A T THE OUTSET of L'Ordre du discours, Michel Foucault sugA gests that every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.1 Although ideology is not a term Foucault frequently employs, the various procedures of exclusion outlined in L'Ordre du discours, that is, those strategies by which the production of discourse is limited (and delimited) at any given place and time, can throw light on the role ideology plays in determining the boundaries of permissible utterance. For whether one defines it as a system of values or beliefs or as a function of the concrete social praxis of social group or class, ideology in its broadest sense serves to justify and make possible a series of prohibitions which determine what may be spoken, when and where it may be spoken, and who may speak. No ideology, in other words, without some form of censorship ; for in its power to silence lies its power to speak ... instead. I would like to examine two instances of this phenomenon which raise interesting questions concerning the definition of obscenity and poetry in Second Empire France and Victorian England. The first involves the prosecution of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 for outrage a la morale publique et religieuse, for it illuminates in striking fashion the power of the law to indict the unspeakable, to legislate the limits of representation, to declare the legality or illegality of poetic utterance. We tend to forget the full force of interdiction leveled at a