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When was the ban on the six censored poems from Les Fleurs du mal revoked in France?
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Charles Baudelaire
French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, photograph by Étienne Carjat, 1863.
The official ban on the six poems removed from Charles Baudelaire’s collection Les Fleurs du mal was not revoked until 1949.1
Following the publication of the first edition in June 1857, 13 of the 100 poems were arraigned for offenses against religion or public morality. After a trial on August 20, 1857, the court ordered the removal of six poems on the grounds of obscenity and imposed a fine on the author. While these poems were republished in Belgium in 1866 within the collection Les Épaves, they remained legally censored in France for nearly a century before the official ban was finally lifted.1