Charles Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire , born with Paris the April 9th 1821 and dead the August 31st 1867 in the same city, is a Poète French.

Baudelaire was seen reproaching its writing and the choice of its subjects. It was included/understood only by some of its pars. In Le Figaro of the July 5th 1857, Gustave Bourdin reacts at the time of the publication of the Fleurs of the evil : “Moments ago when one doubts the mental state of Mr. Baudelaire, there is where one does not doubt it any more; - it is, most of the time, the monotonous and premeditated repetition same things, same thoughts. Odious there the côtoie the wretched one; pushing back is combined there with repugnant… ”. Today recognized like a major writer of the history of the French Poetry , Baudelaire became traditional. Barbey d' Aurevilly saw in him “a Dante one time déchue”.

Through its work, Baudelaire tried to weave and show the bonds between the evil and the beauty, violence and pleasure ( a martyrdom ). In parallel of Poem S low registers ( Semper Eadem ) or scandalous for the time ( Delphine and Hippolyte ), it expressed the Mélancolie ( Mœsta and errabunda ) and envies it besides ( the Invitation with the voyage ). It also extracted the Beauté from the Horreur ( carrion ).

Biographical elements

In 1827, his/her father, Joseph-François Baudelaire, born in 1759 with the Neuville-with-Bridge, in Champagne, dies when Charles is 6 years old. This man well-read man, enthusiast of the ideals of the Lights, and amateur of Painting, painter himself, leaves him a heritage of which it will never have the total usufruct. One year later, his/her mother remarie with the major Jacques Aupick. The future poet will never forgive with his mother this remarriage, and the Aupick officer, become ambassador, incarnates in his eyes all that makes obstacle so that he likes: his/her mother, poetry, the dream, and life without contingencies.

Returned Louis-the-Large college for a trifle in 1839, Baudelaire carries out a life in opposition to the middle-class values incarnated by his/her mother and her father-in-law. This one, judging the life of his/her son-in-law " scandaleuse" , decides to send it on a journey towards the the Indies, which it will never reach.

Of return to Paris, it éprend of Jeanne Duval, young mulatto, with whom he will know the charms and the bitternesses of passion. Involved in debt dandy, it is placed under legal supervision, and knows, as of 1842, a miserable life. He then starts to compose several poems of the Fleurs of the evil . Journalist and art critic, it defends in Delacroix the representative of the Romantisme in painting, but also Balzac when the author of the human Comedy sottement is attacked and caricatured for his passion of the figures or his supposed perversity. In 1848, it takes part in the barricades, but wishes especially, says one, to exhort the insurrectionists to shoot Aupick. Later, it shares hatred of Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo for Napoleon III, but without engaging in addition to measure to its work (“the Riot, tempêtant vainly with my pane/will not make raise my face of my desk” - Paysage in " Tables parisiens" collection Flowers of the evil )

the Flowers of the evil appear in 1857 with 500 specimens. The collection will be continued in 1857 for “offense with religious morals” and “insult with public morals and the moralities”. Only this last criminal charge will condemn Baudelaire to a strong fine of 300 francs, which was reduced to 50 francs, following an intervention of the empress Eugenie. The editor, Auguste Chicken-Malassis, for its part discharged fine of 100 francs, and had to cut off six poems whose public prosecutor Ernest Pinard had asked for prohibition ( the jewels ; Léthé ; With that which is too merry ; Lesbos ; damnées Women first poem; metamorphoses of the vampire ). In spite of the relative leniency of sworn, relative with the indictment which aimed 11 poems, this judgment deeply touched the poet, which realized, constrained and forced, a new edition in 1861, enriched by 32 poems. In 1866, the author succeeds in publishing the six condemned parts, accompanied by 16 news, in Brussels, i.e. out of the French jurisdiction, under the title the Wrecks .

The poet leaves then for the Belgium, and fixes himself at Brussels, where it prepares a lampoon against this country, which appears, in its eyes, a caricature of middle-class France. Having a presentiment of the inescapable death of this artificial kingdom, it summarizes its epitaph in a word: " Finally! "

It meets there Félicien Rops, which illustrates the Flowers of the evil . In 1866, Baudelaire undertakes in Belgium a lecture tour where its talents of critic lit on art hardly move crowd. At the time of a visit to the church Saint-Wolf of Namur, Baudelaire has a loss of consciousness, following which it undergoes cerebral disorders, in particular of Aphasie. He dies in Paris of the Syphilis the August 31st 1867, without to have been able to carry out the project of a final edition, as it wished it, of the " Flowers of Mal" , work of a whole life. It is buried with the cemetery of Montparnasse (the 6th division), in the same tomb as his father-in-law, the Aupick general, and than his mother.

