ABSTRACT
Reading, the construction of meanings from texts, is always a duplicitous affair in a far more general sense than the critical focus on ennui in Baudelaire’s poem suggests. Reading is the pretense of being the writer’s “semblable ’ and brother; but there is no identity, only a family resemblance. In this, “Au Lecteur’’ points beyond its immediate historical situation: the public uproar and the pros ecution of the Fleurs du mal in the name of bourgeois morality; the refusal of reception on the part of the majority of contemporary readers; and its first concretization as a trailblazing work of decadence by the approving literary avant-garde. For what the speaker in “Au Lecteur” insinuates for the purposes of Les fleurs du mal is observable as a general relationship in all acts of reading.1
