The late 19th-c. Decadence is a European phenomenon with its focal point in the Paris of the 1880s and 1890s: Haussmann's metropolis, reconstructed to answer the needs of mass society, expanding capital, and the nascent mass market. The themes and motifs of Les Fleurs du mal (1867), Baudelaire's complicit satire of bourgeois corruption, Richard Wagner's hymns to the decay of culture and aristocracy and the apotheosis of love and death, together with the new feminine icons and fantastic landscapes of the English Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters, all contribute to the representation of a specific political moment and mood, out of whose complexities was to emerge much of 20th-c. European modernism.

In France itself, the Decadent moment spans the period between the Commune of 1871 and World War I. At first ambivalent, it sometimes appears as a regenerative revolt against the mediocrity of bourgeois consensus in, for example, the novels of the socialist Jean Lombard (L'Agonie, 1888; Byzance, 1890) or the anarchist Octave Mirbeau. But the weight of the movement is conservative, clinging to traditional concepts of authority, hierarchy, and power in opposition to the challenges of contemporary socialism and feminism. With the help of new techniques of large-scale printing, reproduction, and distribution, the writers and painters of the Decadence peddled an élitist ideology to the prepolitical masses of a new consumer society.

The (mis-)representations of decadent dream are simple stereotypes drawn from old prejudice. Life is portrayed as a conflict between the virtuous male spirit and evil feminine nature. Woman is the scapegoat, vampire (Helen, Salome, Medusa), or victim (Ophelia, Galatea). Man is the Artist or Magus, creator of all things, frustrated by Woman and the mob. His art enshrines his neurotic impotence and the perversion of his frustrated desire: an adolescent eroticism, marked by fetishism, violence, incest, torture, homophobia (often, a repressed homophilia), murder, and madness (see the short stories and novels of Rachilde, Jean Lorrain, Huysmans, Louÿs). In the 1880s revived interest in the marquis de Sade went hand-in-hand with the vogue for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The ghoulish terror of the mask, evoked by Jean Lorrain, is a key symbol. Elsewhere, rage at the refusal of the natural world to be confined by the frame of individual will finds a different expression in mystical evasions. A variety of occult systems provide new languages for artistic discourse: Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Satanism (see e.g. the epic novel cycle La Décadence latine, 1884-1907 by Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Salons de la Rose+Croix).

Decadent style oscillates between often-parodied cliché and significant linguistic experiment. Huysmans's and de Gourmont's rediscovery of the gamey style of the Latin Decadence, their interest in rare, specialist, technical vocabulary, or in the manipulation of language (after Baudelaire) to collapse the positivist boundaries between sense-experience, represent influential efforts to engineer the decay of language and generate new forms.

— Jennifer Birkett

Bibliography

• J. Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870-1914 (1986)
• B. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (1986)
• M. Teich and R. Porter (eds.), Fin de Siècle and its Legacy (1990)