Charles Baudelaire: life, work, genius

The biography of Baudelaire written by his friend Charles Asselineau is a golden opportunity to get to know the Poet in his most intimate self, the dedication to his 'activitas', the yearning to marry life with thought, in the amazing union of action. and dream


di Marco Maculotti
book review by CHARLES ASSELINEAU
“Charles Baudelaire: the life, the work, the genius”,
Bietti, “l'Archeometro” series, Milan, 2016.


La biography of Baudelaire written by my close friend Charles Asselineauand recently published in a new edition by Bietti — allows us to get to know Baudelaire not so much the accursed poet or icon of a generation at the watershed between two eras, but rather the Baudelaire intimate, in all his touching and amazing humanity. His irrepressible and counter-current attitude, dedication to studies and devotion to the work of Théodore de Banville and Edgar Allan Poe, the yearning for make your life a manifesto of intent.

In the final pages of the text is enclosed the de Profundis more significant that Asselineau dedicated to his friend, and that we report here at the beginning, since there can be no better presentation of Baudelaire (p. 101):

« …his work is not all that he has left us. What an example was the life of this poet, who sacrificed nothing of his conviction and always went straight on his way, without second thoughts or obliquities. Perhaps here lies the secret of his strength. As soon as he felt that what he was doing was not like Baudelaire, he stopped: and no consideration, advantage, money, favor or publicity could make him take one step further. He remained whole and intact. Never has a writer been more wholly absorbed in his work, nor has a work been a more exact reflection of its author. »

The edition includes, in addition to the text by Asselineau published for the first time in 1868, with related notes, a introduction by Massimo Carloni and a large appendix containing anecdotes, Asselineau's "speech on Baudelaire's tomb" and a series of letters between the two - and more. As Carloni writes in the introduction, referring to the biography published by Asselineau, «the book alternates between the bibliographic events and a first critical study of the work which announces the advent of modernity in the culture of the time, outlining the subjects, places, forms and , in some ways, destiny, marked by a metaphysical vision which in Baudelaire remains profoundly anti-modern» (introduction, p. 13).

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Charles Asselineau

Charles Asselineau, born in 1820 in Paris, was part, like Baudelaire (born 1821) and Banville (born 1823) of the «literary revolution of 1830 exploded in France... which had in Hugo the almighty god and in Gautier the prophet» (introduction, p. 7). If the human portrait of Baudelaire is splendidly outlined by Asselineau in his biography, that of Asselineau is excellently reconstructed by Carloni in the introduction, short but punctual, in which the time and space in which the «fascinating and tragic vortex of that bohemian Parisian» fell like a storm on the life and destiny of some young French intellectuals.

Carloni recovers the impressions of Théodore de Banville, according to which Asselineau of the poets was above all the friend, in good times as in bad, the adviser, the guardian angel of their work, ready to host them «in his only room, in the midst of his rare collections, as a peasant of Attica would welcome the traveling Gods in his modest thatched abode» (introduction, p. 9).

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From reading Baudelaire's biography, it emerges that Asselineau does not hesitate to digress on the numerous anecdotes - many of which invented from scratch by his gossipy contemporaries - or on the rumors circulating about Baudelaire: not in this sense does he intend to divulge the private life of the poet. On the contrary, by 'private life' we do not mean gossip or intimate secrets, but rather the deepest attitude of the French genius, which only in 'private life', when he was in the company of his closest associates, gushed like fresh spring water. The 'private life', therefore, how existential microcosm, in which the poetic work and the poet's pure action intersect in a palpable way, even more perhaps than in his most inspired compositions. So Asselineau (pp. 23-24):

