2. Paris

The decline of Rome held special relevance for the French because the architects of the French Revolution took Republican Rome as their model of governance. The work of the traditionalist critic Désiré Nisard, who compared the poetry of the decadent Romans to that of his romantic contemporaries, and the art of Thomas Couture are first considered. The writings of Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Marguerite Eymery Vallette (who wrote under the pen-name Rachilde) are also discussed. Their decadence was mostly confined to the literature they wrote. Such cultural decadence is typical of the Parisian variant during the 1880s.