The Flowers of Evil

On August 20, 1857, Charles Baudelaire stood in the dock of the Sixth Correctional Court of the Seine, accused of offending public morality. At thirty-six, prematurely aged by poverty, drugs, and disease, he cut a strange figure—dressed in black like a dandy, but a dandy whose elegance had frayed. Before him sat the judges who would decide the fate of "Les Fleurs du Mal," the poetry collection he had spent fifteen years perfecting.

The prosecutor read aloud from the offending poems—"Lesbos," "The Damned Women," "The Jewels"—his voice dripping with disgust. These verses, he declared, corrupted youth, glorified vice, and blasphemed against religion. Baudelaire listened with a slight smile. They understood nothing. His flowers of evil weren't celebrations of sin but diagnoses of the modern soul, autopsies of a civilization that had lost God but not the need for transcendence.

"Your honors," Baudelaire began his defense, "you accuse me of immorality. But I have done nothing but show the truth of our age—the spleen, the ennui, the desperate search for beauty in a world drained of meaning. If my poems disturb, it is because reality itself has become disturbing. I am merely the secretary of modern consciousness."

The court was unmoved. Six poems were banned, Baudelaire fined 300 francs he didn't have. But as he left the courtroom, he felt strangely victorious. The trial had confirmed what he always knew—that true poetry was dangerous, that beauty and evil were intimately linked, that the modern artist must descend into hell to bring back flowers. The bourgeois judges had recognized, in their dim way, that his verses threatened their comfortable lies.

That evening, in his shabby hotel room, Baudelaire opened the mutilated edition of his book. The banned poems left gaps like missing teeth. But the essential architecture remained—the journey from spleen to ideal, from Satan to God, from the mud of Paris to the azure of impossible dreams. He had created something new: poetry adequate to the modern city, to the age of crowds and gas lights, prostitutes and flaneurs, boredom and intensity. The flowers of evil would bloom long after his judges were dust.