« In this biography of a Spirit, I will not let myself be drawn into the quicksand of anecdote and gossip. However, I must confess, certain extravagances of dress, furniture, conduct, certain eccentricities of language and opinion which scandalized the hypocritical vanity of fools, always offended by blows inflicted on banality, perhaps did they not indicate the side taken by the revolt and hostility against vulgar conventions that bursts out in the "Flowers of Evil", a need to engage in the struggle, causing daily and continuously amazement and irritation in the majority? Was life married to thought, that union of action and dream invoked in one of his boldest poems… Let us add that such extravagances, capable of irritating only fools, had never weighed on friends… For him they also represented a touchstone against strangers. A bizarre question or a paradoxical statement served him to judge the person he was dealing with; and, if by the tone of the answer and by the demeanor he recognized someone equal to him, an initiate, he immediately became again what he naturally was, the best and most frank of the companions. »

Asselineau recalls on several occasions «the love of combat, that contempt for majorities which led him to enjoy the insults of the short-sighted and the habitual». Attitudes that are revealed from the very first works of the young Baudelaire, The Salon of 1845 e The Salon of 1846, pamphlets in which all the «horror of compromises and respects, the authoritarian and dogmatic tone» emerges; «no recourse to sentiment, to the aid of poetic phrases, to conciliatory speech: a rigorous demonstration, a clear and firm style, a logic that went straight to its goal, regardless of objections or temperaments» (p. 31). Especially in the second booklet, his aversion to the "middle-class" and "false artists", which he defined as "hoarders" and "Pharisees" (p.33).

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Charles Baudelaire

The author defines men like Baudelaire bohemian, «epithet whose meaning is difficult to explain if you don't understand it starting fromforcibly created isolation around those who only care about what others disdain». These extraordinary individuals are "those who are enthusiastic only about the beautiful, whose only ambition is to do well, and who for this reason are considered skeptics by politicians and moralists". In this sense, bohemian is a synonym of dandy as Baudelaire understood it, i.e. «the perfect man, sovereignly independent, subordinate only to himself, who reigns over the world, disdaining it. The writer-dandy despises common opinion and is attached only to the beautiful, always according to his particular conception »(p. 36).

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From this perspective, the world in which the dandy spends his life appears as a separate microcosm, equally detached from both the 'morals' and value dogmas of the ruling class and the progressive intelligentsia as well as from the 'gut regurgitation' of the 'popular': «The dandy - wrote Baudelaire himself - does nothing: he despises every function. How to imagine a dandy who speaks to the people if not to mock them?» (p. 60, note 13). Not that Baudelaire detested intellectual activity, mind you. “No one was less drudge of him". But «if on the one hand he loved work, understood as art, on the other he abhorred work as a function» because he was «too respectful of himself to be able to become a money-making author"(P. 54).

«In everything, in religion as in politics, Baudelaire was sovereignly autonomous, since it depended solely on his nerves... What made him so was what he called "the power of the fixed idea”. Nothing better than constant thought and a single purpose preserves life from party commitments. For Baudelaire, the goal was the Beautiful; his sole ambition was literary glory.' And, to follow, a quote from Baudelaire himself, who reads (p. 46): «The poet does not belong to any party; otherwise he would be a man like the others».

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Gustave Courbet, portrait by Charles Baudelaire, 1847.

Among the poets, we remember the sincere admiration that Baudelaire felt for one of his 'equals', Theodore de Banville, which Asselineau sees as 'complementary' of Baudelaire to the point of recognizing in the relationship between the two a splendid Coniuctio oppositorum: «never has there been such a sharp opposition of genius and nature as that between these two poets, of equal talent, to the point of being able to affirm that each complemented the other, and that between them the admiration, as well as friendship lived on contrasts". And then, Asselineau confirms his observation with the homage that Baudelaire dedicated to Banville, introduced by an admirable excursus on the 'demonic' in modern art, of which Baudelaire probably considered himself one of the most significant exponents (pp. 37-38):

