His work combined rhythmical and musical perfection with a morbid romanticism and eroticism, often using oriental imagery, and finding beauty in decadence and "evil".

His first book of verse, Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857), caused a scandal, and was condemned by the censor as endangering public morals, but paved the way for Rimbaud, Verlaine, and the symbolist school.

Perhaps the first great poet of the modern city, celebrating its contrasts of rich and poor, beauty and ugliness, Baudelaire spent almost all his adult life in Paris.