Spleen of Paris (otherwise called " Small poems in prose"), finished in 1862, will be published on a purely posthumous basis in 1868, in a new edition altered by Asselineau and Theodore de Banville. At its death, its literary heritage is put at the biddings. Michel Levy (editor) acquires it for 1750 francs. The third edition of the " Flowers of Mal" what prepared Baudelaire, accompanied by the 11 intercalated parts, disappeared with him.

A first demand for revision of the judgment of 1857 was introduced in 1929 per Louis Barthou; however it was satisfied, no procedure not existing at the time for this case. It is by the law of September 25th, 1946 that a right of revision in favor of literary works was instituted, exerçable by the Minister of Justice at the request of the Société of the Men of letters. This one decided, the year even, to require the aforementioned revision for the Flowers of the Evil , which was finally returned, on May 31st, 1949, by the Court of criminal appeal of the Court of appeal.

Glances on work

The Flowers of the evil is a collection which made scandal.

Horror and extase

See also: Spleen baudelairien

“ Any child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings: horror of the life and the extase of the life. ” ( My heart exposed )

All the romantic philosopher's stones testify to this passage of the horror to the extase and the extase to the horror. These impressions are born at Baudelaire from the major feeling from the curse which weighs on the creature since the original fall. In this direction the Fleurs of the Evil belong to the Génie of Christianity .

Analyzing what it called 1805 “the vagueness of passions” in the foreword of to this work, Chateaubriand wrote: “The Christian always looks at himself as a traveller who passes ici-bas in a vale of tears, and which rests only with the tomb. ” For Baudelaire, it is neither about literature, nor of more or less abstract concepts, but “of the live performance of (its) sad misery”. Like nature, the man is soiled by the original sin and, following the example Rene or of Werther (Goethe), Baudelaire tests generally only the dislike for “the cheap multitude” ( Recueillement ). What strikes it especially, it is the selfishness and the spite of the human creatures, their spiritual paralysis, and the absence in them of the direction of beautiful like direction of the good. The prose poem the Cord taking as a starting point a true fact, tells how a mother, indifferent for her child who has just hung himself, seizes the fatal cord to make a profitable trade of it.

Baudelaire was to suffer from it more than very other: the Albatros denounces the pleasure which the evil takes the “vulgar one” to make, and, singularly, to torture the poet. In the Romantic Art , Baudelaire note: “It is one of the extraordinary privileges of the Art which the horrible one, skilfully expressed, becomes beauty and which the rythmée and given rhythm pain fills the spirit of a calm joy. ”. Poems, like the Bad Monk , the Enemy , Guignon show this aspiration to transform the pain into beauty. Little before Baudelaire, Vigny and Musset had also sung the pain.

How Baudelaire could it have accepted the perfectibility of civilizations? It tested only mistaken for the Socialisme on the one hand, the realism and the naturalism on the other hand. With an exception for the naturalist Honore de Balzac in which Baudelaire saw well more than a naturalist (“If Balzac made of this social novel commoner kind an admirable thing, always curious and often sublimates, it is because it threw all his being there. I was astonished many times that the great glory of Balzac was to pass for an observer; it had always seemed to me that its principal merit was to be visionary, and impassioned visionary. ”) The sarcastic remarks with regard to the theories Socialist, realistic and naturalists multiply in his work. As Poe whose it will make the translations, it considers “the Progrès, the great modern idea, like a extase of flycatcher”. To finish some with what it calls “the modern heresies”, Baudelaire still denounces “the heresy of teaching”: “Poetry, for little which one wants to descend in oneself, to question his heart, to point out his memories of enthusiasm, does not have an other goal only itself . I say that if the poet worked towards a moral end, it decreased his poetic force; and it is not imprudent to bet that its work will be bad. ” The poet does not revolt less against the human condition. He says his admiration for great satanic creations of the romanticism like Melmoth (Romance black - gothique - of Charles Robert Maturin). Negation of human misery, the Poetry, in its eyes, can be only Révolte. This one takes a more modern form in the Petits prose poems and is made black Humor.

poetic Art

Rejecting the realism and the Positivism of which it is contemporary, Baudelaire is heir to “art for art's sake” movement parnassien. It sublimates the Sensibilité and seeks to reach the essential truth, the human truth of the universe, which brings it in philosophical terms closer to the platonism. He writes thus in introduction to three of these poems into the Salon of 1846 : “The first business of a Artiste is to substitute the Homme for the Nature and to protest against it. This protest is not made a party taken, coldly, like a code or a rhetoric, it is carried and naive, like the defect, passion, the appetite. ” And he adds in the Salon of 1859 : “The artist, the true artist, the true poet, should paint only according to whether it sees and that it feels . He must be really faithful to his own nature. ”. Baudelaire thus states the fundamental discovery of the modern sensitivity : “ the beautiful one is always odd . I do not want to say that it is voluntarily, coldly odd, because in this case it would be a monster left the rails of the life. I say that it always contains a little bizarrery, of bizarrery nondesired, unconscious, and that it is this bizarrery which makes it be particularly the Beautiful. ”

