A short life of the author
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821–1867) was born in Paris and became the most consequential poet of the nineteenth century — the figure who stands at the threshold between Romanticism and Modernism and opens the door through which all subsequent poetry must pass. Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), his single volume of verse — prosecuted for obscenity, condemned by the courts, and reduced by six suppressed poems — is the foundational text of modern poetry.
Life and Career
Baudelaire’s father, a cultivated civil servant and amateur painter, died when Charles was five. His mother remarried Jacques Aupick, a career military officer who eventually became a general and ambassador; Baudelaire loathed his stepfather and the hatred shadowed his entire life. He was sent to boarding school, expelled from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and dispatched on a voyage to India to cure his bohemian tendencies — he turned back at Mauritius, but the experience of the sea and the tropics colours his poetry permanently.
At twenty-one he came into his father’s inheritance and proceeded to spend half of it in two years on dandyism, hashish, opium, and the company of Jeanne Duval, a biracial actress who became his muse and torment for twenty years. His family imposed a conseil judiciaire — a legal guardianship that placed his finances under an administrator — and Baudelaire spent the rest of his life in genteel poverty, borrowing, dodging creditors, and writing letters of desperate humiliation to his mother.
He wrote slowly and revised obsessively. Les Fleurs du mal was published by Poulet-Malassis in June 1857; within weeks, Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for offense to public morality. Six poems were suppressed; Baudelaire was fined 300 francs. He was devastated but continued to revise and expand the collection; the second edition (1861), with thirty-five new poems, is generally considered the definitive version.
He was also a supreme critic — of art (his Salons of 1845, 1846, and 1859 are landmarks of art criticism; his essays on Delacroix and Constantin Guys are masterpieces), of literature (he translated and championed Edgar Allan Poe, introducing him to the French public), and of modernity itself (Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 1863, defines modernity as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”).
Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), a collection of prose poems published posthumously (1869), is the other essential Baudelaire text — the invention of a new form that would be adopted by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and every subsequent practitioner.
In 1866 he suffered a stroke in the church of Saint-Loup in Namur, Belgium, and spent his final eighteen months aphasic and partially paralysed. He died in Paris on 31 August 1867, aged forty-six.
Major Works and Themes
Baudelaire’s great subject is the experience of modernity — the city, the crowd, the fleeting, the degraded, the beautiful — and his great innovation is the insistence that beauty can be found in what previous poetry rejected: the squalid, the perverse, the artificial, the morally ambiguous. “You gave me your mud and I turned it into gold,” he wrote.
Les Fleurs du mal is organised into six sections: “Spleen et Idéal,” “Tableaux parisiens,” “Le Vin,” “Fleurs du mal,” “Révolte,” and “La Mort.” The famous “Correspondances” sonnet — proposing that colours, sounds, and scents are interconnected — is the theoretical foundation of Symbolism.
Baudelaire and Poe
Baudelaire’s discovery of Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most consequential literary encounters of the nineteenth century. He found in Poe a kindred spirit — another artist destroyed by poverty, addiction, and an indifferent public — and spent seventeen years translating Poe’s tales and essays into French. His translations are masterful — many French readers consider Baudelaire’s Poe superior to the English original — and they made Poe a central figure in French literature, influencing Mallarmé, Valéry, and the Symbolists. Baudelaire’s critical essays on Poe — in which he identifies the American as a soul lost in a materialist society, a poet of “the demon of perversity” — are also veiled self-portraits.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Baudelaire’s influence is total. He is the origin of modern poetry: Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valéry, Eliot, Rilke, Celan, and every subsequent poet who has attempted to render the experience of urban modernity owes him a debt. Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project takes Baudelaire as its central figure — the exemplary poet of capitalism, of the crowd, of the commodity. T.S. Eliot said that Baudelaire was “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.”
Collecting Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du mal (1857, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, Paris) is one of the most important and valuable French first editions. The first edition was published in an edition of approximately 1,300 copies. Copies containing the six suppressed poems (“Les Pièces condamnées”) — the uncensored state — are the most desirable. First editions bring $5,000–$30,000 depending on condition and binding; copies on luxury paper (grand papier de Hollande) bring $20,000–$60,000 or more.
The second edition (1861, Poulet-Malassis) with thirty-five additional poems is also highly desirable.
Les Paradis artificiels (1860) first editions bring $1,000–$5,000. Le Spleen de Paris (1869, first collected edition) is the other essential Baudelaire collectible.
Baudelaire’s autograph letters are rare and expensive — $5,000–$30,000 depending on content. His manuscripts are held primarily by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The famous manuscript of “Les Fleurs du mal” with Baudelaire’s corrections is one of the treasures of French literary heritage.