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Paris (dpa) - Ugly, abominable, morbid, blasphemous and obscene: France's press barely let a good hair down on Charles Baudelaire's legendary volume of poems "The Flowers of Evil" (Le Fleurs du Mal) published in June 1857.
Today the book is the most famous work of Baudelaire, who was born 200 years ago on April 9, 1821.
Literary modernism in Europe is inconceivable without his poetry.
The cycle of poems caused a scandal.
Only two weeks after its appearance, a lawsuit against Baudelaire was initiated for insulting public morals and good manners.
In August the Parisian poet was fined 300 francs and six poems criticized as obscene and immoral had to be removed from the edition.
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Baudelaire worked on his main work for around ten years.
The majority of the poems were written between 1840 and 1850, many of which were previously published individually.
But with his book, Baudelaire did not simply publish an anthology.
He wrote a coherent whole of suffering in the world, which was groundbreaking for modern poetry.
Because both formally and in terms of content, Baudelaire broke with traditional poetry.
As a forerunner of symbolism, who freed itself from romanticism, he paved the way for modernity.
Pessimism, melancholy, death, eros, ecstasy, longing, crash: motifs that pervade his poems.
However, in contrast to the romantics, he does not elevate them in his verses to the sensual, fantastic and eerie, but presents them as ugly and hideous reality and people as torn beings between good and evil.
In the cycle of poems he evokes an unjust view of the world, writes about the big city, the world of the poor, the homeless and prostitutes.
His poems are encrypted, self-critical, passionate, aggressive and desperate texts of someone who is desperate for himself and for society.
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At the time, the French daily Le Figaro criticized the ugly with the despicable.
And: This negative appreciation will become the dominant judgment of the time, it read on.
When Baudelaire published the volume of poetry, he was 36 years old.
Baudelaire wrote "The Flowers of Evil" at a time that was politically uneasy with the July Revolution of 1830 and the February Revolution of 1848, marked by industrialization and a newly emerging working class proletariat.
During the February Revolution he took to the streets as a revolutionary.
His poetry was understood and appreciated by only a few of his contemporaries, including Gustave Flaubert, who praised his dark and distant view of man and the world, or Victor Hugo, for whom Baudelaire had created a new thrill.
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Before Baudelaire published his scandalous work, he was best known for his art and literary reviews and his translations of the books by Edgar Allan Poe.
His attempts to make a living from writing as a profession were unendurable.
Sporadically he published individual poems and short stories, including “Fanfarlo” from 1847. In the prose story, he describes his long love affair with the actress and dancer Jeanne Duval.
In his essay “The artistic paradises”, published in 1860, he examines the effects and significance of drugs on artistic creation.
Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil" are strongly interwoven with his life story.
He became a half-orphan early on.
He had never quite got over his mother's quick remarriage to the authoritarian and ambitious officer Jacques Aupick.
He developed into a difficult, depressed and unloved boy who was deported to boarding schools.
The poet led a life that turned his back on the civic values embodied in his family.
He went in and out of the Parisian literary and artistic bohemia, contracted syphilis and squandered the legacy of his father, a wealthy, literary and art-loving former administrative clerk, through a luxurious dandy existence.
Because of his dissolute lifestyle with alcohol, drugs and women, his family placed him under financial guardianship in 1844.
In 1864 he went to Brussels hoping to earn money there by lecturing on literature.
But the attempt failed.
After a stroke, he returned to Paris, immature and impoverished, where his mother looked after him.
At the age of only 46, he died on August 31, 1867.
With his «Flowers of Evil», Baudelaire wrote his main work, which he began in his early twenties.
He was not allowed to experience the success.
It was not until 1949, after 92 years, that the six poems were censored.
A trial before the court of cassation rehabilitated the editor - and Baudelaire.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210408-99-123657 / 2