Charles Baudelaire

The French poet Charles Baudelaire published his first and most famous volume of poems, The Flowers of Evil, in 1857. “Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible,” wrote a critic for Le Figaro. The book was subsequently condemned as obscene by the Public Safety section of the French Ministry of the Interior. The ban remained in place until 1949. “The strange success of my book and the hatred it aroused interested me for a short time,” Baudelaire wrote shortly after its publication, “but after that I sank back into my usual mood.”