Decadent Movement

The Decadent movement was a late 19th-century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The first to coin the term was Théophile Gautier in his 1868 preface to Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal. However, the visual artist Félicien Rops's work and Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel Against Nature (1884) are considered the prime examples of the Decadent movement, that went on to flourish in France and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.

Decadence was the name given, originally by hostile critics, to several late nineteenth-century writers who valued artifice more than the earlier Romantics' naïve descriptions. Some of them adopted the name, referring to themselves as "Decadents". For the most part, they were influenced by the tradition of Gothic novels and by the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and were associated with Symbolism and/or Aestheticism.

This concept of decadence dates from the eighteenth century, especially from Montesquieu, and was adopted by critics as a term of abuse after Désiré Nisard used it against Victor Hugo and Romanticism in general. A later generation of Romantics, such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire used the word proudly, to represent their rejection of what they considered banal "progress." During the 1880s a group of French writers referred to themselves as Decadents. The classic novel from this group is Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (1884), often considered the first great decadent work, though others attribute this honour to Baudelaire's works. Prominent scholars of Decadence, such as David Weir, now regard Decadence as a transition between Romanticism and Modernism.

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