Baudelaire Was Fined and Censored for Les Fleurs du Mal
Quick answer: In 1857 Baudelaire was fined and six poems of Les Fleurs du Mal were banned for nearly a century. The true story of the trial and his defiant second edition.
On 20 August 1857, Charles Baudelaire stood in the sixth correctional chamber of a Paris court, on trial for a book of poems. Les Fleurs du Mal had been on sale for less than two months. He was thirty-six, chronically broke, and had spent the better part of fifteen years composing and arranging the collection he regarded as a single architectural work rather than a heap of verses. The state's position was that parts of that architecture were an offence against public morality.
By evening he was a convicted man. The court fined him three hundred francs, fined his publishers a hundred each, and ordered six poems cut from the book. Those six poems remained legally banned in France until 1949, ninety-two years later and eighty-two years after their author's death. What Baudelaire did between the verdict and his early grave is one of the stubbornest acts of persistence in literary history.
A Book Fifteen Years in the Building
Les Fleurs du Mal was not a young man's rushed debut. Baudelaire had been announcing versions of it since the 1840s under earlier titles, and individual poems had appeared in journals for years. When his friend the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis finally issued the book on 25 June 1857, it contained one hundred poems arranged in deliberate sequence, a moral journey through beauty, boredom, desire, decay and revolt. Baudelaire insisted the book had to be judged whole, that its darkest rooms only made sense inside the full house.
The authorities declined to read it that way. On 5 July the journalist Gustave Bourdin attacked the book in Le Figaro, calling out its monstrosities, and the machinery of prosecution began to move. Copies were seized. Within weeks the poet, his publisher and the printer were summoned to answer charges of offending public and religious morality.
The Prosecutor Who Had Just Lost to Flaubert
The case against Baudelaire was argued by Ernest Pinard, the same imperial prosecutor who, only six months earlier, had tried Gustave Flaubert over Madame Bovary and lost; Flaubert was acquitted in February 1857. Pinard was evidently determined not to lose twice in one year. His argument against Les Fleurs du Mal conceded the poems' power and attacked their subject matter: depictions of lesbian desire, of the body, of blasphemous despair, presented without the protective varnish of condemnation.
Baudelaire's defence, that the book painted vice in order to expose it and had to be read as a whole, did not persuade the court. The religious charge was dropped, but on the morals charge he was convicted. Six poems were ordered removed: 'Lesbos', 'Femmes damnees', 'Le Lethe', 'A celle qui est trop gaie', 'Les Bijoux' and 'Les Metamorphoses du vampire'. Flaubert had walked free with a bestseller; Baudelaire got a fine he could not afford and a mutilated book.
A Letter to the Empress
What followed shows how practical, even humbling, a poet's persistence sometimes has to be. Three hundred francs was serious money to a man living on advances and an allowance controlled by a family lawyer. In November 1857 Baudelaire wrote directly to Empress Eugenie, respectfully pleading that the fine exceeded his means. The petition worked: the fine was reduced to fifty francs.
There is no varnishing this episode into heroism. The author of the century's most scandalous poems wrote a careful, courteous begging letter to the imperial court, because he needed the money. Working writers will recognise the manoeuvre. Principles fill no ledgers; he defended the book in court on artistic grounds and then dealt with the arithmetic like a man who still had rent to think about.
The Second Edition: Rebuilding Around the Wound
The court had torn six rooms out of Baudelaire's house, and his response was to enlarge the house. Rather than reprint the censored text with gaps, he spent four years composing new work, and the 1861 second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal carried more than thirty new poems, among them 'Le Voyage', which many readers count with his greatest. The collection's architecture was rethought so that the new edition stood as a complete design, not a patched one.
The banned six were not abandoned either. In 1866 they appeared in Les Epaves, a small volume published in Brussels, beyond the reach of French law, again through the loyal Poulet-Malassis, who had by then gone bankrupt and endured his own legal troubles partly through standing by his authors. Censorship had made the six poems famous; exile publishing kept them alive.
Vindication He Never Saw
Recognition arrived in fragments during Baudelaire's lifetime. In 1859 Victor Hugo, writing from exile, told him his poems created a new shudder, a 'frisson nouveau' in literature, a phrase that has followed the book ever since. Younger poets, Verlaine and Mallarme among them, began treating him as the source of everything modern. But the general public knew him mostly as the man convicted over an immoral book, and the money never came right.
Baudelaire suffered a stroke in 1866 that robbed him of speech and died in Paris in August 1867, aged forty-six, with his mother at his side. The legal ban on the six poems outlived him by generations: only on 31 May 1949 did a French court, empowered by a special law, formally quash the 1857 conviction. By then Les Fleurs du Mal had long been recognised as one of the foundation stones of modern poetry, taught in the same schools of the same republic that had once prosecuted it.
What a Working Writer Can Take From It
First, the deep lesson of the second edition. When Baudelaire's book was wounded, he did not merely defend the old work; he wrote past it, replacing six poems with thirty and making the damaged book better than the original. Rejection and censure ask you the same question at different volumes: is there more where that came from? The strongest possible answer is new work.
Second, notice that Baudelaire's book was a design, not a pile. He fought for the arrangement because the arrangement carried the meaning. Whether you are shaping a chapbook, a portfolio or a single contest entry, sequence and structure are part of the writing; judges and editors feel architecture even when they do not name it. Build the whole house, and if someone knocks a wall down, build a bigger one.
What poets can take from this
- Answer censure and rejection with new work; Baudelaire replaced six banned poems with more than thirty better ones.
- Treat a collection as architecture: order your poems so they argue with and answer each other.
- Keep one loyal ally in the trade; Poulet-Malassis mattered to this story as much as any poem.
- Do the unglamorous practical thing when survival requires it, as Baudelaire petitioned to reduce his fine.
- Do not confuse scandal with success; the trial hurt him financially and personally even as it spread his name.
- Play the long game on trust: reputations, unlike verdicts, get revised.
Try it yourself
Write a poem that a censor would want to cut, then write the poem you would put in its place, and let the replacement say the same truth more powerfully.
Questions
Why was Les Fleurs du Mal banned?
A Paris court convicted Baudelaire in August 1857 of offending public morality, citing poems dealing frankly with lesbian desire, the body and moral corruption. He was fined 300 francs, later reduced to 50 after he petitioned the Empress, and six poems were ordered removed from the book.
Which six poems were banned from Les Fleurs du Mal?
'Lesbos', 'Femmes damnees', 'Le Lethe', 'A celle qui est trop gaie', 'Les Bijoux' and 'Les Metamorphoses du vampire'. Baudelaire later had them printed in Belgium in the 1866 volume Les Epaves, outside French jurisdiction.
When was the ban on Baudelaire's poems lifted?
Not until 31 May 1949, when a French court formally overturned the 1857 conviction under a law allowing the revision of such judgments. The six poems had been legally suppressed in France for ninety-two years.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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