From 1850 to 1900

The Decadents

The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine, other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing, and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal, the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its vampiric heroine.

The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent movement.

Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886, whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.