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All those bourgeois imbeciles who are constantly saying “immoral, immorality, morality in art” and other nonsense make me think of Louise Villedieu, a two-bit whore who once came with me to the Louvre, where she’d never been, started blushing, covering her face, and pulling me by the sleeve, asked me, in front of the immortal statues and paintings, how such indecency could be on public display. Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare [Mon coeur mis à nu] I n 1949, the year Minnelli’s Madame Bovary came out in the United States, the six poems that had been removed from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal by court order in 1857 were rehabilitated by the French judicial system. A law passed in 1946, specifically geared to Baudelaire’s case, allowed such previous decisions to be overturned, and the poet and his six poems, along with the publisher and printer, were duly exonerated (posthumous restitution of their fines was not, however, included in the new ruling). The rehabilitation does not exactly state that the original verdict had been wrong, but implicitly places matters in historical perspective, decreeing that the condemned poems could no longer be held to pose the public danger they had seemed to represent a century earlier. This ruling is remarkable in a number of ways: laws are not usually written with particular cases in mind, nor are verdicts often overturned long after the fact on the basis that aesthetics and mores have changed in the interim. (Indeed, if this last became standard practice the courts would soon be busy rehabilitating witches and heretics, not to mention Socrates, Joan of Arc, Sacco and Vanzetti.) Even so, the most notable aspect of the rehabilitation in this context may well be that its text suggests the original judges had erred because they had mistakenly applied a form of “realism”: chapter two  Charles Baudelaire Florist of Evil 47 while due to their originality, certain depictions may have alarmed some sensibilities at the time of first publication of Les Fleurs du mal and appeared to the judges to offend decency, this reading, which depends exclusively on a realistic interpretation of the poems and neglects their symbolic meaning, has been shown to be arbitrary. [si certaines peintures ont pu, par leur originalité, alarmer quelques esprits à l’époque de la première publication des Fleurs du mal et apparaître aux premiers juges comme offensant les bonnes moeurs, une telle appréciation, ne s’attachant qu’à l’interprétation réaliste de ces poèmes et négligeant leur sens symbolique, s’est révélée de caractère arbitraire.] [Emphasis added.]1 Here, it seems, a “realist” interpretation is a literal one, which goes to show, if further evidence were needed, just how elastic the term realist can be. The original judgment which this new finding annuls, and which it quotes in the course of overturning it, cites “a vulgar realism offensive to decency [un réalisme grossier offensant pour la pudeur]” in Baudelaire’s poems as the decisive factor in the verdict. The judges in 1949 were accusing the original tribunal of finding an inappropriate realism in Les Fleurs du mal only because it was interpreting too realistically. They were also suggesting that their predecessors were bad readers of Baudelaire because at the time of his trial “Baudelaire” as a literary touchstone did not yet exist, nor did the Symbolist movement he inspired. To read Baudelaire properly, and therefore to find him innocent of the charges leveled against him, it seems, it was necessary to have been educated in a postBaudelairean cultural climate. The formal rehabilitation was at any rate somewhat moot, since despite the fact that in principle the 1857 judgment had made it illegal to publish or circulate the six inculpated poems in France, editions of Les Fleurs du mal including those poems had proliferated following the passage of Baudelaire’s magnum opus into the public domain in 1917. During Baudelaire’s lifetime (he died in 1867) the suppressed poems were published along with new poems in a volume entitled Les Épaves in 1866 in Belgium. A shipment of Épaves was seized in Lille in 1868, subject to a new trial in that city, and destroyed. The second (1861) and third (1868) editions of Les Fleurs du mal omitted the six condemned poems, but the volumes grew successively larger as the author kept adding new poems to take their place. The first critical edition of the collection, including the condemned...

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