Les paradis artificiels ("Artificial Paradises") is a book by French poet Charles Baudelaire, first published in 1860, about the state of being under the influence of opium and hashish. Baudelaire describes the effects of the drugs and discusses the way in which they could theoretically aid mankind in reaching an "ideal" world. The text was heavily influenced by Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
When his Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) appeared in 1857, the author, publisher, and printer were prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy.
Before 1949, when his work has been reevaluated, he was considered a drug-addict and a very vulgar author because of his poems, too futurist for the 19th century.
Many of his poems were influenced by his interest in les correspondances- synaesthesia.
His first important publications were two booklets of art criticism, Les salons (1845-1846), in which he discussed with acute insight the paintings and drawings of such contemporary French artists as Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet, and Eugène Delacroix.
Although the elite of French literature came to his support, he was fined, and six poems in the volume were suppressed in subsequent editions.
His next work, Lesparadisartificiels (1860), is a self-analytical book, based on his own experiences and inspired by Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey.
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