Baudelaire will always be the first modern man

He was a rebel who believed in art for art’s sake, writes Kevin Childs. His life was scarred by alcoholism, penury and complicated love, but in the end Baudelaire changed what it meant to be a poet and a man

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet, 1847 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier)

In a small garret room on the Isle Saint Louis in Paris, Charles Baudelaire sits and writes. He has a fuming pipe in his mouth, a book propped against his table, and there is a gleaming white goose quill jutting out from its ink pot. His face is pink and yellow and there’s a boozy flush on his cheeks, a gleam of light on the tip of his nose.

One pale, thin hand rests on the side of the sofa jammed up against the corner of the room to act as day bed and work station, everything is doubled up, economised, spare, except for the flash of an extravagant gold silk cravat about his neck that betrays the shoestring dandy. In Gustave Courbet’s portrait, Baudelaire’s teaming brain is reconstituting life as poetry, foraging in the gutter for jewels, but, above all, searching for a way to distil the beauty of the eternal present.

On this occasion he’d been reading a little too much of the sort of political sermonising to the poor that ushered in the revolution of 1848 and he needed a drink. Lacing up his good English boots, a little down at heel, but serviceable still, he heads for a tavern not far away, only to be accosted at the door by a beggar, a particularly decrepit example, he thinks, of the very people who were the object of all his reading. Instead of giving him a few centimes, Baudelaire sets about him with his fists and boots, provoking the much stronger beggar into giving him a real black-eyed drubbing. Now on the ground, with the other man towering over him, through bloodied and broken teeth, laughing, the poet calls a truce: “Monsieur, you are my equal! Do me the honour of sharing with me my purse. And remember, if you are truly philanthropic, to apply to your brothers, when they demand money from you, the theory that I’ve taken pains to drum into your bones.”