Fleurs du mal, Les. The title of Baudelaire's great collection of lyric poems appears to have been suggested by the critic Hippolyte Babou (1824-78), and was first used by Baudelaire when he published a sequence of 18 poems under that title in 1855. A substantial proportion of the poems included in the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal had been completed by the mid-1840s, and at intervals during the 1840s and early 1850s Baudelaire announced their forthcoming publication, first under the title of Les Lesbiennes (1845-7) and then of Les Limbes (1848-51), under which title a sequence of 11 sonnets did indeed appear in 1851. When Les Fleurs du mal was published in book form in late June 1857 its often scabrous and sacrilegious content immediately attracted the attention of the authorities, and on 20 August 1857 Baudelaire was fined 300 francs by the Sixième Chambre Correctionnelle for ‘outrage à la morale publique’; in addition, six poems in the collection were ordered to be suppressed. A second edition appeared in February 1861, ‘rajeuni, accru et fortifié’, in Baudelaire's words, by a large number of new poems composed in 1859-60, notably ‘La Chevelure’, ‘Les Sept Vieillards’, ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, ‘Le Cygne’, and the new collection's culminating piece, ‘Le Voyage’.
In February 1866 Poulet-Malassis published the six banned poems, along with 17 other poems, in a Belgian edition entitled Les Épaves; the condemnation of 1857 was finally quashed in May 1949. A third edition of Les Fleurs du mal containing 25 extra poems, some of them juvenilia or discarded works, others (notably ‘L'Imprévu’ and ‘Recueillement’) post-1861 compositions, was prepared by Banville and published after Baudelaire's death.
Baudelaire was adamant that his ‘livre atroce’ was not ‘un pur album’ and that the individual poems yielded their full significance only when read within the ‘cadre sigulier’ in which he had set them. Introduced by the celebrated dedicatory piece ‘Au lecteur’, the 100 poems of the 1857 edition were divided into five sequences or ‘chapters’ (‘Spleen et Idéal’, ‘Fleurs du mal’, ‘Révolte’, ‘Le Vin’, and ‘La Mort’), while a new section, ‘Tableaux parisiens’, was inserted into the revised structure used for the 126 poems of the 1861 edition. Les Fleurs du mal records, in poetry in which lyricism and irony are fused, the quest of divided modern man for an ‘ideal’—variously sought in art, eroticism, travel, drugs, and political, social, and metaphysical revolt—that forever eludes him, plunging him back into the agony of isolation and despair that Baudelaire called ‘spleen’. Oscillating from one extreme to another, the quest is open-ended, ever to be renewed, and takes the seeker beyond the realms of life and death ‘au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau’ (‘Le Voyage’).
[Richard Burton]
Bibliography
- J. Prévost, Baudelaire: essai sur la création et l'inspiration poétiques (1953)
- A. Fairlie, Baudelaire: ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ (1960)
- F. W. Leakey, Baudelaire and Nature (1969)
