Charles Pierre Baudelaire 1821 - 1867

Charles Pierre Baudelaire 1821 - 1867 was a nineteenth century French poet, critic and translator.

Baudelaire was a friend of Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Paul Ferdinand Gachet, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Edouard Manet and many others.

Baudelaire was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg.

The poet Theophile Gautier, for instance, received hashish samples from Moreau de Tours. In 1843 he described extensively a self-experienced hashish intoxication in the Paris newspaper La Presse under the title ‘Le Club des Hachichins’. The club of hashish eaters, of which Gauthier was one of the founders, had regular meetings in Hôtel Pimodan on the Seine island of St Louis.

He and Charles Baudelaire shared a penthouse in the hotel for several years. Other prominent club members were Alexandre Dumas and Honore Daumier. Further well known contemporaries such as Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo participated occasionally.

Baudelaire was born in Paris, France in 1821. His father, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, died during Baudelaire’s childhood in 1827. The following year, his mother, Caroline, thirty four years younger than his father, married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts.