Juxtaposed with this was a debate about prostitution, whose terms were set in the pioneering sociological investigation by the erstwhile inspector of the Paris sewers, Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet. His On Prostitution in the City of Paris declared that prostitutes are as inevitable in a large city as sewers, slaughterhouses, and refuse dumps, and that the government ought to adopt the same policy as in these other cases: to control them and to keep them out of sight. What these two discourses share is the attempt to de-eroticize women, and in proposing to call his collection of poems ‘The Lesbians’, Baudelaire not only endows women with sexual desire but counters the discourses of male passion which represent women as objects of male desire who find fulfilment in the love of a man.

There was a small vogue of plays and novels about Sappho in early nineteenth-century France, but most authors followed Ovid in treating Sappho as a tragic figure, an abandoned woman who leaped into the sea when she was spurned by the young boatman Phaon, for whom she was consumed by passion. Baudelaire is the first nineteenth-century author to portray Sappho as a lesbian; speaking of her as ‘lover and poet’, he imagines her as the priestess of a cult based on the impossibility for women to find satisfaction with men; she died, he imagines,

When she, against the rite the cult devised,

Let her sweet body be the rutting-ground

For a brute …

(‘Lesbos’)

Baudelaire’s identification with his imagined lesbians emphasizes above all that men and women do not enter symmetrical sexual relations or find satisfaction together. In this respect, the lesbians would have been the central and representative figures for a book of poems about the impossible structure of desire, its diverse dramas, and the poet’s relation to infinite longings.3

In shifting from The Lesbians to The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire moved from a classical setting to a modern one, and, in essence, replaced lesbians with prostitutes as his representative female figures—figures who, like lesbians, do not find satisfaction in relations with men. What persists through these changes is the lack of symmetrical sexual relations between men and women.

II

In the form it was published in 1857, Les Fleurs du Mal consisted of five sections. Seventy-seven of the hundred and one poems were placed in the opening section, ‘Spleen and the Ideal’.4 The three lesbian poems come early in the second section, entitled ‘Flowers of Evil’. Their placement at the beginning of the section that bears the title of the collection as a whole makes them seem paradigmatic instances of the exfoliation of evil that the book explores. Then there follow three short sections, ‘Revolt’, ‘Wine’, and ‘Death’, which include only eleven poems all told.

Much has been written about the ‘secret architecture’ of The Flowers of Evil. The phrase comes from Baudelaire’s friend Barbey D’Aurévilly, who in 1857 defended the book against charges of immorality by arguing that it had a secret architecture which made it a moral book. Since he didn’t reveal the secret, attempting to work it out has been an obvious task for critics ever since. Certainly the way the poems are ordered has important effects, though one may be sceptical about a ‘secret architecture’. In December 1856, Baudelaire wrote to his publisher Poulet-Malassis that they should meet ‘to arrange together the order of materials—together, do you hear, for the question is important; we must make a volume composed only of good pieces, a small amount of material but which looks like a lot and is very eye-catching’ (très voyante). On 29 January he says he needs just a day to ‘put a bit of order in the collection’ and that he will take this day shortly. This sounds less like the imposing of a secret architecture than an attempt to work out, with a friend’s help, what arrangement might be most effective.5

In fact, the volume proved all too ‘eye-catching’, attracting the attention of the police. The edition was seized and Baudelaire and his publisher prosecuted for ‘offence to public decency’. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had earlier that year been prosecuted but found innocent. Baudelaire’s lawyer argued, at his client’s suggestion, that the book must be judged as a whole, that Baudelaire presents evil in order to inspire hatred and disgust, and that the licentiousness of the indicted pieces was no greater than that of many works by celebrated authors, past and present. The judges were not convinced, deciding that whatever Baudelaire’s intentions, some of the scenes he presents ‘necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to decency’. Baudelaire’s earlier intuition that a lesbian subject would shock proved well founded: while anti-religious poems, such as ‘St Peter’s Denial’ and the ‘Litanies of Satan’, were indicted for offence to religious morality, Baudelaire was found innocent on this charge but guilty on the other, and the six poems banned by the verdict included two of the three lesbian poems—despite the fact that just before publication Baudelaire had rewritten the end of ‘Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta’ to emphasize the condemnation of their illicit passion.

More shocking, though, to nineteenth-century readers than scenes of love between women, which had occured in both pornographic and ‘serious’ literature,6 was the linking of sex with sadism and death in The Flowers of Evil. By 1859 there was one poem ineluctably tied to the name Baudelaire: ‘A Carcass’. The opening lines of this poem, addressing the beloved as his ‘soul’ in the past tense of the greatest formality—‘Rappelezvous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, | Ce beau matin d’été si doux’ (‘Remember, my love, the object we saw | That beautiful morning in June’)—install us in the universe of Petrarchan love poetry and exalted sentiments, but the object the lovers saw proves to be not a flower but a rotting corpse, and the lengthy, disgusting description makes it a sexual object:

Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore,

Sweating out poisonous fumes,

Who opened in slick invitational style

Her stinking and festering womb.

The end of the poem enforces the juxtaposition:

—And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this:

Horrible, filthy, undone,

O sun of my nature and star of my eyes,

My passion, my angel in one!

No wonder a journalist complained that Baudelaire had invented ‘carcass literature’ (‘la littérature-charogne’). Though evocations of rotting corpses are relatively infrequent in The Flowers of Evil—just a few set a tone—one suspects that complaints about corpses are a convenient outlet for discomforts with aspects of this poetry more difficult to define, such as its general negativity, its relentless irony, and its refusal of the sentimental or heartwarming gesture. But complaints about corpses may also be a way of objecting to a sadism of which it was difficult to speak—though one reviewer of the 1857 edition maintained that ‘Never has one seen so many breasts bitten or even chewed in so few pages’.

Clearly the poems about love, which comprise a considerable portion of the first section of The Flowers of Evil, struck contemporaries as unusual. They are likely to seem so to us as well—for their diversity. The Flowers of Evil contains the most extraordinary body of love poetry, or poetry about love, we possess—extraordinary, first, for the variety of amorous relations explored and, second, for the surprising combination of attitudes, the involutions of the passion they explore. By turn tender, reverent, vicious, sententious, suppliant, declamatory, mocking, and insinuating, these poems often shift abruptly from one tone to another, enacting the instabilities of fantasy so central to passion. It is as though Baudelaire, inheritor of the tradition of Renaissance and Baroque love poetry and an adept of the discourse of modern urban debauchery, had wagered that the range and complexity of human passion could be as great as the rhetorical and imaginative resources of his language. That the visions of his poems have been found compelling suggests that he was right.

Critics have generally not seen the love poetry in this way, as a demonstration that the complications of amorous experience can be as great as our possibilities of rhetorical invention. In fact, they have coped with the extraordinary diversity of the love poetry, the daring of its rhetorical exuberance, by dividing the poems into ‘cycles’ addressed to different women.