Baudelaire, "Les Fleurs du Mal"
- Artist/Author/Producer: Charles Pierre Baudelaire
- Confronting Bodies: Government
- Dates of action: 1857
- Location: France, Paris
- Description of the Art Work
- "Les Fleurs du Mal": (English: "The Flowers of Evil" (1909)). Collection
of poems, consisting largely of poems of decadence, eroticism and
spiritual revolution. Further editions of the collection prepared by
Baudelaire were published in 1861 and posthumously in 1866. Each were
greatly enlarged but omitted the banned poems. These were published
however in 1866 in Belgium in a collection entitled "Les Epaves" ("The
Waifs"). In France the ban of the six poems was not lifted until 1949.
- Description of incident
- The author, publisher and printer were prosecuted under the Second Empire
for an "outrage aux bonnes moeurs" (outrage to public decency).
- Results of incident
- Baudelaire was arrested and fined 300 francs. In 1866, in Brussels,
Belgium, six poems suppressed from Les Fleurs du Mal were published under
the title of Les Epaves, and were widely circulated in France. In 1949,
the ban was lifted in France.
Source:Banned Books, Anne Lyon Haight, RR Bowker Co., NY,1978