Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère
[Hypocrite reader—my double—my brother]!

The line comes from the closing address of “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”), the prefatory poem that opens Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 collection *Les Fleurs du mal*. Written in the context of mid-19th-century Parisian modernity and moral anxiety, the poem frames the book’s themes—boredom, vice, self-deception, and complicity in evil—before the reader encounters the rest of the volume. Baudelaire’s direct apostrophe collapses the distance between poet and audience: rather than presenting sin as merely observed, he implicates the reader as a participant in the same spiritual malaise the poems will explore.

Baudelaire’s “Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère” is a deliberately accusatory invitation into shared guilt. “Hypocrite” targets the reader’s tendency to condemn vice as spectacle while secretly recognizing it within oneself; “mon semblable” (“my likeness/double”) insists on moral and psychological kinship between author and audience; “mon frère” seals that kinship with a quasi-biblical fraternity. The line functions as a manifesto for the collection’s modern stance: the poet is not a detached moralist but a fellow sufferer, and the reader’s consumption of transgression is itself part of the problem the poems diagnose—especially the deadening force of ennui and self-justifying hypocrisy.

« — C’est l’Ennui ! — l’œil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère ! »