Which French poet wrote the collection 'Les Fleurs du Mal' (The Flowers of Evil)?

Charles Baudelaire wrote the French poetry collection “Les Fleurs du Mal,” commonly translated as “The Flowers of Evil.” First published in 1857, the book explores desire, boredom, beauty, sin, urban life, rebellion, and death.

The collection gathers much of Baudelaire’s poetry written from roughly 1840 onward. Its original arrangement was divided into six sections: “Spleen et Idéal,” “Tableaux parisiens,” “Le Vin,” “Fleurs du mal,” “Révolte,” and “La Mort.” The structure traces a restless movement between ideal beauty, despair, temptation, revolt, and mortality.

The book caused a public scandal in France. A court condemned Baudelaire and his publisher for offenses against public morality, and six poems were removed from the first edition. Later editions restored some of the censored material, while additional poems were added after the author’s death.

Baudelaire is often associated with French Romanticism, but his influence reaches especially into Symbolism and modernist poetry. His attention to city life and his ability to find strange beauty in decay strongly influenced Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé.