"Absent coconut palms from superb Africa": Overcoming censorship: Baudelaire - Cesaire

The addition of "Paintings Parisians" in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal can be understood as Baudelaire's response to his accusers during the trial of which he was the victim on the occasion of the first publication of Les Fleurs du Mal. The notion of "flowers of evil" is changed and now also concerns the bourgeois, capitalist and colonialist world which staged this trial, while the City of Light, Paris, appears full of mud. This movement of reversal against his accusers will later be taken up by Aime Cesaire in the Cahier du retour au pays natal, which, by also addressing the mud that invaded the colonized West Indies, calls into question the hypocrisy that Baudelaire denounced in the first Poem from the Flowers of Evil.