The Flowers of Evil

Published in 1857, it is one of the most decisive and disturbing books of literary modernity. A journey into the heart of the human experience, it guides poetry along the line that divides the sublime and the abject.

Desire, boredom, guilt, beauty, and decay, with a lucidity that scandalized his time. Condemned for “offending public morality,” the poet was tried and forced to suppress poems.

It breaks with the romantic vision and inaugurates the modern gaze—fragmented, urban, aware of decay. Instead of fleeing from evil, Baudelaire confronts it and shows that beauty is also born from ugliness. Each poem is a provocation to bourgeois morality and the idea of aesthetic purity. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a poet, essayist, and critic, considered the precursor of poetic modernity. His work, marked by the ambiguity between the spiritual and the profane, deeply influenced the Symbolists, the Decadents, and all of 20th-century literature. A marginal figure, always in conflict with morality and his time, he lived between misery, illness, and the obsessive search for beauty.