This is why the Imagination is for him “the queen of faculties”. For the fact, it substitutes “a legendary translation of the external life”; with the action, the Dream. This design of poetry announces that of almost all the poets who will follow. However, Baudelaire did not live its work, “cursed poet”, for him life and poetry, remained, to a certain extent, separate (what it expresses while saying: " Poetry is what there is of more real, which is completely true only in another monde"). Where Baudelaire and Stephan Mallarmé thought only work of art, the surrealist , after Arthur Rimbaud, will think work of life, and will try to bind action and writing. In spite of this divergence with its successors, it was the object of vibrating homages as that which returned to him the Rimbaud young person for which it was a model: “Baudelaire is the first conspicuous one, king of the poets, true God. ” It is enough to compare these some lines of Baudelaire:

“which did not know these admirable hours, true festivals of the brain, where the more attentive directions perceive more resounding feelings, where the sky of a more transparent azure is inserted in a more infinite abyss, where the sounds tinkle musicalement, where the colors speak, and where the perfumes tell worlds of ideas? Eh well, the painting of Delacroix appears to me the translation of these beautiful days of the spirit. It is covered with intensity and its splendor is privileged. Like the nature perceived by ultra-sensitive nerves, it reveals the supernaturalism . ”

with this passage of the First Proclamation of Surrealism :

“To reduce imagination to slavery, when well even it would go there from what is called coarsely happiness, it is to conceal itself with all that one finds, at the bottom of oneself, of supreme justice. Only imagination returns account to me of what can be, and it is enough to raise a little the terrible interdict; enough also so that I give up myself with it without fear to mislead me. ”

Thus, supernaturalism comprises in germ certain aspects of the work of Lautréamont, Rimbaud and the Surréalisme even.

It is in connection with the Peinture of Eugene Delacroix and the work of Théophile Gautier that Baudelaire used of this famous formula which so precisely characterizes its art: “To handle a language learnedly, it is to practice a species of sorcery évocatoire . At this point in time the color speaks, like a major and vibrating voice, that the monuments are drawn up and make covered on major space; that the animals and the plants, representatives of ugly and the evil, articulate to them grimace unambiguous, that the perfume causes the corresponding thought and memory ; whether passion murmurs or howls its eternally similar language. ”

Only Gerard de Nerval, before him, had created a poetry which was not literature. Released from the yoke of the reason, poetry can from now on express the feeling in its brutality.

Already, in its best poems, Baudelaire, like, Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck, preserves worms traditional only its music, avoiding by the irregular Césure S, the rejection S, the Enjambement S the character far too mechanical of the Alexandrin, and thus announces the odd first steps of the worms of Verlaine, the dissonances of Laforgue, which will lead finally to the creation of the free Verse. Without the knowledge, Baudelaire thus founds the bases of what one will call later the symbolism.

Inspired by the reading of Gaspard of the night of Aloysius Bertrand which, the first, had introduced the Prose poem in France, it composes Petits prose poems and explains in its foreword: “Which is that of us who does not have, in its days of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a prose poetic, musical without rate/rhythm and rhyme, rather flexible and run up against enough to adapt to the lyric movements of the heart, with the undulations of the daydream, the sudden starts of the conscience? ”

Jeanne Duval

Jeanne Duval is MUSE of Baudelaire. It represents for him the pure animality.

Poems paying homage to him

the exotic Balcony
Perfume
the Hair
the Snake which dances
carrion
posthumous Sed not satiata
Remords

This last poem, detailing the destiny reserved after the death of Jeanne, is not very eulogistic. It is a bitter and cruel assessment of a relation which did not know to satisfy Baudelaire, source of more than sufferings than of happiness. He concludes himself thus “And the worm will corrode your skin like a remorse. ”

Principal works

Living room of 1845 (1845)
Living room of 1846 (1846)
Fanfarlo (1847), new
Of the wine and the hashish (1851)
Fused (1851)
the romantic Art (1852)
Moral of the toy (1853, rewritten in 1869)
World Fair (1855)
Flowers of the evil (1857)
the Poem of the haschich (1858)
Living room of 1859 (1859)
artificial Paradises (1860)
the Hair (1861)
Reflections on some of my contemporaries (1861)
Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris (1861)
Small prose poems or Spleen of Paris (1862)
the Painter of the modern life (1863)
the work and life of Eugene Delacroix (1863)
My heart exposed (1864)
esthetic Curiosities (1868)
romantic art (1869)
Diaries (1851 - 1862)

Baudelaire was also among the first French translators of Edgar Allan Poe (which it joins together in several collections, in particular the extraordinary Histoires ), that it contributed to make known.

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