Les Fleurs du mal

The French original, Paris 1857, is the true first — the census claim is correct, and there is no competing English or other-language edition of any standing. Roughly 1,100 copies of the 1,300 printed were for sale, plus about 20 hors-commerce copies on Holland paper, most signed by Baudelaire. After the August 1857 obscenity conviction the six poems were physically cut from copies then in the publisher's hands, so an intact copy retaining the six is the point that matters. The 1861 Poulet-Malassis second edition (February 1861, adding 35 new poems and the "Tableaux parisiens" section, but without the six condemned poems) is separately collected, as is Les Épaves (Belgium, 1866), which first reprinted the condemned pieces; the ban in France was not lifted until 1949.