Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle -- Modernity and Defeat

Psychic and  physical deterioration alike were blamed on  modern -- especially urban-living. If society was a living

body, social disorders were expressions  of malady, connected  with a pathology  of moral and material corruption: the infection of bodies and minds as of water and air. Conscious  of the disgrace surrounding them, city dwellers attributed  it to the swift and  highly  visible changes  wrought by industrial growth  and  speculative  enterprise: "a  kind of collective neurasthenia ... A derangement of the collective consciousness."33

Thus,  Hippolyte  Taine's  robust,  Americanized, Frederic-Thomas Graindorge,  whose opinions  began to appear in 1863 and who found the French overrefined, overcivilized, artificial and decadent : "Paris is an  overheated   hothouse,   aromatic   and   tainted."   Like  Theophile Gautier,  the  Goncourts,  Huysmans,  and Henri  Rochefort,  who  in 1866  brought  out  Les Français de la decadence, all equated modernity with artificiality  and decadence. The latter was not all bad --  or necessarily see as bad; it was a matter of perspective. For this was also the time when the romantic  view of genius as derangement of the senses was taken up by scientists like Dr. Joseph Moreau (de Tours):  De Influence du physique sur le moral (1830) [The Influence of the Physical on the Moral]; Les Facultes morales ( 1836) [Moral Faculties]. For the next twenty years Moreau busied himself discussing the hereditary nature  of degeneracy, a notion  that  inspired Zola's saga of the Rougon-Macquarts and led off a long series of works equating genius and madness, such as Cesare Lombroso's  Genio e Follia (1863),  culminating  in  Max  Nordau's  Entartung (1892) [Degeneration],  soon  translated  into French ( 1893),  which depicted "degenerates  in literature,  music, and painting" and proclaimed Paris the capital of "decadence."36

Once  more  the  notion  of decadence  appears overdetermined:  romantic inspirations,  reinforced  by social experience, merge with  the angry disillusions of one more defeat. On September 4, 1870, watching the Republicans take over as the Empire collapsed, Edmond de Goncourt  had coined  the  word  "mediocracy."  A few months later, Jules Ferry  wrote to this  brother ruing the fate of  a country  condemned  always to  find its men inferior  to the situations  they must face: "There's  the implacable sign, the chronic  revelation of our decadence!"37

The depression  of defeat was aggravated  by unfavorable comparisons with the newly formed German  Reich. Even after Waterloo, the French had continued  to think of themselves as the leading representatives of world civilization:· Now  they felt reason to question this, as others did; and depressing news of their demographic evolution sharp­ened their doubts.  Already inferior in number to the now-united Germans, French population  was growing  at one-third  the German  rate, and marriages were steadily declining  (by 20 percent between 1872 and the end of that decade).  Taine, who had already unfavorably compred French torpor to the primitive vigor of Americans, had also stressed the positive (physical and psychological factors) of social and cultural  development:  race and  environment. 39   He  now  set  out  to apply his principles. in the study of The Origins of Contemporary France (1875-1894), which presented the Ancien Regime, Revolution,  and Napoleon  as the three agents of the country's  "decomposition." Admitting  that everything was in a bad way, Taine consoled his readers with the thought  that it never had been better, yet people managed to live, some of them quite  well. Taine's  historical  pessimism (for  him Roman decadence began when Romulus had murdered Remus)  was a bit too general for contemporary  political argument,  but it reflected a potential  mood  and  aftected significant literary and  political figures: not only Emile Zola (whose Thérèse Raquin  [1867]  bore an epigraph culled  from  him),  but  Paul  Bourget,  Maurice  Barrcs, and  Charles Maurras.