Jacques Aupick

Jacques Aupick (28 February 1789 – 27 April 1857) was a French general and politician. He was the stepfather of the poet Charles Baudelaire.

Biography Aupick was the apparent son of a soldier of the Irish Brigade who was mortally wounded at Hondschoote in 1793. The orphaned child's original given name, James, was gallicized to Jacques. After his father's death, he was raised by Pierre Jean Baptiste Louis Baudart, a defrocked former curé of Gravelines. Aupick entered the Prytanée national militaire in 1802, and in 1808 went on to the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr.

In March 1809, he was named second lieutenant of the 105th Infantry Regiment. He spent a brief time in Spain with the 105th, then in 1813 was transferred to the 145th Infantry where he ascended to the rank of capitaine adjudant-major. He fought at Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden and Leipzig, then in 1815 with the 46th Infantry at Fleurus, where he was hit in the knee by a cannonball. Dufaÿs was already pregnant at the time of wedding; the couple then traveled to Creil, so that Caroline's confinement could be made quiet; she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. and on May 12, 1839, in the repression of the insurrection organized in Paris by the Society of Seasons. then from 1855 Counselor General of the Canton of Gravelines, in the Nord department.

In 1855, he bought a house in Honfleur to which his widow would later retire.

Relationship with Charles Baudelaire Tension existed between Aupick and his stepson from very early in their relationship, but anecdotes like that of Nadar, who recounts that Baudelaire locked his mother in her bedroom to prevent her from consummating her marriage to Aupick, and Aupick seems to have felt initial affection for Baudelaire as well; however, their relationship soured in the early years as Aupick tried to instill a sense of duty in a child whose penchants towards extravagance and idleness were early very pronounced. for his widowed mother.

In his study on Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: "The role of the General was prime in the process of self-punishment ... and it is also true that the terrible Aupick seems to have incarnated himself in the mother of the poet ... After the death of her husband, she takes up, despite herself, his crushing role of law-enforcer."