Charles Baudelaire was a
mama’s boy and a decadent ne’er-do-well, who wrote a group of poems known as The Flowers of Evil that profoundly
influenced generations of future poets--even though many of the poems were
denounced as obscene and six of them were banned in France until 1949. Poor
Baudelaire also had gonorrhea and syphilis (acquired in the usual disreputable
manner) and a fondness for opium, laudanum, and cognac, which conspired to snuff
out his life at the age of forty-six.
Born in
Paris April 9, 1821, Baudelaire was always close to his mother, a relationship
that deepened after his father died when Charles was six. But the following
year, she remarried a French diplomat and military officer named Jacques
Aupick, whom Charles regarded as a rival for his mother’s affection. In a
letter written to her years later he spoke of his “passionate love” for her as
a child. After his stepfather’s death, when Charles was thirty-six, he wrote to
his mother: “I believe that I belong to you absolutely, and that I belong only
to you.”
Young Charles was sent to
boarding school in Lyon and then studied law at the Lycée
Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he spent much of his time running
up expenses for dandified clothes,
liquor, and prostitutes.
Throughout his life Baudelaire wheedled money out of his mother to cover
his debts. In desperation his stepfather shipped him out as a crewman on a
freighter to India, but he jumped ship and returned to Paris, where, lo and
behold!, having reached the age of twenty-one, he inherited a small fortune of
99,568 francs from his late father’s estate. That would probably be something
in excess of half a million dollars in today’s buying power, and it enabled
Baudelaire to live a playboy’s life—until he had spent almost half the
inheritance and his parents managed to put the remainder in trust, granting him
only a small monthly allowance.
During this period,
Baudelaire became involved with Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born sometime actress
and the inspiration for a series of “Black Venus” poems. Baudelaire’s family vehemently
rejected his relationship with her, whether because of her ethnicity or her profession
is not clear. Jeanne and Charles remained off-and-on lovers for the rest of his
life, although he also engaged in dalliances with a voluptuous blonde actress
named Marie Daubrun and a demimondaine named Apolonie Sabatier, who conducted a
salon that attracted the likes of Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, and
Ernest Feydeau.
In 1857 Baudelaire
published his chief (and practically his only) poetic work, Les Fleurs du Mal, which launched the
French symbolist movement in poetry,
deeply affecting such followers as Paul Verlaine, Artur Rimbaud, and Stéphane
Mallarmé, as well as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and many later poets. Baudelaire’s
poems deal with taboo subjects like death and sexual activity of many
varieties, which he treated in sensual detail. Six poems deal with lesbian
love, and he and his publisher were tried and convicted of an offense against
public morals, barely escaping prison time. The six poems were were banned from
publication in France, a prohibition not lifted until 1949.
Always strapped for cash,
Baudelaire saw his financial position worsen when his publisher went bankrupt
in 1861. Belgium offered the prospect of income from lectures and the sale of
his books, so Baudelaire moved there in 1863. But his lifelong indulgence in drugs and alcohol, combined
with the continuing symptoms of venereal diseases, resulted in his collapse in
the Church of Saint-Loup in Namur in 1866. This was followed by a series of
strokes in which he suffered loss of speech and partial paralysis. He returned
to Paris and entered a nursing home, where, after a year’s confinement, he died
on August 31, 1867, at the age of forty-six. He was buried in the Montparnasse
Cemetery.
During his final days,
Baudelaire was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but whether
he was actually a religious believer is a subject of great speculation. Certainly his poems are filled with
Christian symbolism, but there are also references to Satanism. There is a
famous story of Baudelaire’s close
friend, the one-named photographer Nadar, a free thinker who often visited
Baudelaire in the nursing home.
One day Nadar asked Baudelaire, “How can you possibly believe in God and
an afterlife?” Unable to speak, Baudelaire smiled and gestured toward a
glorious sunset over the Arc de Triomphe. Most likely Baudelaire remained an
unwilling agnostic until the end of his life, for as he wrote in a letter to
his mother in 1861: “I desire with all my heart—and with a sincerity which no
one except myself will ever understand—to believe that an external invisible
being is interested in my fate; but what must one do to believe it?”
