The modern press, with its large format and wide circulation, appeared when Baudelaire was a teenager, with La Presse and Le Siècle ; his adult life was contemporary with its development and boom. The press is a model of the relationship between the author of Les Fleurs du mal and the modern world. Baudelaire was always angry when it came to the press, and reproached Arsène Houssaye in particular for his many interventions in texts during publication, although this did not prevent him from making concessions. As a result, both author and publisher made their own corrections, sometimes resulting in contradictory changes and inconsistencies. In Houssaye's eyes, Baudelaire's poems are no more and no less than copies that he corrects, like the rest of his diary.
In the end, Houssaye suspended publication of the prose poems in serial form, on the pretext that Baudelaire wasn't just giving him unpublished material. This publisher was the antithesis of Baudelaire; he had gone from bohemian to bourgeois, and was speculating in real estate at the time of the Haussmannization of Paris. The suspension of publication of the poems in La Presse was at the root of their quarrel. According to some contemporary readers, Baudelaire's dedication to Arsène Houssaye was a poisoned gift, a pique, a mystification full of irony that Arsène Houssaye didn't even realize was there. It's an interesting reading hypothesis, but not entirely convincing, insofar as Houssaye gave Baudelaire considerable support, notably by granting him the first floor of his journal, rather than the "Variétés" column initially envisaged. This was both promotion and recognition for Baudelaire. Moreover, the director never censored poems that clearly attacked his profession and his readers.
It seems more legitimate to hypothesize that the first two feuilletons published in La Presse provoked reactions that were not always favorable, and that they shocked certain readers; the argument that certain poems were unpublished may have served as a pretext for suspending publication, at a time when Houssaye's position in the daily was becoming fragile. This hypothesis is all the more likely given that the same type of misadventure befell Baudelaire in Le Figaro in 1864. The poet justified suspending publication of his poems, as he wrote to his mother, because they bored everyone.
As such,Le Chien et le Flacon can be read as an illustration of this adventure; in it, Baudelaire describes all the violence of the attack on the public and the press; from something read, we move on to an unpleasant morality. The public is taken to task from the very first page. This hatred of the press could be associated with the last Baudelaire, but that would be forgetting that the much younger Baudelaire contemplated suicide, not least because of the new newspapers. "Anywhere out of the world" would be a dream world, without a single newspaper. Baudelaire's relationship with the press is one of fascination and disgust.
