Les Fleurs du mal
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Les Fleurs du mal (literal trans. "The Flowers of Evil") is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. The poems represented the near-totality of his poetic output since 1840. First published in 1857, the poems were of influence to the symbolists and modernists. Their subject matter deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. A number of the poems were banned in France following an obscenity trial on August 20, 1857. Ernest Pinard, the magistrate who ruled the case had also been involved in the Madame Bovary trial.
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Background
The Flowers of Evil
Baudelaire was a slow and fastidious worker, often sidetracked by indolence, emotional distress and illness, and it was not until 1857 that he published his first and most famous volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes (Review of Two Worlds), when they were published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis.
The poems found a small, appreciative audience, but greater public attention was given to their subject matter. The effect on fellow artists was, as Théodore de Banville stated, "immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxious fear". Flaubert, recently attacked in a similar fashion for Madame Bovary (and acquitted), was impressed and wrote to Baudelaire: "You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist".
The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and wine. Notable in some poems is Baudelaire's use of imagery of the sense of smell and of fragrances, which is used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.
The book, however, quickly became a byword for unwholesomeness among mainstream critics of the day. Some critics called a few of the poems "masterpieces of passion, art and poetry" but other poems were deemed to merit no less than legal action to suppress them. J. Habas writing in Le Figaro, led the charge against Baudelaire, writing: "Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid". Then Baudelaire responded to the outcry, in a prophetic letter to his mother:
"You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people. Moreover, since I was terrified myself of the horror that I should inspire, I cut out a third from the proofs. They deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don't care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron."
Baudelaire, his publisher and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals. They were fined but Baudelaire was not imprisoned. Six of the poems were suppressed, but printed later as Les Épaves (The Wrecks) (Brussels, 1866). Another edition of Les Fleurs du mal, without these poems, but with considerable additions, appeared in 1861. Many notables rallied behind Baudelaire and condemned the sentence. Victor Hugo wrote to him: "Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars... I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might". Baudelaire did not appeal the judgment but his fine was reduced. Nearly 100 years later, on May 11, 1949, Baudelaire was vindicated, the judgment officially reversed, and the six banned poems reinstated in France.
In the poem "Au lecteur" ("To the Reader") that prefaces Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire accuses his readers of hypocrisy and of being as guilty of sins and lies as the poet:
- ...If rape or arson, poison or the knife
- Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
- Of this drab canvas we accept as life—
- It is because we are not bold enough!
- (Roy Campbell's translation)
Initial publication
The initial publication of the book was arranged in five thematically segregated sections:
- Spleen et Idéal (Spleen and Ideal)
- Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)
- Révolte (Revolt)
- Le Vin (Wine)
- La Mort (Death)
The foreword to the volume, blasphemously defining Satan as "thrice-great" and calling boredom the worst of miseries, neatly sets the general tone of what is to follow:
Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,
N'ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C'est que notre âme, hélas! n'est pas assez hardie.
- If rape and poison, dagger and burning,
- Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs
- On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies,
- It's because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!
The preface concludes with the following malediction:
C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!
- It's Ennui! — his eye brimming with spontaneous tear
- He dreams of the gallows in the haze of his hookah.
- You know him, reader, this delicate monster,
- Hypocritical reader, my likeness, my brother!
"Ennui" is left untranslated here, as "boredom" does not accurately portray Baudelaire's intended meaning. "Ennui" means a boredom so pronounced as to lead to a violent depression.
The author and the publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an outrage aux bonnes mœurs (trans. "an insult to public decency"). As a consequence of this prosecution, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs. Six poems from the work were suppressed and the ban on their publication was not lifted in France until 1949. These poems were "Lesbos", "Femmes damnés (À la pâle clarté)" (or "Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer...)"), "Le Léthé" (or "Lethe"), "À celle qui est trop gaie" (or "To She Who Is Too Gay"), "Les Bijoux" (or "The Jewels"), and " Les "Métamorphoses du Vampire" (or "The Vampire's Metamorphoses"). These were later published in Brussels in a small volume entitled Les Épaves (Scraps).
On the other hand, upon reading "The Swan" or "Le Cygne" from Les Fleurs du mal, Victor Hugo announced that Baudelaire had created "un nouveau frisson" (a new shudder, a new thrill) in literature.
Publication history
On June 1 1855, La Revue des Deux Mondes publishes under the title Fleurs du mal, eighteen poems by Baudelaire.
In the wake of the prosecution a second edition was issued in 1861 which added 32 new poems, removed the six suppressed poems and added a new section entitled Tableaux Parisiens.
A posthumous third edition with a preface by Théophile Gautier and including 14 previously unpublished poems was issued in 1868.
On February 4 of 1857, Baudelaire sends some of its poems to his Belgian publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis. On April 20, the Revue française publishes nine poems. The first edition is of 300 copies, put on sale on June 25. Le Moniteur publishes on July 14 an article by Édouard Thierry.
Illustrators
A selection of illustrators who've illustrated The Flowers:
- Carlo Farneti, George-Roux, Grékoff, Hallman, Hauterives, Hofer, Janserge, Labocceta, Latour, Legrand, Lemagny, Lemengeot, Leroy, Manceaux, Marcel-Béronn, Mauplot, Monnier, Pipard, Redon, Riche, Rochegrosse, Rochgrosse, Rodin, Rodin (facs), Rops, Roubille, Saint-André, Sala, Schwabe, Serré, Spilimbergo, Trémois, Tzolakis, van Dongen [1]
See also
