Les Fleurs du Mal and the Trial of 1857

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.