The West is decadent, or so we are told. One symptom of our decadence is our masochistic desire to hear, over and over again, how sick we are. Witness the success of Michel Houellebecq’s bleak visions of modernity, including his 2019 novel Serotonin. Citing Houellebecq and many others, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat confirms the diagnosis in his recent book The Decadent Society. But what does it mean that we are so eager to hear about our own decadence? What, indeed, does “decadence” mean?
Douthat notes that “decadence” links “the aesthetic and moral and political” into a “comprehensive civilizational indictment.” Yet the concept is not a neutral tool of analysis; it is a weapon. As any consideration of its 19th-century origins reveals, the idea of decadence links aesthetics, morality, and politics in service of a critique of the West that clears the way for a revival of religion — and misrepresents some key features of our era.
Complaints about decline and degeneration are as old as civilization. The word “decadence” is only slightly younger. It derives from the late Latin “decadere,” itself a degenerate version of classical Latin words meaning “to fall.” It has been used at least since the 16th and 17th centuries to decry problems as varied as the decline of Spanish power and falling standards of erudition.
Only in the 19th century, however, did decadence come to be seen as something that could be defined and studied. One of the first intellectuals to do so — to transform “decadence” from a vague sense of decline into a clear aesthetic, ethical, and political critique — was the French literary critic Desire Nisard. In his 1834 study the Latin Poets of the Decadence, Nisard combined two topics that had long interested Western thinkers: the fall of the Roman Empire and the supposed decline of Latin literature after the “Golden Age” of Virgil and Cicero. Nisard argued that one could trace Rome’s moral and political decline in its writers’ worsening style.
Latin literature began to go awry, Nisard claimed, with 1st-century authors such as the poet Lucan, who experimented with syntax to create jarring, novel effects. These authors “disturbed all the harmonies of language, violated all convention,” Nisard wrote, all “to give themselves the illusion that they were creating something.” For Nisard, great literature is limpid and exact because its authors are concerned with expressing ideas. Writers of the later Roman Empire, however, “no longer had anything important to say.” They had lost contact with the classical Greco-Roman conception of “man,” called to political life and philosophy, but had not yet found a new faith in Christianity. Unable to offer any ideas, they innovated on the level of language, falling into either jargon or vulgarity.
Nisard ended his study by evaluating the French poets of his day to determine France’s level of decadence. They were not quite as bad as the late Romans, in his view, but what he found was nevertheless disconcerting. He would have been horrified to know that, within a few decades, French authors would emulate the style he had critiqued.
In 1868, one year after the death of poet Charles Baudelaire, critic Theophile Gautier wrote a preface to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, celebrating the book as a triumph of decadence. Gautier saw in Baudelaire’s poetry the influence of the Latin authors excoriated by Nisard. He presented Baudelaire as the first to understand that decadence was not something to be warded off with pious injunctions but the inevitable character of a worn-out, exhausted Europe. Seen from the present, late 19th-century Europe might appear a time of great cultural vitality. At the time, however, many observers agreed that, after the French Revolution and Napoleon, Europe had fallen into a slough of bourgeois complacency. Baudelaire, Gautier argued, had discovered in the decadent Romans the literary style fit for the decrepit condition of the West.
For Gautier, however, the recognition that one’s own society is decadent is, at the same time, a recognition that something new is about to be born. Like Nisard, Gautier held that decadent style is a kind of void into which authors descend when they can no longer maintain classical purity. Their literary style becomes self-conscious, tortured, and artificial. But this condition has the virtue of opening them to the possibility of a new revelation. Decadent authors are “already transformed and prepared for spiritual life” in a way that classical writers never could be. Decadent literature was a preparation for conversion to Christianity, which demanded of believers a still more intense dissatisfaction with the flesh.
Decadence could now appear not as a terminal phase of a dying civilization but as the first step toward the cross. By the 1880s, a self-described “decadent” movement had emerged in French literature. Many writers took up Gautier’s suggestion that a study of the decadent Romans was an excellent means of analyzing the modern condition. And many found, at the end of this experiment in literary anachronism, that they had readied themselves for a return to the Church. The most famous of these was Joris-Karl Huysmans, who wrote a series of flamboyantly decadent novels before converting to Catholicism. In his 1884 novel Against the Grain, Huysmans described the library of his protagonist, Jean des Esseintes, who is only interested in Latin literature after Lucan.
In his novels and in his life, Huysmans applied Gautier’s theory of decadence. He developed an elaborate style full of rare words in imitation of the decadent Latins. Like them, he described complicated, sensual scenes that provided neither his readers nor his characters with any healthy pleasure. These ornate images and intricate enjoyments seemed to be the last word on what the world could offer and were a kind of training for Catholicism’s combination of aesthetics and asceticism.
Huysmans is a central figure in Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission, which depicts a near-future scenario in which Islamists take over France. The book’s protagonist is an academic who specializes in Huysmans, and the novel is an attempt to make sense of our era in terms of the late 19th-century notion of decadence. Disgusted with modern life and its dubious, desperate eroticism, Houellebecq’s protagonist flirts with a return to Catholicism but cannot quite summon the faith for a conversion. Failing that, there is always Islam.
Douthat’s diagnosis is much more pessimistic. It breaks with the conception of “decadence” as it has been deployed from Nisard to Houellebecq. Instead of seeing modern decadence as an inventive precursor to some new revival of faith, he finds in it a flat, arid terrain of repetition and imitation. Indeed, the great age of Western literary decadence, in Nisard’s sense, appears to be well behind us. Nineteenth-century decadence gave rise to the explosion of creativity that was modernism. But there do not seem to be contemporary equivalents of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein.
If we take seriously the concept of decadence as it has been developed over the last century and a half, then we are not so fortunate as to be decadent. Being decadent, after all, would mean that we have gone astray in a daring search for the new and that, at that search’s end, we will find our way home. The decadents of ancient Rome and 19th-century France frantically sought an escape from their empty and achingly self-conscious cultural condition, which they found in Christianity. Our decline may well be more comfortable, less creative, and incurable.
Blake Smith is a Harper Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, where he works on cultural ties between France and India.
