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How did the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal differ from the first edition?
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Charles Baudelaire
French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, photograph by Étienne Carjat, 1863.
The 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal differed from the 1857 first edition in several significant ways:
- Expansion and Structure: The 1861 edition was greatly enlarged, ultimately containing 126 poems arranged into six thematic sections.12
- New Content: Baudelaire added the section titled "Tableaux parisiens," which explores the life of the city through the perspective of a flaneur (an idle man-about-town) navigating the urban environment.2
- Censorship: The 1861 edition omitted six poems that had been banned following the 1857 trial for obscenity and offenses to public morality. These poems were not legally republished in France until 1949, though they appeared in the 1866 Belgian collection Les Épaves.13
Baudelaire viewed the 1861 collection as a cohesive work rather than a simple album, intending for the poems to be read within their specific framework to reveal a journey through self and society.2