Koenraad Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth Cntury France

In most periods of history poets and novelists have inveighed against the evils of their  times. But at the end of

the nineteenth century the corruption  of society was more than  a favorite theme, it became an obsession. Realistic  and naturalistic novelists portrayed  the degenerations of their age in the most somber colors and authors belonging to the Decadent and Symbolist movements took an even gloomier view of the world in which they lived. . .

Many contemporaries  explained  the pessimism  of  the younger literary generation  by the painful  experiences  of  the année terrible ["the terrible year," i.e.1870-1871 and the following disenchantment  with the Third Republic. "Nous sommes entrés dans la vie," wrote Paul Bourget, "par cette terrible année de la guerre et de la Commune, et cet année terrible n'a pas mutile que la carte de notre cher pays; ... quelque  chose nous en est demeuré,  à tous, comme  un premier empoisonnement qui nous a laissés  plus dépourvus,  plus incapables  de résister  a la maladie intellectuelle ou il nous a fallu grandir."["We entered life through this terrible year of war and the Commune, and this terrible year not only mutilated the map of our dear country . . .these things stayed with us all, like a first poisoning that left us weakened, less capable of resisting the intellectual malady when we must be stronger."] Many young Frenchmen, according  to another  literary critic, Jules Lemaitre,  had been so disturbed by the misfortunes of their country that their hearts had been filled  with a fund of bitterness  that made them incapable of the exuberance and gaiety of their elders.

But the despondency of many French men of letters was more than a specific  response  to the political  misfortunes of their country. It was not in France alone that a profound melancholy pervaded much of  the  literary  production at the end of  the nineteenth  century.

As Romantic gloom, with which it had much in common, the pessimism of the fin de siécle was  a European-wide phenomenon that should  --­ rather be seen  as a renewed protest on the part of highly  sensitive minds against the complacency and vulgarity of their contemporaries and as a form of anxiety about  the loss of religious assurances.

The new sense of decadence  was not an exact  replica of the old Romantic despair. At the end of the nineteenth century many men of letters  went even further  than their predecessors in proclaiming the degeneracy of modern civilization. "Je suis un homme ne sur le tard ' d'une race,"  ["I am a man from the last hours of a race."] sang Paul Bourget in his early years.1  In a similar vein Paul Verlaine proclaimed: "Je suis l'Empire a la fin de la decadence."2 [I am the (Roman) Empire at the end of the decadence."]