Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire’s dazzlingly complex masterpiece—whose influence reached more widely than almost any other poetic work of the era—generated controversy almost as soon as it was published.
By that time in 1857, Baudelaire, the son of a bourgeois household, had been living in Paris for years, largely devoting himself to bohemian pleasures as he worked on poetry and translations, notably of Edgar Allan Poe. He published 11 poems in the Messager de l’Assemblée in 1851; four years later, the Revue des deux mondes would print 18 more. Then, in 1857, Auguste Poulet-Malassis published Les Fleurs du mal, which consisted of six parts: “Spleen et Idéal” (Spleen and the Ideal), “Tableaux Parisiens” (Parisian Tableaus), “Le Vin” (Wine), “Fleurs du mal” (Flowers of Evil), “Révolte” (Revolt), and “La Mort” (Death).
The erotic and religious themes of 13 poems, in particular, attracted the attention of censors, who soon convened a trial to judge their affront to obscenity laws. (Earlier that year, similar charges had been brought against Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.) On August 20, 1957, the judges ruled that six poems would be eliminated from the work, as they would “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to public decency.” That decision remained in place until 1949.
In the four years after the trial, Baudelaire wrote 35 additional new poems, some of which were included in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, and would also continue his work as a critic, producing influential essays on art and contemporary life, among others. Still, the trial and ensuing notoriety would come to dominate the public’s view of his work, a view that remains simplistic: far from crude, Baudelaire devoted himself to some of the most elemental, yet most complicated, philosophical questions that humans face. In addressing these questions, he often called upon opposing ideas: the tensions of eroticism and religious faith; the thrills of connection against the pleasures of interiority; the pressures of modernity and romanticism alike. Jane Desmarais has noted that “dualism is present everywhere in Baudelaire, and it is part of the reason why his work resists categorization.”
In his essay “The Lesson of Baudelaire,” published in 1921, T. S. Eliot—a deep admirer of Baudelaire—offered this assessment of his work:
More than any poet of his time, Baudelaire was aware of what most mattered: the problem of good and evil. What gives the French Seventeenth Century literature its solidity is the fact that it had its Morals, that it had a coherent point of view. Romanticism endeavoured to form another Morals—Rousseau, Byron, Goethe, Poe were moralists. But they have not sufficient coherence; not only was the foundation of Rousseau rotten, his structure was chaotic and inconsistent. Baudelaire, a deformed Dante (somewhat after the intelligent Barbey d'Aurevilly’s phrase), aimed, with more intellect plus intensity, and without much help from his predecessors, to arrive at a point of view toward good and evil.
