Apostasy Apostasized: The Effects of Censorship and Self-Censorship on Baudelaire's "Le Reniement de saint Pierre"

Abstract

For the 1857 Fleurs du mal Baudelaire restaged earlier poetry to suit his changed religious and political views. "Le Reniement de saint Pierre," originally a blasphemous challenge to both institutional Christianity and the idealistic Christian socialism of 1848, became part of Baudelaire's "douleureux programme" of dramatizing evil at once sympathetically and judgmentally. Partly shielded from the censors by his formal choice of dramatic monologue, Baudelaire used context and paratext to ensure that the apparently lyric expression of religious apostasy and militant politics would appear symptomatic of "l'agitation de l'esprit dans le mal." Censorship, both self- and state-imposed, motivated a poetic revision that achieved deniability of the very blasphemy the poem still affirmed.