What is French Decadent Literature?

Due to its significant stylistic differences from prior movements, such as Romanticism and Naturalism, I believe French Decadent literature is a critical step between literature in the 19th and 20th Centuries. As such, we must study it if we want to understand the rise of Modernism and the upheaval it created in the arts at the turn of the 20th Century. This post is a brief initial stab at what I've picked up from reading French Decadent literature.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Monsieur Louis Pascal, 1893 (detail)

While Decadent writing displayed some aspects of the dominant literary schools of the 19th Century – Romanticism and Naturalism – its writers went well beyond either movement’s boundaries and into new ground. Naturalism’s journalistic, detailed descriptions can be found in Decadent literature. However, Decadent writers use this tool to probe interior psychology rather than present external social reality. On the other hand, both Decadent literature and Romanticism are replete with high emotion, imagination, and individualism. Decadence, however, lacks Romanticism’s heroism or fundamental optimism. Instead, it is steeped in alienation, neurasthenia, and degeneration. In both cases, the innovations of Decadent literature presage many themes and motifs in Modern literature.

The above referenced innovations are not unknown to Romantic and Naturalist literature. For example, Jean Valjean’s actions and choices in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables are largely driven by an internal spiritual journey. Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle illustrates the impact of heredity on psychology. Neurasthenia and degeneration are depicted in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Even so, these works remain within the Romantic or Naturalist traditions and would never be construed as Decadent. This is because Decadent fiction addresses a complex set of motifs driven by the social, cultural, and political gestalt of the French Fin de Siècle. These motifs were rarely – if ever – consistently aggregated by earlier authors. 

These motifs include but are not limited to:

• Degeneration – Depiction of social corrosion through taboo subjects viewed in 19th Century society as symptoms of that corrosion, such as dandyism, amour, the demimonde, homosexuality, gender fluidity, drug use, and the occult. These subjects are often presented to defy social mores or to shock bourgeois morality. 
• Artificiality – Emphasis on surface appearances. Amour over love; wit over sincerity; attire over morality. Decadent writers often use extremely detailed and flamboyantly worded descriptions of décor, attire, and landscapes to present characters and settings in a way that distances them from ‘normal’ society. 
• Spleen – Cynicism and disgust arising from the forces of rapid social change in the 19th Century, such as democracy, capitalism, expansion of the middle class, technology, and greater freedom for women. These forces are resented for causing the corrosion of the fine arts, culture, and aristocratic privilege.
• Neurasthenia – A preoccupation with abnormal psychology. This includes sexual dysfunction (in men) and hypersexuality (in women), drug abuse and addiction, nervous disorders, ennui, blurred gender roles, hysteria, obsessive behavior, and disease. 
• Pessimism – An underlying acceptance that society is speeding toward catastrophe and that one is powerlessness to prevent it. Decadent writers don’t expose social ills, advocate social change, or seek spiritual growth. In Nero-esque style, they languidly sip champagne and smoke opium while watching civilization burn.

Georges Rochegrosse, The Dancer, 1894 

None of these motifs were invented by Decadent writers. Decadent writers – with Baudelaire and the Goncourts as predecessors – did however develop them to an extraordinary degree and weave them together. This constellation of motifs consistently dominates the output of Decadent writers and, in some cases, their actual lives. As a result, Decadent literature arrived at a discernable and – for the time – unique approach to characterization, conflict, and tone. We shall briefly examine each of these with examples of how they reappear in Modernism.

In Romanticism, characterization was often based on presenting heroic protagonists in conflict with society or defending a value (e.g., king, nation, lover, honor). In contrast, Decadence presents self-destructive protagonists who reject society, cynically place themselves outside it, or seek to escape it altogether. Neither are the protagonists in Decadent fiction the ‘statistical norm’ desired by Naturalism. They are invariably unusual and exceptional. Birth, wealth, or intellect (often all three) set them above others and lead to their disgust with society. Alternatively, their neuroses may be what makes them unique. Whatever the case, Decadent protagonists are unquestionably individual, but that uniqueness is a path to alienation, angst, even mental instability. Such characterization presages Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea and Mersault in Camus’ The Stranger.

Unlike Romanticism and Naturalism, the conflict in Decadent literature is almost always internal. Regardless of any tensions between a given protagonist and society, the primary conflict is consistently man against himself. Or more specifically, man against his own damaged psyche. In place of good and evil characters arrayed against one another, Decadent fiction presents the morally ambiguous corrosion of a human being from within. It is the crystallization of the degeneration motif. Due to this emphasis, traditional plotting is often deemphasized (and sometimes discarded) in Decadent literature. Such acute internalized conflict is further developed by Modernist authors as varied as Woolf, Gide, Kafka, and Sartre.

The tone of Decadent fiction is also distinct from prior movements. Wordsworth – a Romantic – once described poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. This is certainly true of Decadence. However, the powerful feelings in Romanticism are spiritual, elevating, and noble. Even when otherwise, the innate value of human beings and the moral underpinning of existence are not in question. The exact opposite is the case in Decadence, where powerful feelings are perverse, self-destructive, even mentally unbalanced. Alienation, not heroism, is the mindset that drives the tone of the literature. This tone absolutely presages the notion of absurdity that was a fundamental basis for 20th Century movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Existentialism.

More broadly, Decadence has a distinctive ontology. Romanticists such as Mary Shelley, the Brontës, and Victor Hugo explored dark themes (both social and psychological) before Decadence emerged. Likewise, Naturalists were unafraid to depict vice and irrationality while serving up their ‘slice of life’. However, both movements operated within social or religious mores. Such underpinnings are largely absent in Decadence. While it would be going too far to describe Decadent writing as nihilistic, the philosophical seeds of nihilism are there. Pessimism is the inescapable conclusion for anyone intelligent or cultured. Protagonists are therefore alienated from society, and their antipathy often leads them to devise or imagine self-made worlds. If they cannot do so, they wade through the day-to-day cesspool of society in some combination of disgust and detachment. This ontology is much closer to Modernism than it is to 19th Century literary movements.

This is only a brief summary of what I’ve picked up while reading French Decadent literature, and I’m excited to find my thoughts confirmed in literary analyses I’ve read on the subject. As my understanding deepens during my Decadent Reading Project, I hope to crystallize and expand these observations. The result, I hope, will be a strong case for French Decadent literature as an underappreciated literary movement in the evolution of literature from the Romanticism and Naturalism of the 19th Century into the Modernism of the 20th Century.