What "decadence" meant in literature

A term you'll meet in late-19th-century European literature.

Decadence as a literary movement emerged in France in the 1880s and spread across Europe through the 1890s. The Decadents — Baudelaire as their prophet, Huysmans, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and in England Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Arthur Symons — embraced what bourgeois Victorian culture considered weakness or perversion and made it the basis of an aesthetic. They valued artifice over nature, refinement over health, exhaustion over vigor, and the sensations of late civilization over the supposed simplicity of earlier ages.

The Decadent stance

Decadent writers took the word "decadence," which their critics used as an insult — meaning cultural decline, moral collapse, the sunset of civilization — and adopted it as a badge. Yes, they were decadent; and decadence was where art belonged. The healthy, the productive, the moral were the territories of philistines and shopkeepers. The artist's place was on the margin, in the salon, the boudoir, the cathedral after dark.

The core values

Artifice over nature. The Decadent prefers cultivated, made things to natural ones. Huysmans's À rebours (1884) — the bible of the movement — features a protagonist who designs his own indoor world, complete with artificial flowers preferred to real ones.
Refinement over health. Health is vulgar. The neurotic, the febrile, the over-cultivated nervous system is the proper object of art.
Style over substance. The Decadents developed a deliberately ornate prose style — adjective-rich, rhythmically intricate, dense with allusion. The surface mattered as much as anything underneath.
Sin and the forbidden. What Victorian morality marked off as wicked — sexual transgression, occultism, drugs, perversion — the Decadents claimed as legitimate territory for art.
The exhaustion of meaning. The sense that Western civilization had reached a late phase, that the great themes had been exhausted, that what remained was ornament, sensation, and the cultivation of one's own decay.

Key texts

Huysmans's À rebours (1884; usually translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain) is the central Decadent novel. Its protagonist, Des Esseintes, retreats from society into a hermetic indoor world of cultivated sensation. The novel is plotless by design; it is a catalog of refined experiences.

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is the English Decadent novel. Lord Henry Wotton speaks the movement's catechism: "the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."

Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (1857) is the precursor and prophet — a generation before the movement crystallized, Baudelaire had already developed its tone, themes, and aesthetic stance.

The end of Decadence

The movement was killed off by several converging forces: the 1895 conviction of Oscar Wilde for "gross indecency" (which made public association with Decadent aesthetics legally and socially dangerous); the conversions of many former Decadents to Catholicism or other forms of order (Huysmans himself converted and became a Benedictine oblate); and the arrival of modernism, which absorbed many of Decadence's interests but rejected its ornate surface in favor of a leaner, more austere style.

The afterlife

Decadence shaped modernism more than modernism liked to admit. Symbolism, Aestheticism, and Decadence flow continuously into the work of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce. The Decadent attention to sensation, the cultivation of style as an end in itself, and the sense of late-civilizational exhaustion all carry forward, even when the floral excess of the 1890s prose has been pruned away.

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