The French Decadence Project

For the last several years, I've been obsessed with literature from the French Decadent Movement, with a bit of Symbolism tossed in. It’s why I started this blog. 

The Fin de Siècle was a time of glittering beauty and pernicious darkness, with amazing social and technological progress creating both dizzying excitement and poisonous angst. In addition, the vitality of the period’s avant-garde art, music, and writing, and the beauty of its crafts, posters, and design aesthetics deeply appeal to me. So much so that, if I believed in so-called past lives, then I was a bohemian artist, writer, or journalist in the Fin de Siècle demimonde. Someone who died at a relatively young age without achieving fame.

On a more grounded note, my exploration of French Decadent literature has given me insight into a question I've had since I was young: What happened during a mere 20 years in Paris to transform the arts from Hugo-Zola-Monet-Rodin-Debussy to Gide-Proust-Matisse-Picasso-Satie? The starting and end points (Impressionism-Realism-Naturalism versus Twentieth Century Modernism) are well-defined, but the bridge between them feels obscure. A ‘missing link’, if you will. 

French Decadent literature has shed some light on this, as it contains elements of both the starting and end points noted above. This has led me to believe that the Decadent Movement is the ‘missing link’ that allows us to track the above referenced transformation. 

As someone who is always working on a ‘project’ (or three), I decided to really go at this: do some research and directed reading and weave my observations and insights into a coherent statement or theory. I’ve dubbed this my French Decadence Project.

The first step of the Project was to build a chronologically ordered Reading List which, at present, includes almost 400 (mostly French) novels, shorts stories, manifestos, memoirs, poetry collections, and philosophy books written primarily between 1870 to 1903. Some I’ve already read; others will be new. The Reading List also includes analyses of Fin de Siècle culture and arts from the time as well as from today. 

I’m several books into the Reading List. As I go, I plan to use my marginalia, thought essays, and Decadence blog posts to develop my theory that the Decadent Movement is the ‘missing link’ between the 19th Century and Modernism. If true, the Decadent/Symbolist Movement deserves much greater recognition, attention, and study.

I don’t know what I’ll do with the results of my French Decadence Project, but that’s okay. After dreaming up and working on many such Projects during my life, I’ve learned that I can never be sure where they will take me. Some bear unexpected fruit after years while others fizzle in a few weeks (if that). 

Souhaite-moi bonne chance! 

PS: Despite my use of British Decadent art in this post, I’m generally prejudiced against the British Decadents. Perhaps this is unfair since I haven’t read a lot of their work. However, there do not seem to be as many novelists among the British Decadents; most of them seem to be poets. Also, I can’t forgive Oscar Wilde - their most famous figure - for shamelessly ripping off J.K. Huysmans for The Picture of Dorian Gray. On the other hand, British Decadent art of the period – as well as art from other parts of Europe – align with the Movement’s aesthetics just as well as the French art does.