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Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
Charles Baudelaire, “Chant d’Automne” (Song of Autumn)
Forty-six years. Most of them spent pissing off the French establishment and not giving a single fuck about it.
Les Fleurs du mal, The Flowers of Evil. 1857. Poetry about sex, death, decay, the city, beauty found in rot and darkness. Not the romantic, sanitized bullshit everyone else was writing. Real. Ugly. Gorgeous.
The government prosecuted him. Obscenity. Six poems banned. They fined him. Didn’t matter. The book became legendary. He’d shown what poetry could do if you stopped pretending life was pretty.
He was the original flâneur, wandering Paris, observing, documenting. Wrote about prostitutes, lesbians, drug addiction, his own self-loathing. Nothing was off limits.
Art critic too. Championed Delacroix, Manet, modern art when no one else got it. He saw things before anyone else did.
Translated Edgar Allan Poe into French. Made Poe famous in Europe. Saw a kindred spirit in the darkness.
His personal life? A disaster. Syphilis. Opium. Hashish. Debt everywhere. Mistress Jeanne Duval, his “Black Venus”, on and off for years.
1866: stroke. Paralyzed, couldn’t speak. Took him a year to die. Awful way to go for someone whose weapon was words.
The poet who found beauty in sewers and sin. Who wrote about the shadow side of Paris when everyone else was writing odes to spring flowers. Died in 1867, broke, destroyed by his own appetites.
He understood something: beauty and decay are the same thing. We’re all rotting. Might as well write about it honestly.
Shot on infrared film in Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.