Haussmann’s Paris forced Baudelaire to redefine beauty
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) fixed modern lyric attention on industrialising Paris in Les Fleurs du mal. Born to an ageing civil-servant father who died in 1827, he watched his mother remarry the ambitious Jacques Aupick—a rupture biographers treat as formative trauma.
Law study at Louis-le-Grand ended in an 1839 degree and a confession of no vocation; a stepfather-ordered 1841 Calcutta voyage instead stocked sea imagery. Coming into money at twenty-one, he burned through inheritance until the family imposed a legal guardian. Tavern drafts of the Flowers poems followed.
Born in Paris on 9 April 1821, he was the son of a 60-year-old civil servant and amateur artist and a mother 34 years younger. Biographers often trace his later excesses to the moment she remarried and he lost her undivided attention; he begged her for money all his life. At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand he ran up debts, mostly for clothes. As a young dandy he took the actress Jeanne Duval as his mistress, a match his family rejected.
Criticism came first. His Salon of 1845, signed Baudelaire Dufaÿs, drew notice for its boldness and its championing of Delacroix, with views that anticipate the Impressionists. He joined the revolutions of 1848, briefly, and in the early 1850s dodged creditors from lodging to lodging while finishing translations of Edgar Allan Poe.
Les Fleurs du mal appeared in 1857 and shocked with its themes of sex and death, urban corruption and melancholy, and its evocations of scent. Le Figaro led the attack, and Baudelaire, his publisher and printer were convicted of offending public morals and fined; six poems were suppressed, later printed in Brussels in 1866 as Les Épaves. Flaubert, recently acquitted over Madame Bovary, wrote in support. A revised edition with many new poems followed in 1861, and later years brought prose poems and a version of De Quincey's opium confessions.
Source: Charles Baudelaire
