afterward: "I had a feeling of pride and joy in understanding, in being possessed, in being overwhelmed, a truly sensual pleasure like that of rising in the air." He later produced a non-technical analysis of Wagner that was highly regarded, particularly the essay "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris." His writings contributed to the spread of Wagnerism across Europe in the following decades.

  Baudelaire's translations of Poe occupied him from 1847 until 1865. He was not the first French translator of Poe, but his versions were considered among the finest. They appeared in several volumes: Histoires extraordinaires in 1856, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires in 1857, and Histoires grotesques et serieuses in 1865. In the English-speaking world, Edmund Wilson later credited these translations as providing the initial impetus for the Symbolist movement, since they brought Poe's ideas into French literary culture where they were then amplified by Verlaine and Mallarme.

• 7. Final Years and Lasting Reach

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  By 1859, illness, long-term use of laudanum, poverty, and stress had visibly aged Baudelaire. His mother finally agreed to let him live with her in the seaside town of Honfleur, where he was productive and at peace. His poem Le Voyage came from that period. But financial trouble returned after his publisher Poulet Malassis went bankrupt in 1861. In 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Belgium, hoping to sell the rights to his works and deliver lectures.

  In Brussels he began to drink to excess. He suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed. After more than a year of aphasia, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church. He died in Paris on the 31st of August 1867. His funeral was held at the Saint-Honore d'Eylau church, with a few dozen persons in attendance. He is buried in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse.

  After his death, his mother paid off his substantial debts and found some comfort in his emerging fame. "I see that my son, for all his faults, has his place in literature," she said. She lived another four years.

  Four years after Baudelaire's death, Arthur Rimbaud praised him in a letter as "the king of poets, a true God." In 1895, Stephane Mallarme published "Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire," a sonnet in his memory. Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, named Baudelaire alongside Alfred de Vigny as "the greatest poet of the nineteenth century." T. S. Eliot, in a lecture delivered in Aix-en-Provence in April 1948, stated: "I am an English poet of American origin who learnt his art under the aegis of Baudelaire and the Baudelairian lineage of poets." He also quoted the last line of Baudelaire's "Au Lecteur" directly in Section I of The Waste Land. Walter Benjamin, in the late 1930s, used Baudelaire as the focus for his monumental Das Passagenwerk, arguing that in Les Fleurs du mal, "the specific devaluation of the world of things, as manifested in the commodity, is the foundation of Baudelaire's allegorical intention." Vanderbilt University eventually assembled what it describes as one of the world's most comprehensive research collections on him.