Review: 'Artificial Paradises' by Charles Baudelaire

Originally published in France, in 1860, under the title ‘Les Paradis Artificiels’ (Artificial Paradises); Charles Baudelaire’s classic of drug writing is a blend of personal insight, translation, and morality discourse.

Charles Baudelaire was an early precursor to the French symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century. The literary movement was a reaction to realism and placed a lot of emphasis on the power of dreams and the imagination as tools for communicating ideals through symbols. Synaesthesia was one the great tools of the symbolists and Baudelaire wrote of hashish: "By graduations, external objects assume unique appearances in the endless combining and transfiguring of forms. Ideas are distorted; perceptions are confused. Sounds are clothed in colors and colors in music." (Baud 50). Baudelaire utilised the dream as the symbolic ground of the drug experience, which in the case of this edition of Artificial Paradises incorporates wine, hashish and opium.