Baudelaire devoted one of the two slim volumes he published in his lifetime to the discussion of intoxicants. While references to drugs, alcohol and tobacco were already to be found in Les Fleurs du Mal and would continue to dot Le Spleen de Paris, it was only with Les Paradis artificiels (The Artificial Paradises), first published as two articles and then as a volume in 1860, that the poet addressed in a systematic way the question of intoxication and literature. Readers have long puzzled over the rationale for his interest in stimulants. Was Baudelaire's treatise an attempt to justify an indulgence in intoxicants, say by celebrating drugs as enhancing the imagination? Did he aim on the contrary to denounce the use of drugs? These are the motives to which the literature on drugs - already beginning to swell by the mid nineteenth century when Baudelaire wrote - is usually ascribed. But in the case of Baudelaire, neither rationale quite fits.

Let's take the question of Baudelaire's drug use first. To all accounts, Baudelaire appears to have used the stimulants favoured by his century only in moderation. He slightly overstated the case when he boasted in one projected preface to Les Fleurs du Mal that his aim was to create a reputation for excess in such matters while remaining strictly sober: