The French Symbolists
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of thematic
content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is between the
Decadents’ perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the present, is all there is
and the Symbolists’ concept of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and ideal, absolute
meanings that it is the artist’s task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the material world:
images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination into meaningful symbolizations. The
narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote
all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration
with an existence of marginalization and repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters
of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires
and sensations, break free of conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute
himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the failed
workers’ insurrection of May 1871. The poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) evokes
the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and common sense
through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed
references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur, and poetry and the poet are
caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary prose poems, Une
Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]), reworks
his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and
prose, outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the
tumult of revolt and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern
unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led to a loss of religious faith and a
loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his inability
not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also to communicate
his own response to the object. In Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry progressively became
a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional task of communicating
functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could bring
images into new constellations and allow assonance and alliteration to suggest new connections
—to model, in short, the creative movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans.
L’Après-midi d’un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated on
multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun’s erotic
desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later poems are
studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical
patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown
Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarmé’s formal tour de force, co-opts typography to the
presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a desperate chaos of
significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be asserted within it, by creating
constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance itself, the constantly changing hazard
of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moréas, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among his
works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A
Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”), and Le Problème du style (1902;
“The Problem of Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the founding of the Symbolist
movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism continued to
mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major poets. Among those whose works have
survived in anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets
Georges Rodenbach and Émile Verhaeren.
The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and Mirbeau’s The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new vogue
for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a recrudescence of
the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Contes
cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of
Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War.
The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886; “The
Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor).
But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the novels of
Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of the
times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in
Maurice Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved from decadent self-absorption to
become the advocate for an extreme form of historical determinism, which saw the individual as
part of a collective inherited unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman de l’énergie
nationale (“The Book of National Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The Rootless” or
“Men Without Roots”), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the
French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical
offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany’s victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the
detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At
the Sign of the Reine Pédauque).
But in Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France’s
commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note
to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe
twice overrun by German imperial ambitions.