« Beethoven began to shake the worlds of melancholy and incurable despair, massed like clouds in the inner sky of man. Maturin in the novel, Byron in the poem and Poe in the analytic novel have admirably expressed the blasphemous side of passion: they have projected splendid, glittering rays on the Lucifer latent, installed in every human heart. I mean that modern art has an essentially demonic tendency. And it seems that this infernal part of man, which man delights in inflicting on himself, increases day by day, as if the devil amused himself by artificially increasing it, like the breeders, patiently fattening mankind in his courtyards, to prepare a more succulent meal. — But Théodore de Banville refuses to turn towards these marshes of blood, in these abyss of mud. Like ancient art, he only expresses what is beautiful, joyful, noble, grand, rhythmic. Furthermore, you will never perceive in his works the dissonances, the musical discordances of the sabbath, nor the moans of irony, this vengeance of the vanquished. In his verses, everything has a taste of celebration and innocence, even of voluptuousness. His poetry is not just a regret, a nostalgia; it is also a voluntary return to the heavenly state. From this point of view, we can consider him as an original of the bravest kind. In full satanic or romantic atmosphere, in the midst of a concert of curses, he has the audacity to sing of the goodness of the gods and to be a perfect Environment. I would like this word to be understood in the noblest sense, in the truly historical sense. »

If Théodore de Banville appeared to Asselineau - and to Baudelaire himself - as his 'complementary', there was another great author who enjoyed the poet's highest esteem and who, unlike Banville, presented an attitude markedly similar to that of Baudelaire : and this author was the Bostonian Edgar Allan Poe. Asselineau writes (p. 51): «From the very first reading he was inflamed with admiration for that unknown genius, in many respects similar to his own. Rarely have I seen such complete, lightning-fast, absolute possessions».

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From that moment on, wherever he went, whoever he came across, Baudelaire spoke only of Poe and drew execrably anyone who did not know the author or his works. «How could anyone live without knowing in detail who Poe was, his life and his works?». His obsession with Poe reached the point that "he would not allow any of his friends to ignore the slightest biographical circumstance of his hero and would get angry if they missed a comic intention, an allusion or subtlety" (p. 52).

From this electrocution was born the Baudelaire's Promethean project of translating Poe's works into French. The work was impeccable and obsessive: to better understand the "tavern" nautical vocabulary of the Adventures of Gordon Pym, Baudelaire spent countless hours in port taverns, looking for English sailors who, between a pint and another, could be of help to him. Théodore de Banville also reported that, while translating Poe, Baudelaire made use of "carefully cleaned atlases, charts and mathematical instruments... he verified Gordon Pym's nautical calculations and wanted to personally ensure their accuracy" (p. 60, note 10). It was the "power of the fixed idea" in action, the obsessive pursuit of Perfection - seen as an Ideal - that always distinguished theactivities by Baudelaire.

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First edition of “Les Fleurs du Mal”, Paris, 1857.

A separate chapter could not fail to be dedicated tomaximum work of the poet, The evil flowers, and above all to lawsuit against the author which followed its publication in Paris in 1857. That legal proceeding «aroused in Baudelaire a naïve astonishment. He could not understand… how a work of such high spirituality could be the subject of a legal action. He felt wounded in his dignity as a poet, as a writer respectful of his art and of himself…» (p. 67). Asselineau, as a colleague and close friend, launches in this chapter into a real defensive speech of Baudelaire's work: an apology that today may appear pleonastic yet at the time it was elaborated it was far from being taken for granted.

And, on the other hand, even in the times in which we find ourselves writing, 150 years after the death of Charles Baudelaire, it begins to meander once again, on the wave of stars and stripes neo-Puritan hysteria, the ghost of the most vacuous and hypocritical moralism, destined to infect Art — with a capital letter — leveraging on the servility of those who live too deep in the mud to rise to the heights of Poetry. A bitter lesson that Baudelaire learned the hard way, and which decreed his own damnatio memoriae. And ultimately it could not be otherwise, since

The Poet resembles the prince of clouds
Who inhabits the storm and laughs at the archer;
But an exile on earth, in the midst of ridicule,
Because of giant wings he can't walk.

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Cover of the Bietti edition, 2016.