Introduction

Abstract

As Victor Plarr’s comments on the Francophilia of the fin-de-siècle British literary avant-garde indicate, studies of British Decadence must invariably account for its French origins. Certainly by the time Decadence as an aesthetic practice came into its own in Britain in the 1890s, it had been long established in France, where political and social turbulence throughout the century fostered anxieties about cultural decline. Though technically Decadence did not constitute a movement in France until the 1880s,² its exponents in this period traced the roots of the aesthetic in the writings of earlier writers: Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1857); Théophile Gautier’s Mademosielle de Maupin (1835) and his poems of the 1850s; the 1860s novels of the Goncourt brothers; and Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862), La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874), and Trois contes (1877). In the works of these writers were found elements of style and theme that French writers of the 1880s would come to label Decadent: the insistence on the autonomy of art; a disgust with bourgeois philistinism and utilitarianism; an interest in complexity of form and elaborate and arcane language; a fascination with the perverse, the morbid, and the artificial; a desire for intense experience and a seeking after rare sensations in order to combat a feeling of ennui or world-weariness.