The speaker of ‘The Possessed’ reports that every fibre of his body cries to his beloved, ‘O my Beelzebub, I worship you!’ There is always a question, it seems, whether a woman is a Satanic manifestation. ‘From Heaven or Hell, who cares!’ exclaim Baudelairian narrators in moments of desperation, but that this should come as the climax of agonized reflection shows that usually they care very much whether they are dealing with the Devil, though they can never know for sure. When the sinister old man in ‘The Seven Old Men’ seems to multiply himself seven times, the speaker suspects a diabolical plot, but it could also be just ‘wicked chance’ that humiliates him by making him suspect a plot.

We might say that the figure of the Devil poses the general question of whether there is a meaning to the scenarios in which we are caught up or misfortunes that befall us, or whether they are simply accidents. Can we escape our sense that there are malignant forces that operate independently of human intentions or that the world often works against us? ‘Everyone feels the Devil but no one believes in him’, wrote Baudelaire. As the prose poem ‘The Generous Gambler’ puts it, ‘the Devil’s subtlest ruse is to convince us that he doesn’t exist’.

If the Devil is the name of a force that works on us against our will—if, as Baudelaire says in ‘To the Reader’, ‘all the richest metal of our will | Is vaporized by his hermetic arts’—isn’t he just a personification of aspects of what Freud called the Unconscious or the Id, forces that make us do what our conscious selves might reject? To make Baudelaire modern can’t we just cross out Devil and write in Unconscious or, better, Death Drive, or Repetition Compulsion? There is something to be said for this view, though one would have to work out the analogy and the substitution more precisely. Baudelaire, though, had thought about this possibility and in his prose poem ‘The Bad Glazier’ speaks of ‘that mood [humeur] termed hysterical by doctors and Satanical by those who think rather more clearly than doctors, which pushes us unresisting towards a host of dangerous or unsuitable actions’. The Satanical hypothesis is clearer thinking, one surmises, because it adduces not an individual disorder but impersonal structures and forces. When Gustave Flaubert objected to Baudelaire that he ‘insisted too much on the Evil Spirit’ (l’Esprit du Mal), Baudelaire replied, ‘I have always been obsessed by the impossibility of accounting for some of man’s sudden actions or thoughts without the hypothesis of the intervention of an evil force outside him— Here’s a scandalous avowal for which the whole nineteenth century won’t make me blush’.

Christian theology introduces the Devil to account for the presence of evil in the world. If God is not to be held responsible for evil, there must be another creature whose free choice in deviating from good introduced evil. The Devil, thus, is not a symbol of evil but an agent or personification whose ability to act is essential. The Flowers of Evil make him an actor as well, along with other unexpected agents: Prostitution, which lights up in the streets; Anguish, which plants its black flag in my skull; Ennui, who puffs on his hookah and dreams of gallows; and many other figures who people these poems. To dismiss Satan as just a ‘personification’ of evil requires remarkable confidence about what can and what cannot act. Behind this may lie the wishful presumption that only human individuals can act, that they control the world and that there are no other agents; but the world would be a very different place if this were true. Much of its difficulty as well as its mystery comes from the effects produced by actions of other sorts of agents—history, language, ‘the market’—which our grammars may personify. These poems, in which Anguish, Autumn, Beauty, Ennui, Hope, Hate and others do their work, pose questions about the constituents and boundaries of persons, about the forces that can act in the world, and about whether this level of allegorical action does not best capture the realities of body, spirit, and history.

This is, finally, a question about the sort of rhetoric best suited to explore our condition. In his ‘Epigraph for a Condemned Book’, Baudelaire takes up again the distinction between the hysterical and the Satanic that we encountered in ‘The Bad Glazier’ and urges any reader who has not studied rhetoric with Satan to throw away this ‘Saturnian book’:

unless you’ve learned

Your rhetoric in Satan’s school

You will not understand a word,

You’ll think I am hysterical.

To study rhetoric with Satan is to complete your education (‘Rhetoric’ was the name of the last year of lycée, or grammar school). Satan the tempter or seducer is a master of persuasive discourse, but rhetoric in this sense would work on novices as well as experts, so the epigraph must rather have in view rhetoric as a way of analysing and articulating the world. When Baudelaire speaks of the best contemporary literature as ‘essentially Satanic’, he hints at such a notion. To see The Flowers of Evil as a Satanic rhetoric is to read it as an exposition or articulation of uncanny forces (forces of evil) that structure our lives and imaginings.

Many readers of Baudelaire’s time did think him hysterical, but Baudelaire was convinced that, as he put it in ‘To the Reader’, whatever our hypocritical claims, we are thoroughly familiar with the forces and figures that people such a world, such as Ennui, ‘this dainty monster’. Whether we know it or not, we have studied with Satan and may hope to understand Baudelaire’s book.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was published in 1857 by Poulet-Malassis et De Broise, a firm run by a young publisher, Auguste Poulet-Malassis. It contained one hundred poems, plus the prefatory poem ‘To the Reader’: the vast majority of these poems, seventy-seven, comprised the first section, ‘Spleen and the Ideal’; twelve were included in the section entitled ‘Flowers of Evil’, three in ‘Revolt’, five in ‘Wine’, and three in the final section, ‘Death’. A table listing the poems of this edition and their placement follows on pp. xxxix-xlv. In the trial of 1857, six poems were condemned for offence to public morals; the copies of the first edition were seized and the six poems were forbidden to be published in France. (In fact, the decision condemning them was reversed only in 1949, nearly a century later, although editions of Les Fleurs du Mal containing the banned poems had been sold for some time without attracting the attention of the police.)

Since most of the first edition had been confiscated, Baudelaire and Poulet-Malassis needed to produce a second edition. With considerable irritation, Baudelaire went back to work: ‘To have to start again on these damned Fleurs du Mal!’ he complained (19 Feb. 1858). He undertook to compose twenty new poems, but in fact 1858-60 turned out to be one of his greatest periods of creativity and the new edition, which finally appeared early in 1861, contained thirty-five new poems. (In addition, Baudelaire made some changes, mostly minor, to the poems already published.) This 1861 edition, also published by Poulet-Malassis, is the one generally followed by modern editions of Baudelaire and is the one used here. It has the disadvantage, however, of omitting from the body of the work the six banned poems; we have chosen to reinsert them according to their place in the 1857 edition.