France: Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet, essayist, literary critic and opium addict. Photographer unknown, 1860s

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century.

Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term 'modernity' (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Baudelaire worked on a translation and adaptation of Thomas de Quincey's 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'. He contributed various articles to Eugene Crepet's 'Poètes francais; Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch' (French poets; Artificial Paradises: opium and hashish, 1860). He smoked opium and drank to excess, causing his early death in 1867, but he is posthumously remembered as a literary giant.

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