Les Fleurs du Mal (Baccalaureate Edition), Charles Baudelaire

Why does Les Fleurs du Mal still have such an audience today? Because it represents, since 1857, the birth of a new poetry. Baudelaire uses classical forms – the sonnet, the alexandrine – to express modernity: strangeness, immense cities, the unease of a painful existence. Faced with this anguish, he offers us a way to overcome evil, self-loathing and loathing of others, "spleen": the ideal of a language that would show us a dreamt-of elsewhere, a world finally habitable.