CHATON La Suite (2023)
With its easy-going electropop production and the casual, almost conversational vocals, “La Suite” invokes something between a sweet feeling of ennui and a restless search for something more. And until he finds just that, Lyon-born singer-songwriter CHATON (according to his song lyrics, at least) will be found reading Baudelaire at the park.
It’s not necessarily light reading CHATON picks here: to this day, Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (in English: The Flowers of Evil) remains the most analyzed work of French literature. That’s partially because of the collection’s themes of estrangement, decadence and sin, as well as its break with previous Western European poetical traditions.
The literary world’s obsession with Fleurs du mal started right when it first hit the shelves in 1857, although initially for a different reason: Upon publication Baudelaire was put on trial for six poems of the collection. The charge: “outrage à la morale publique” (offense to public morality). The themes in those texts: of a decidedly sexual nature, more specifically of a female sexual nature—in two out of the six thereafter banned poems of the lesbian variety.
As it goes with all banned things, the poems dealing with female desire in all of their complicated, 19th-century moral glory gained additional allure due to their forbidden nature and continued to circulate on the downlow (often even in nicely illustrated editions) until they were eventually re-introduced to the official Fleurs du mal publication in 1949. Turns out you can take the lesbians out of your sinful source of entertainment, but you can’t take the sinful source of entertainment out of the—you know what, never mind. You get it.
Start the conversation
Become a paid member of The Rest to gain access to the comments section.