'Ce père nourricier': Revisiting Baudelaire's Family Romance

Setting aside the Œdipal psychodrama played out between Charles Baudelaire and his mother, Madame Aupick, this article revisits Baudelaire’s family romance, emphasising the fantasmatic presence of his natural father, François Baudelaire, who died when the poet was six years old. In particular, the article explores the mythography that Baudelaire constructs around his father – intimately linked in the poet’s imagination to the eighteenth century, to apostasy and to painting – and more particularly, his inscription in Baudelaire’s poetry and art criticism. (SG)