The extent of the influence of Baudelaire's family background on his life and work has been the subject of some interest to critics. In his life-story there are classic ingredients for neurosis, and his adult life was shaped by a triangle of family relations that some believe explains his complicated psyche. Baudelaire's father, François Baudelaire (1759-1827), came from a family of woodworkers, winegrowers, farm laborers, and craftsmen who had lived near the Argonne forest since the seventeenth century. He went to Paris on a scholarship and in the course of a long career there became a priest; worked as a tutor for the children of Count Antoine de Choiseul-Praslin, even composing a manual to teach Latin; resigned his priesthood during the Reign of Terror; married Rosalie Janin, a painter, and had a son, Alphonse Baudelaire (1805-1862); earned a living as a painter; and from the age of thirty-eight until retirement worked his way up the ranks of the civil service.
François Baudelaire was sixty when he married the twenty-six-year-old Caroline Dufayis (1793-1871) in 1819; Charles was their only child, born in Paris on 9 April 1821. Caroline was an orphan: her mother, who came from a family of solicitors from the same part of France as the Baudelaires, died in England, where she had emigrated for unknown reasons; little is known about Caroline's father except that his name was Charles Dufayis and that he was supposed to have died in July 1795 at Quiberon Bay in southern Brittany when Revolutionary forces put down a peasant revolt aided by émigrés.
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