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Upon its original publication in 1857 Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" or "The Flowers of Evil" was embroiled in controversy. Within a month of its publication the French authorities brought an action against the author and the book's publisher claiming that the work was an insult to public decency. Eventually the French courts would acknowledge the literary merit of Baudelaire's work but ordered that six poems in particular should be banned from subsequent publication. The notoriety caused by this scandal would ultimately work in the author's favor causing the initial publication to sell out, thus prompting the publication of another edition. The second edition was published in 1861, it included an additional thirty-five poems, with the exclusion of the six poems censored by the French government. Finally in 1868 a third edition was published posthumously.
About the author
Rainer J. Hanshe is the author of The Acolytes (2010), The Abdication (2012), and Shattering the Muses (2017). He is the editor of Richard Foreman's Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth's Fragments (2014). His second novel, The Abdication, has been translated into Slovakian (2015), Italian (2016), and Turkish (2017). Other work of his has appeared in Sinn und Form, Jelenkor, ChrisMarker.org, Asymptote, Quarterly Conversation, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere. Hanshe is currently working on two novels, Humanimality, and Now, Wonder.
