Charles Pierre Baudelaire
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Charles Pierre Baudelaire
April 9, 1821 Ð- August 31, 1867
Baudelaire was born in Paris.
His father was a senior civil servant and an amateur artist who died in 1837. In the following year his mother married a lieutenant colonel named Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various courts.
Baudelaire was educated in Lyon and at the CollДÐge Louis-le-Grand in Paris. On gaining his degree in 1839 he decided to embark upon a literary career, and for the next two years led an irregular life. It is believed that he contracted syphilis during this period.
To straighten him out, his guardians sent him on a voyage to India, he never even made it there.
When he returned to Paris,his lavish spending threatened to exhaust his small inheritance, and his family obtained a decree to place his property in trust.
In this period he met Jeanne Duval, a mulatta who was to become his longest romantic association.
He took part in the revolutionaries in 1848, and for some years was interested in republican politics.
Baudelaire was a slow worker, and it was not until 1857 that he produced his first and most famous volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”).
The poems found a small appreciative audience, but greater public attention was given to their inappropriate subject matter. The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalou.
Baudelaire, his publisher, and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals.
In the poem “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”) that prefaces Les fleurs du mal, Baudelaire accuses his readers of hypocrisy and of being as guilty of sins and lies as the poet.
Five of the poems were suppressed, but printed later as Les Д‰paves (“The Wrecks
His other works include Petits PoДÐmes es prose, a series of art reviews published in the Pays, Exposition universelle (“Country, World Fair) and Un Dernier Chapitre de lhistoire des oeuvres de Balzac (“A Final Chapter of the history of works of Balzac”) in which his criticism turns against his friends HonorД© de Balzac, ThД©ophile Gautier, and GД©rard de Nerval.
He found Edgard Allan Poes tales and poems and claimed