Literary Decadence and the French Occult Revival: A Survey Essay with Two New Translations of Joséphin Péladan

Abstract

The history of how the term ‘decadence’ came to be used as a description for certain kinds of literary productivity, eventually spawning a ‘Decadent Movement’ in the 1880s, which expanded to embrace the visual arts as well as poetry and prose fiction, is complicated and curious.

The notion of cultural decadence had been popularized by the eighteenth-century philosophe Charles-Louis le Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, in Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence [Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline] (1734). Montesquieu argued that the disintegration of the Roman Empire had not been a series of unfortunate accidents, but the inevitable unfolding of a pattern governed by a quasi-scientific law, applicable to all empires, and all civilizations, according to which they follow a life-cycle that guides them inevitably from infancy to virility, and from virility to decrepitude. Implicit within that argument was the notion that France was repeating that inevitable life-cycle, its decadence symbolized by the courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and its climactic catastrophe looming.