Charles Baudelaire, The Self Indulgent Dandy

Charles Baudelaire was the epitome of all French poets, past and present.  Reading his poetry and prose leaves no doubt to the woundedness of his soul.  His tortured emotions that brilliantly sculpted every word of his prose and poetry spewed from a gaping deep wound in his psyche.

His words rip though your own illusions about life and love, pushing you to  limits , whether you agree with   his views or not.   He was not for sissies,  prudes, nor the righteous pious ones, but if his poetry appeared today, it probably would raise only a few eyebrows.

Charles Baudelaire did not know any boundaries , and if he did, he ripped through society’s conventional  umbrella,  like a  sword makes a jagged tear in the cultural fabric of his  time.

He was a living breathing dichotomy as much as his poetry was, as he revelled in opposites of one extreme to another.  Unconventional and eccentric, he was known to test acquaintances by making shocking statements, before further engaging with them.

He strutted around Paris  as an elitist dressed to the gills in the finest of haberdashery, fashioning himself as a magnetic flashing dandy, yet who much preferred to bed slutty mistresses rather than bourgeois women from his own class.

He had a lot of ambivalent feelings around women, sometimes putting them on mythological pedestals, like madonnas or reducing them down to whores. He often equated sensual women as evil torturers of the flesh.   In his poem La Fountain du Sang, he wrote that “love for me is a bed of needles.”.

His poems about women are sensual, explicit, guttural, raw, and sometimes vulgare.  Many were about taboo themes of lesbianism, and prostitutes  meant to shock the prevailing morals of his time.

Shock, he indeed succeeded doing.   When Flowers of Evil was published,  it was quickly condemned for corrupting societal morals for which he was levied a heavy fine.

Withdrawn from sales, Baudelaire had to remove the most offending poems.  They were later published under the title Les Epaves.

Only after writing a letter to Empress Eugenie, was the fine reduced, but his reputation remained tarnished. Eventually he presented two sanitized versions of Fleurs du Mal, for which he wrote some new poems.

He makes for an absolutely  fascinating character and personality study.  Obviously there can’t be a totally complete analysis of Charles Baudelaire, unless you knew him intimately.     Therefore I proceed with caution, looking at his life and his behaviour with my own knowledge of  current psychiatric thought and philosophy that wasn’t a part of  his lifetime.

I am writing this as a therapist, not a literary critic,.  This is a study of a man, his thoughts, his personality,  his behaviour, but not his works, which I leave to those whose  who are experts in poetry and literature of 19 century France.

He certainly would have been a very interesting patient, who probably would have delighted in playing with   a Freudian or Lacanian therapist’s psycho babble, which unfortunately still strangles current French psychotherapeutic circles, who have not caught up with the rest of the psychiatric/therapeutic world.

The most revealing window into Charles Baudelaire psyche , was provided by reading letters he wrote to his mother, some lovers, and friends.  The emerging portrait,  along with insights gathered here and there all went to form the following thoughts and opinions.

Charles Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821 in Paris, France.  His family’s house on Rue Hautfeuille was eventually destroyed, when Haussmann paved the way for Blvd Saint German.   A plaque commemorating his birth on an adjoining building on this ancient street , fashioned with two medieval turrets is seen in the photos.

His mother, Caroline Dufayis who was an orphan, married Francois Baudelaire, when she was 26 years old.  His father was 60-year-old, an artist and former Catholic priest, who reigned from a well off bourgeois family.

Charles was only 6 years old, when his father died. Within less than a year, his mother had met and married Jacques  Aupick, a career military man, who later became a general and diplomat.   Charles led a privileged childhood, attending only the best schools, both in Lyon and in Paris.

The first notion of his rebelliousness started when he was kicked out of Louis Le Grand Lycee, one of the most prestigious high schools in Paris, for refusing to give his professor a note passed.  By this time his ever-present smoldering dislike of his stepfather surfaced, whom Charles referred as “the general”.

Charles eventually passed his baccalaureate, and moved into an apartment in his natal Latin Quarter neighborhood,  where he hung around with other young poets  for two years.

Because of his scandalous lifestyle, frequenting  prostitutes, his stepfather decided to ship him off to India, much against Charles protests, who  jumped off his ship at Ile Maurice, where he spent time there and in Reunion.

He had already been diagnosed with syphilis at 18, which at that time was treated with mercury salve and tincture of opium for headaches and intestinal problems he had.  Baudelaire eventually became addicted to landanum, as it was called requiring progressively larger doses.

Upon his return to Paris, he met Jeanne Duval, a mulatto, who was to become  his  sporadic life long mistress. Their off and on relationship was as tumultuous and tormented as Charles, and she became the subject of many of his poems.

Her personality mirrored many aspects of Charles Baudelaire, which was why their relationship remained tumultuous. They fought tooth and nail, yet never were able to flee completely from each other.

He called her the “Venus Noire” and in his collection of Flowers of Evil, she seemingly dominate his poems about women.  She was described as being deceptive, a liar, debauched, spendthrift, alcoholic, ignorant and stupid.

In letters to his mother Baudelaire complained about never being able to exchange any intellectual thoughts with her.  Yet, he wrote in extremely demeaning terminology, that a “woman’s stupidity preserved her beauty, preventing wrinkles and was a divine cosmetic”.

Within two years of his return, Charles had gone through over half of his father’s inheritance and his family insisted on appointing  a legal administrator of his funds, who remained in place most of his life.

