Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire doesn’t flirt with original sin so much as tattoo it onto the body. “Marked” is the key provocation: evil isn’t a choice we stumble into later, it’s an inscription, a birthright, a stigma carried in the flesh. The line compresses his whole project in Les Fleurs du mal: to treat moral corruption not as a scandal to be hidden but as the starting material of art, desire, and modern life. If the Romantic inheritance promised the soul’s natural purity, Baudelaire answers with a sneer and a streetlamp’s harsh light.

The intent is less theological than diagnostic. Mid-19th-century Paris is being remade by Haussmann’s boulevards, consumer spectacle, and anonymous crowds; “evil” becomes a shorthand for the alienation, boredom (spleen), and compulsions that modernity manufactures. By insisting we’re “born” into it, Baudelaire denies the comforting narrative that vice is merely social contamination or individual failure. No clean origin exists to return to. That’s why the line lands like a verdict: it strips away the liberal fantasy of self-perfecting progress.

Subtextually, the phrase also absolves and condemns at once. If everyone is marked, the poet’s own transgressions aren’t exceptional; they’re simply more honestly displayed. The scandal isn’t that darkness exists, but that society pretends it doesn’t while profiting from it. Baudelaire’s cynicism is strategic: it clears space for a different kind of beauty, one that doesn’t require moral hygiene. Evil, here, is not an edgy accessory. It’s the modern condition, and he’s daring you to look without blinking.