It is hard today to understand why Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poetry collection Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), considered one of the most important literary contributions to the symbolist and modernist movements, caused such moral outrage when it appeared. Its notoriety, however, along with the undoubted originality, has kept it in print ever since. When the book appeared the poems, dealing with themes relating to decadence and eroticism, were judged ‘an insult to public decency’; the author and the publisher were prosecuted and Baudelaire fined. Six poems from the work were suppressed, the ban on their publication not being lifted in France until 1949.

After protracted legal proceedings, the six poems – Lesbos, Femmes damnées (À la pâle clarté), Le léthé, À celle qui est trop gaie, Les bijoux, and Les métamorphoses du vampire – were released from the 1857 injunction, and several publishers produced illustrated editions of the complete collection as originally conceived by Baudelaire. Les Bibliolatres de France commissioned Lemagny to produce more than 150 engravings to illustrate their offering, and the artist, clearly inspired by the bold symbolism of the poetry, produced some of his best work. We show here some fifty of the larger illustrations.

The Lemagny-illustrated Les fleurs du mal was produced in a limited numbered edition of 650 copies.