« France: The Rise of Modern Decadence »

International audienceFin-de-siècle French decadence is one expression of the partial autonomy from political power in literature and the arts, both of which established their own frames of reference and legitimation. This article retraces the history of decadence in France in the 1880s. Envisaging decadence as both an infamous appellation and a literary movement embed­ within a specific ecosystem of little magazines, it presents canonical works such as Huysmans’s À rebours and the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, and ex­plores some notable little magazines where decadent writings first appeared, paying at­ tention to some of the quarrels that led to the emergence of symbolism and instrumen­tism originating from decadent works in the late 1880s. Literary decadence helped shape the little magazines of the 1890s while also heralding modern poetry