Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 9, 1821, the son of François Baudelaire and the young Caroline. After her husband's death in 1827, she married Commander Aupick, later a general and French ambassador to Spain, with whom Baudelaire would soon become incompatible. When he reaches the age of majority, he claims his paternal inheritance, which he will squander, consumes opium and hashish (an experience that is at the origin of The Artificial Paradises, from 1860) and has a relationship with the actress Jeanne Duval. Known mainly for his poetry, Baudelaire also wrote literary and artistic criticism, essays, novels and translations, of which a substantial part of Edgar Alan Poe's work stands out. His books The Painter of Modern Life (1863), the posthumous work The Spleen of Paris (1869) or The Flowers of Evil (1857), a masterpiece of modern poetry that scandalized French society at the time and condemned the author to the dock, remained for posterity. With his health already weakened by syphilis, Baudelaire was paralyzed after a fall in the church of St. Loup, eventually dying years later, on August 31, 1867.