Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose in this volume represents a further exploration of the area covered by Baudelaire in his poetic masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city with all its wickedness and inequalities, the pressures of time and death, and the liberation provided by the sensual pleasures of intoxication, art, and women.

Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a milestone publication in the development of the prose-poem genre - a form that Baudelaire considered particularly suitable for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flow, and freedom of his era - and one of the founding texts of literary modernism.