Apollonie Sabatier, who was known as having been a  mistress to several men, was at least described as being as intelligent and was admired socially.  Charles wooed her with anonymous letters and after she succumbed to his seduction, when he revealed his identity, he quickly rejected her.  In a letter he stated that with her  reciprocity, she had lost her Goddess stature and had become to him “a mere woman”.

He met actress Marie Daubrun in his later 30’s.   He wrote to her some of the most elegant romantic love prose ever written, that equaled the time of l’amour courtois.  Despite these amorous overtures, he was unfaithful to her too. Whether this prevented her from  investing fully her feelings, she broke up their brief relationship, to return to a previous lover.

Charles felt a strong kinship with Egar Allen Poe who he greatly admired. Though they never met, he translated several works of Poe, including The Raven for the French press.

He also dabbled in painting and his interest in collecting art served to only increase his debts.  He was friends with the painter Delacroix, whose house was in the sixth arrondissement.

By 1864, his financial status worsened. One publishing house stopped publishing his prose and he sold the rights of his Poe translations for a cash sum to help ease the situation.    He decided to move to Brussels in hopes of making money giving lectures , which was not very successful.

Two years later while still living in Brussels, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.  This was to be a result of tertiary syphilis as he had several previous recurring bouts.

In addition to the paralysis, he developed aphasia. He could only express himself with monosyllables . Because of this, his mother brought him back to Paris for treatment.

This tortuous situation must have been hell for this brilliant poet, who had such a rich repertoire of words.    Seventeen months later on August 31, 1867, Charles Baudelaire died.

I  will start my personality commentary by looking at the three major relationships in his life, each serving to demonstrate pathologic flaws in his personality and his feelings toward women.   Baudelaire felt enslaved by his convictions that women could be immortalised as goddesses of love or a guardian angel, or either reduced to objects of extreme sexual pleasure,  decried as pawns of satan.

All of his poetry had blatant dichotomies, as if he was always vacillating  between opposing poles of good and evil.  In one of his poems, he expressed that”in every man, at any time, there are always two simultaneous  polarities, one towards God and the other toward satan.”

These themes of original sin and man’s fallen nature are woven throughout his poetry, especially in regard to sexual pleasure weighing heavy on Augustinian theology around sins of the flesh.

I suspect that Baudelaire had traits of  madonna whore syndrome, which I hope to write about in a future post.  In a nutshell, men can over idealise women, usually their wives, elevating them to Madonna or mother figures, but find it very difficult to relate to them sexually.

With the good saintly women, they can love, but not be sexual, and with the sexualized women, can feel desire, but generally not love.  This splitting is quite evident in Baudelaire’s thoughts and feelings about women.

Madonna whore stems generally from having extremely close and dependent relationships with their mother, which they then project onto other women that they love, but because of the obvious taboo of sexual feelings towards one’s mother, their sexual interest diminishes or even disappears.

Baudelaire had a very dependant relationship with his mother, with some hostile overtones, which were mostly covert.   I certainly feel he suffered abandonment issues when she remarried shortly after his father died.

I suspect he felt intense displacement from being the center of his mothers love, and this caused a deep narcissistic wound to  his undeveloped ego, predisposing him to having ambivalent feelings of love and need versus fear and resentment towards women as an adult.

Sometimes his resentment towards his mother, that he could not be fully expressed out of fear of being abandoned, was acted out with relationships with other women.

There is a clear vacillation between adoration and demeaning women in his life.  In one of his letters to his mother, he said that when women give birth and become mothers, they become madonna like and could only then be morally equivalent to man.

Some in the past have considered him bohemian, but I see him more as a narcissistic elitist.  He was extremely self indulgent, having to have the finest clothing and lived most of the time in very prestigious  locations.

He was unable to have any real self denial of material goods, freely spending whatever money he earned, then repetitively asking his mother for more.  His habit of moving from one apartment of hotel to another to escape his creditors shows sociopathic traits.

He accuses them of “stealing” from him, rather than quilt for not paying his bills.  In letters he often admitting to  having fits of rage.  In the letters I read, written to his mother, he used tremendous manipulation with her, in order to constantly extrapolate more money.

He was as nomadic sexually  as he was in his dwellings, reportedly living in 40 different locations in Paris during his lifetime.  Promiscuity, infidelity, manipulation,  and chaotic relationships characterised his behavior.

This along with his fits of anger, chaotic  relationships, substance abuse, manipulation, over idealization then de idealization, splitting,   makes me think that he had a borderline personality disorder.

One can have a mixed personality disorder with varying traits of other personality disorders, such as narcissistic and sociopathic, which  his complex convoluted personality and behavior exemplifies.

I think he also suffered from major depressive disorder, recurring, as he often mentioned to his mother his episodic melancholy, and that he wanted to die.  At one time he did attempt suicide.

Genius and talent can come from tormented complicated individuals.  I have often thought that psychic pain provides a well of agitated energy that can indeed unleash  talents that would not have ever surfaced before.

Certainly the life and brilliant work of Charles Baudelaire  is a testimony of his extraordinary talents and gifts, despite all we could decipher   or pronounce as being psychologically  maligned.

If any thing we could take away from his life, it that human talent and expertise  is really beyond our full comprehension.  His psychological and personality deficits are not uncommon in his field and in others.

Charles Baudelaire shared with us his exquisite poetry that broke through the oppressed silence of his Époque.  His expressions, however salacious and provocative  may underlined the unspoken  feelings that may also lurk underneath the psyches of others.

Addendum:  I spent all of sunday afternoon taking photos of some of swellings and views that were a part of his like, but due to problems with my iphoto upload, I can not load to my post at this time.