Publishing, the Rules of the Trade

Les Fleurs du mal, title page

Charles Baudelaire, Poulet-Malassis and De Broise, original edition, 1857, Gallica.bnf.fr/Coll. Bibliothèque d'Alençon

In 1857, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and its publishers were condemned: the court imposed fines for offending public decency (Law of May 17, 1819). The prosecuting lawyer was the same as in the case against Madame Bovary. In spite of the support he received from his literary peers and his great renown, Baudelaire was obliged to withdraw six poems from the book. At the end of the 1920s, an attempt to have the sentence quashed failed, for the want of adequate legal texts. To fill this juridical void, a law was voted on September 25, 1946 - 20 years after the first trial - permitting the revision of the condemnation of a book for offending public morality. This law proves that the appreciation of an artistic creation can evolve with passing time. On May 31, 1949, the sentence against Les Fleurs du mal was finally quashed. During his lifetime, Baudelaire had hoped to be cleared of this accusation.