The Family and Cultural Influences of Charles Baudelaire, Instigator of Modernity

Abstract

To celebrate the bicentennial of Charles Baudelaire, this article seeks to reconstruct the family and social universe of the Parisian poet in order to better perceive, through the nodal encounters experienced during his short life, the singularities of his poetry. In fact, certain people definitely influenced the poet and art critic to revolutionize the nineteenth-century poetic vision. A stepfather who arrives abruptly to break the family harmony impregnated with the love of art previously professed by the father; the black African beauty discovered during a trip to the southern hemisphere and sublimated ever since as one of the most inspiring female figures; Parisian friends, poets, painters, or even critics, who marked the constant exchanges with the accursed poet with a unique and distinctive stamp; love relationships personified by the ideal muse endowed with a triple facet: wife, sister and daughter. And this brief tour ends with a crucial, albeit ephemeral, meeting for serving as a synthesis of the Baudelairian poetic ars, To a Passerby.