Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821, in Paris, France. His father, Joseph-François Baudelaire, had been ordained as a priest, but left the priesthood during the French Revolution (1789—1799) and worked as a tutor, giving him connections with high levels of French aristocracy. He was sixty years old when he met and married Baudelaire's mother, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, who was twenty-six. Baudelaire was six when his father died. For a short time, his mother showered him with affection, but the following year she married Jacques Aupick, a military man who eventually rose through the ranks of the military to become an ambassador and then a senator. Aupick was strict with his stepson, sending him away to military school, where Baudelaire began a lifelong struggle against authority.

Baudelaire was expelled from high school in 1839, though he received his degree later that year. He soon decided that...