Sharl Bodler

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet and critic.

He was born in Paris. His father was François Baudelaire, a man of peasant origin who became a senator in the Napoleonic era. In the year of his son’s birth, he was 62 years old, while his wife was only 27. François Baudelaire was an artist and, from early childhood, instilled in his son a love of art, took him to museums and galleries, and introduced him to his artist friends. But the boy lost his father, apparently killed in battle, in the year he turned six. A year later Charles’s mother married General Aupick; the boy never got along with his stepfather. His mother’s remarriage left a deep mark on Charles’s character, and in adolescence and youth, in defiance of the opinions of his stepfather and mother, he often committed acts that shocked society.

When Charles was 11, the family moved to Lyon, and the boy was sent to a boarding school. In 1836 the Aupicks returned to Paris, and Charles entered the Collège Louis-le-Grand, from which he was expelled just one year before graduation. In May 1841 Baudelaire was sent on a trip to India (as a punishment), so that he might “shake off the bad influence” of the bohemian circle of the Latin Quarter. The trip lasted only two months; he never reached India and turned back from Réunion Island: homesickness for the homeland he had left compelled him to return to Paris. In 1841 he came into his inheritance; however, he quickly began to squander his father’s money, and in 1844, by court order, control of the estate was transferred to his mother, while Charles himself was henceforth to receive only a modest monthly sum for “pocket money.”

He began writing when he received his inheritance and started living the life of a wealthy idler. Baudelaire’s first poems were published in 1843–1844 in the magazine L’Artiste. The most important period in the formation of Baudelaire’s overall worldview and literary orientation was the late 1840s and early 1850s. Baudelaire’s fate in these years embodied the lot of that part of the French intelligentsia which shared