Shocking the bourgeoisie is so old-fashioned.
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A Decadent Girl captures the ennui of the movement. 1899, RamĂłn Casas, courtesy Museum of Montserrat.
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The Aristocrats is a very old dirty joke. A family—not the Kardashians—pitches their act to a talent agent. It is a long list of obscene sex acts, none of which I’m prepared to repeat in print. When they finish, the agent asks what their act is called. The father proudly responds “the Aristocrats!”
A tag line is sometimes added:
“Is that all you got?” the agent responds.
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Pornocrates, etching and aquatint, 1878, FĂ©licien Rops
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Épater la bourgeoisiewas the slogan of the Decadent poets of fin de siècle France. It meant “Shock the bourgeoisie.” In other words, they weren’t just interested in the sensual experience of breaking taboos; they wanted to be sure to offend the middle class while doing so.
Decadents focused on pleasure, sex, and the bizarre. Their overriding aesthetic was, simply, excess. Of course, the movement was fascinated by drugs: opium, hashish and absinthe (the hallucinogenic properties of which were probably mostly in the drinker’s mind).
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Green Muse (absinthe),1895, Albert Maignan, courtesy MusĂ©e de Picardie d’Amiens.
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The seminal Decadent work is the now-forgotten À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its hero, Jean des Esseintes, is the last member of a great noble family. Disgusted with human society, he retreats to the countryside, where he contemplates literature and art, punctuated, of course, with his own erotic fantasies.
French Decadence was more than just a rejection of middle-class values, however; it was an obsession with sensuality, death, exotic beauty, fantasy and beautiful language.
Like the closely-related Symbolists, the Decadents were disillusioned with the meaning and truth offered by Nature. There can be no doubt about it,” Hysmans had his hero say. “This eternal, driveling, old woman is no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replace her by artifice.”
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La Mort et le Fossoyeur, c. 1895, Carlos Schwabe
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While the Decadents were a French movement, they exported their transgressive spirit to other European nations. In England, they were mimicked by the Aesthetes, including Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Aubrey Beardsley.
The movement gained little foothold in the bustling, religious United States, however. We strongly resisted the spirit of declining culture emanating from Europe. Less than a century later, however, shock art, shock literature, shock TV, shock movies and shock music were all the rage here. French Decadence was just ahead of its time.