Les fleurs du mal

Les Fleurs du mal is Charles Baudelaire's landmark collection of lyric poetry, first published in Paris in 1857. Across roughly a hundred and fifty poems, arranged into movements such as "Spleen et Idéal," "Tableaux parisiens," and "La Mort," Baudelaire maps the restless modern soul torn between a longing for transcendent beauty and the pull of vice, boredom, and decay.

Written in tightly controlled classical verse, the poems find beauty in the ugly and the forbidden — the crowds and gutters of Paris, intoxication, eroticism, sin, and death — and shape them into something austere and musical. Its frankness scandalised Second Empire France: six poems were condemned as an offence to public morals and suppressed, and Baudelaire was prosecuted and fined.

Today it stands as one of the founding works of modern poetry, a decisive influence on the Symbolists and on much of the verse that followed. This is the French-language collection; readers should expect dense, allusive nineteenth-century verse that rewards slow, repeated reading.