Charles Baudelaire

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal appeared in June 1857 and was in court within weeks. French prosecutors, the same office that had tried Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary earlier that same year on similar grounds, charged Baudelaire and his publisher with offense to religious morality and offense to public morals. The religious charge was dismissed, but the morals charge held: on 20 August 1857 a Paris court fined Baudelaire three hundred francs, later reduced, and ordered six poems removed from the collection outright, among them Lesbos and Les Bijoux, for what the court called an excessive realism that risked exciting the senses through a coarse and sometimes offensive lewdness. The banned six were not restored to a French edition legally until 1949, when a French court formally reversed the 1857 judgment on the grounds that literary and artistic sensibility had evolved. Baudelaire's own response at the time was less defiant than pained; he had genuinely hoped, and said so in letters, that readers would recognize the poems' moral seriousness, their argument that beauty and corruption, spleen and the ideal, could not honestly be separated in verse that was trying to tell the truth about the modern soul rather than flatter it. The trial did not stop the book's influence. It arguably sharpened it, giving Les Fleurs du Mal the reputation, among the writers who came after Baudelaire, of a work dangerous enough to be worth reading closely.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Charles Baudelaire died in 1867, nineteen years before the poet Jean Moreas published the manifesto in Le Figaro that gave Symbolism its name. He is nonetheless the movement's most consistently cited precursor, and his 1863 essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne, written about the illustrator Constantin Guys, is a large part of why. The essay defined modernity itself as a subject: the fleeting, the fugitive, the contingent, all the passing detail of a specific modern city street that an artist chasing timeless classical beauty alone would consider beneath serious attention. Baudelaire argued the opposite, that true art had to capture both halves at once, the eternal and the immediate, and that an artist who refused the modern, transient half was not painting a purer beauty but half a subject. Symbolist writers a generation later inherited this argument nearly whole and pushed it inward, from the modern street toward the private symbol, dream and suggestion as the truer register of experience than direct description. The Symbolist poets did not so much depart from Baudelaire as extend a method he had already demonstrated in Les Fleurs du Mal itself, where the ordinary material of Paris, its fog, its ragpickers, its Sunday funerals, sits beside the frankly mystical and the openly allegorical without the poem ever treating one register as more serious than the other.