In truth, Baudelaire made more than one poetic journey in Les Fleurs du Mal.

There was, first of all, the journey of the book itself. Condemned as an affront to public morality after its first publication in 1857, partly for its poems on lesbian love, partly for perceived sadism, partly for its questioning of conventional morality, the second edition, in 1861, dropped the six banned poems (published since then under the title 'Pièces condamnées') and added a further thirty-five. Baudelaire himself wanted to bring out what he hoped would be a definitive version, but death intervened and the third edition, in 1868, was posthumous.

As between the 1857 and the 1861 editions, the controversy turns on whether to prioritise the purity of Baudelaire's initial vision of Les Fleurs du Mal, before the trial of 1857, as opposed to the reworked version, with its new poems and an entirely new section, 'Parisian Scenes' ['Tableaux parisiens']. To strengthen the case of the defendant in the law court, in July 1857, Baudelaire's friend, Barbey d'Aurevilly, wrote an article in which he highlighted the 'secret architecture' ['architecture secrète'] of Les Fleurs du Mal, a book which he maintained was 'a poetic work of the strongest unity' ['une oeuvre poètique de la plus forte unitê' (OC I 798)]. There is no doubt that this claim was well founded. It is corroborated by Baudelaire's own observation to Alfred de Vigny that Les Fleurs du Mal was not 'a simple album' ['un pur album'], but had a beginning and an end: 'All the new poems were written to fit a curious frame I had chosen' ['Tous les poèmes nouveaux ont ete faits pour etre adaptes au cadre singulier que j'avais choisi' (C II 196)]. In other words, the work was conceived as an integral whole, with interconnecting strands.