The class quiz
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The French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) courted controversy. In Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), he argued in favour of artificiality, and when his collection Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) appeared in 1857, everyone involved – author, publisher and printer – was prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy. By the middle of the 18th century, the bulk of the solid middle class was being described as ‘bourgeois’, which had come to mean being economically comfortable, socially respectable and culturally conservative. The comment about shocking the bourgeois is only attributed to Baudelaire, but he certainly shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay.
