fleurs du mal

Carlos Schwabe's La Déstruction, an illustration from the 1900 edition of Les Fleurs du mal

This Halloween, I bet you're thinking, "I wish I had the perfect 19th century French literary-themed playlist to listen to". Well, you're in luck! I've made a playlist of songs that take their lyrics from poems found in Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) by French poet Charles Baudelaire, first published in 1857.

While this might seem a curious choice, I promise these songs make for a perfectly creepy, atmospheric playlist. The poems of Les Fleurs du mal are haunting, unnerving, visceral, and often downright macabre. Play it for friends you want to both impress and creep out at the same time!

Fleurs du mal – Spotify playlist

My criteria for the songs was that they had to be the poems (or substantial excerpts of them) set to music, not simply lyrics inspired by Baudelaire. So this a very narrow focus, yet I found some really diverse and interesting music, and I really like the result.

The playlist spans the 1950s to the 2020s, covering an eclectic range of experimental sounds, classical pieces, synth pop, chanson, and more. I tried to mostly pick songs based on the most macabre and creepy Baudelaire poems. But I also included songs based on poems with lighter themes of love and beauty, if the music sounds eerie, and they thus fit the overall haunting feel here.

This is an idea I've wanted to do for some time, but I've scraped this together very last-minute, so I haven't had a chance to add information about the songs and poems yet, which I'm really keen to do. So please check back later, and you'll find annotatiions that note the specific poems and translations these songs are based on.

There's a Spotify playlist, as well as one for something I'm trying for the first time called Mixider, which lets you add songs from various services like Youtube and Bandcamp. The Mixider version has a few extra songs I couldn't find on Spotify (and may have some that aren't available in your region on Spotify).

Fleurs du mal – Mixider playlist

Tracklist

Songs marked with * appear only on the Mixider version

1. Ruth White - Owls (1969)
2. Yvette Mimieux & Ali Akbar Khan - Episode, Pt. 1 (1968)
3. Yvette Mimieux & Ali Akbar Khan - Episode, Pt. 2 (1968)
4. Uta - Baudelaire (1969)*
5. Mylène Farmer - L'horloge (1988)
6. Logic System - Unit (1981)
7. POETRONIKA - La muse malade (2019)
8. Frànçois Atlas feat. Barbara Carlotti - Rêve parisien (2018)
9. Susanna - The Ghost (2023)
10. Claude Debussy (Raquel Camarinha & Yoan Héreau) - Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, L. 64: No. 3, Le jet d'eau (2023)
11. Marc Almond - Remorse of the Dead (1993)
12. Léo Ferré - Les Métamorphoses du vampire (1957)
13. Fear Condition - Vampire (1986)*
14. Diamanda Galás - L'Heautontimoroumenos (1857) (Self-Tormentor) (1986)
15. Mr Neveux - Reversibilité (2005)
16. Etron Fou Leloublan - La musique (1982)
17. Yvette Mimieux & Ali Akbar Khan - A Voyage to Cythera, Pt. 2 (1968)
18. Jean-Louis Murat - La cloche fêlée (2007)
19. Moon Far Away - Francisca (2010)
20. Temple Ov Saturn - Hymn to Beauty (2020)*
21. Ruth White - The Litanies of Satan (1969)
22. Susanna - The Vampire (2020)
23. Mylène Farmer - Au lecteur (2018)
24. Yvette Mimieux & Ali Akbar Khan - Murdered Woman, Pt. 1 (1968)
25. Yvette Mimieux & Ali Akbar Khan - Murdered Woman, Pt. 2 (1968)
26. Suzanne Ciani - Flowers Of Evil (1969)
27. Ruth White - Spleen (1969)
28. Brégent - Métamorphoses du vampire (1973)*
29. Albert Huybrechts & Martial Defontaine - Sépulture d'un poète maudit (2011)
30. Léo Ferré - La cloche fêlée (1976)
31. Sam McKeon - Le Vampire (2025)
32. Susanna - Alchemy of Suffering (2022)
33. Ruth White - Evening Harmony (1969)