Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), a dandy and flâneur wandering the transformed boulevards of Haussmann's Paris, invented the concept of modernité ('the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable'). He was also the inspired French translator who introduced Edgar Allan Poe to Europe.

In 1857, Baudelaire published Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). The volume shocked bourgeois society by exploring themes of decay, lesbian love, erotic despair, and the existential abyss between spiritual ideal (*l'Idéal*) and soul-crushing boredom (*le Spleen*). Fined and condemned for obscenity alongside Flaubert in 1857, with six poems banned, Baudelaire's radical synesthesia (*Correspondances*) and decadent sensibility opened the path to Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé.