Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque

This chapter considers the origin and significance of three terms widely used to characterize a decadent periodization in Britain, the United States, and France: fin de siècle, Gilded Age, and Belle Époque. While these terms were used loosely, and in some cases retrospectively, to describe the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, they also highlight dominant social narratives of the period. These decades witnessed unprecedented economic growth, rapid technological progress, and relative peace following such crises as the Franco-Prussian War in Europe and the Civil War in the United States. However, the cultural products of decadence were more likely to emphasize millennial doom, nervous exhaustion, sexual perversion, and scientific failure, while the decadent style was seen as a novel way of expressing how it felt to live in an era in which the pace of modern life brought with it febrile cultural, social, and political change.

The Decadent Short Story

The short story form and decadence are not only coterminous in 1890s Britain, but they also share common roots, as both hark back to Edgar Allan Poe. Even though the decadent short story eludes definition, it emphasizes style and rarefied subjectivity against the conventional Victorian novel’s emphasis on plot-driven narratives built around traditional moral values and social concerns. It is a self-conscious cross-genre that explores multifariously the tension between artificiality and life, thus reflecting the experimentalist ethos of its major outlet, the little magazine. In doing so, the decadent short story is distinguished by “excess in quintessence,” a paradox in which morbidity in its thematic and stylistic manifestations is enhanced by the delimiting nature of the form. This paradox makes the decadent short story “plotless,” static, and evanescent. Charlotte Mew’s “Passed” (1894), M. P. Shiel’s “Xélucha” (1895), and Jean Lorrain’s “The Man Who Loved Consumptives” (1891) consummately demonstrate its qualities.

Architecture

This article examines how decadence inflected modern architectural thought from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, starting with the polemical writings of the French architect Charles-François Viel, who dismissed scientific methods and engineering techniques as inferior to classical tradition. Later, decadence played a part in the Arts and Crafts critique of mechanized industrial production as well as twentieth-century condemnations of the managerial practices of late capitalism. Nevertheless, fin-de-siècle decadent culture also influenced architectural designers and theorists, exemplified by the art nouveau stylings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the theoretical writings of Ralph Adams Cram and Geoffrey Scott. From concerns about the sources and causes of social decadence to the aesthetic influence of decadent culture, the works explored here trace interchanges between decadence and modern conceptions of architecture.

Italy

Nineteenth-century Italy witnessed the rise of nationalist politics, industrial capitalism, and colonialist adventurism. Intellectuals viewed political conquest and technological progress as barbaric and invasive, feeling alienated from a changing world dominated by bourgeois materialism and by the lower classes seeking economic advancement. This isolating tendency represented a desire to rise above mediocrity, to be greater than the common man. Progress was viewed with cynicism, and writers met with despair the failure of ideals in the post-Risorgimento world. Once the guiding hand of the populace, intellectuals now lost their way, as well as their ability to reconcile the profound contradictions in society and their cultural expectations. This article explores how Italian decadentismo as a spiritual reaction to progress occasioned an escape from reality. It also touches on the dichotomies present in the literature, illustrating the despondency of Italian writers at the fin de siècle.

Politics

This article explores ideas of decadence and decline in political thought, from classical Greek and Roman speculation about the cycle of political regimes to early modern discussions of the importance of civic virtue, the role of institutions and constitutions, and the dangerous effects of luxury, culminating in eighteenth-century concerns about the risk of excessive civilization. It also considers the varied political stances of the decadents themselves in the wider context of the nineteenth-century critique of modernity and the historicization of the present as a “late” stage of human development. Such a diagnosis can be incorporated into either revolutionary or reactionary projects; since the early twentieth century, decadence has featured primarily as an important component of the worldview of fascist and other right-wing movements and has been an important tool in the mobilization of individual grievances and discontent for reactionary ends.

The Decadent Novel

This article argues that the decadent novel purposefully inverts the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Rather than developing bourgeois interiority, cultivating moral sympathy, and promoting conventional ideologies of gender and romance, the decadent novel focuses on detached individuals and damaging forms of desire. Refusing to provide reassuring narratives that reinforce myths of progress or camouflage the fractured, fraught nature of modern experience, these texts force readers to confront the anguish produced by modern conditions. They ask readers to meditate on the manner in which the increasing emphasis on individuation and an escalating sense of fragmentation at the turn of the century distort subjectivity and enable ever more horrifying forms of cruelty. In their representations of isolation and sadism, decadent novels amplify and exaggerate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms of alienation in a way that enables further reflection on the dehumanization and deprivation engendered by modernity.

France

Fin-de-siècle French decadence is one expression of the partial autonomy from political power in literature and the arts, both of which established their own frames of reference and legitimation. This article retraces the history of decadence in France in the 1880s. Envisaging decadence as both an infamous appellation and a literary movement embedded within a specific ecosystem of little magazines, it presents canonical works such as Huysmans’s À rebours and the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, and explores some notable little magazines where decadent writings first appeared, paying attention to some of the quarrels that led to the emergence of symbolism and instrumentism originating from decadent works in the late 1880s. Literary decadence helped shape the little magazines of the 1890s while also heralding modern poetry.

Narratives of Decadence in Post-Kantian Philosophy

Decadence is a perennial theme in philosophy. But tracing the arc of decline becomes an especially prominent focus of attention in European philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article explains and contrasts several “narratives of decadence” in the post-Kantian tradition. The article first lays out briefly the basics of G. W. F. Hegel’s optimistic view of progress and history as a foil and point of reference, then turns to expounding several narratives of decadence from other canonical philosophical figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—specifically, from Friedrich Nietzsche, from Martin Heidegger, and from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. All of these thinkers see modern humanity as being, in some (often quite nuanced) sense, in a decadent state, but all have a rather different diagnosis of what that fallen state consists of, and of how (or whether) we might be able to extricate ourselves from it.

Nordic Literary Decadence

This article maps literary decadence in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland. Nordic decadence is not a clear-cut movement but rather a cultural response to French naturalism, symbolism, decadence, and German philosophy. It has been broadly understood to include works that thematize decay and analyze the supposed decay of modernity and modern humanity. This article focuses on the “core decadence” (in contrast to naturalistic depictions of decay) of Nordic works in which the visions and experiential sphere of neurotic (usually male) heroes explore larger social vistas as the characters both reflect upon decay and illustrate the processes of shattering and dissolution connected to decadence. Examples include J. P. Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne (1880) and Herman Bang’s Haabløse Slægter (Hopeless families, 1880), both of which appeared before Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), the usual paradigmatic example of decadence. These texts and others reflect, imitate, modify, comment on, and reconfigure European decadence in the light of Nordic circumstances and traditions.

Republican Romans

This article considers how the Roman Republic could function as a site of decadence for both ancient writers and later critics. While Imperial Rome and its colorful emperors frequently appear in fin-de-siècle literature and artwork, the Roman Republic was also home to a host of morally ambiguous characters. The early Republic is perhaps better known for its heroes—Brutus, Horatius, Cloelia, or Mucius—but even within the characterizations of these seemingly virtuous Romans there is room for accusations of lateness, inadequacy, and decline. The hallmarks of decadence can be found in the long history of Rome, from its foundation through to its “fall” in the West. As such, the moral and material stagnation that is so familiar from decadent references to Imperial Rome can be usefully understood as a result of the decline that was always present in the state and appears even in the biographies of its most illustrious citizens.