at The New Criterion:
Baudelaire’s early suspicion that he had been born under a dark star seemed to be fulfilling itself. He considered becoming a monk but instead went to Belgium. “One becomes a Belgian through having sinned,” he quipped. “A Belgian is his own hell.” While walking to a church one day with the artist Félicien Rops, Baudelaire collapsed. Returning to Paris, he died in 1867 at the age of forty-six. The funeral was held in Montparnasse. Only sixty people showed up to honor the greatest poet France has ever created, but one of the mourners was Manet. Later, the journalist Victor Noir wrote, “in his last moments, his best friend was M. Manet; it was because the two natures understood each other so well.”
Around this time a young Parisian author and playwright, Henri Balesta, wrote a treatise Absinthe et Absintheurs (1860), which was probably (according to the pharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel) the first known book to record the socialization of absinthe abuse. Gradually, an anti-alcohol movement was growing in France as well as England.
more here.