Paul Emmanuel Auguste Poulet-Malassis (16 March 1825 – 11 February 1878) was a French printer and publisher who lived and worked in Paris. He was a longstanding friend and the printer-publisher of

Charles Baudelaire Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poetry, French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticis ...

Biography

In his short six years of

printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ea ...

and

publishing Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

, Poulet-Malassis released very few books, and with little gain financially. He seemed to have been more concerned with their aesthetics and their appeal to his close friends than, much to the despair of his partner and brother-in-law , the profits and financial state of his business. The books were always beautifully bound and printed on fine paper with illustrations. Poulet-Malassis famously printed and published the works of Baudelaire, but also printed works that would have been safer, by more acclaimed novelists, poets and critics. These included Théodore Faullain de Banville,

Théophile Gautier Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier ( , ; 30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and rem ...

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (; 23 December 1804 – 13 October 1869) was a French literary critic. Early life He was born in Boulogne, educated there, and studied medicine at the Collège Charlemagne in Paris (1824–27). In 1828, he se ...

and

Champfleury Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson (17 September 1821, in Laon, Aisne – 6 December 1889, in Sèvres), who wrote under the name Champfleury (), was a French art critic and novelist, a prominent supporter of the Realist movement in painting ...

. It sometimes seems as if he had printed his friends' works - through acts of kindheartedness or even sympathy - when they had nowhere else to turn. This may have been the case with Baudelaire, who struggled to make a living almost all of his adult life. He and Baudelaire worked themselves further and further into debt until Poulet-Malassis was imprisoned for unpaid debts in November 1862. This debt would have been less of a problem, if it were not for the scarcity of sales, probably due to little or no advertising. It could not have helped being involved with the scandal and outrage which ''Les Fleurs du mal'' generated. In 1868, he was sentenced to one year in jail in absentia, alongside a fine of 500 francs, after Baudelaire's ''Les Epaves'' was banned, which he published in the same year. This occurred only a year after his initial publications of Baudelaire's ''Les Fleurs du mal'' and ''

Le Spleen de Paris ''Le Spleen de Paris'', also known as ''Paris Spleen'' or ''Petits Poèmes en prose'', is a collection of 50 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire. The collection was published posthumously in 1869 and is associated with literary modernism. B ...

''.

External links

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Auguste Poulet-Malassis
on data.bnf.fr 1825 births 1878 deaths 19th-century French businesspeople École Nationale des Chartes alumni French bibliographers French book publishers (people) French printers People from Alençon {{France-business-bio-stub