The Decadent Republic of Letters
by Matthew Potolsky

Reviewed by Nicholas Nardini

One of the most memorable character portraits in War and Peace is of a couple whom anyone familiar with American high schools will recognize immediately. Toward the end of Tolstoy’s novel, the flighty Boris Drubetskoy fixes his attentions on the heiress Julie Karagina, who has mastered the flirtatious pose of a “poetic, melancholic, disenchanted maiden,” collecting macabre clippings in a scrapbook. The normally sanguine Boris catches on immediately:

When he firmly decided to choose her, he suddenly became sad and melancholic, and Julie realized he was surrendering himself to her. Julie’s entire album was covered with aphorisms in his hand above little pictures of gravestones, such as ‘Death is salvation, and in the grave there is peace…’ Or: ‘Ancient trees, your dark branches inspire me with gloom and melancholy. There is refuge for melancholy in the grove. I wish to rest in its shade like a hermit.’

Two years before the 1869 publication of War and Peace, destitute and half-paralyzed, Charles Baudelaire died in a Paris asylum. And, according to Matthew Potolsky’s The Decadent Republic of Letters, in dying became the patron saint of another nineteenth-century society of antisocials. Whereas the couple in Tolstoy’s historical epic fell in love to the minor arpeggios of a sepulchral late Romanticism, Potolsky’s story is of how the generation of European artists that came to be known as “decadent” found in the French poet’s example a model of how to organize a creative life outside of and opposed to the crescent bourgeois state. While in rhetoric and in reputation the decadents are characterized by anarchic disgust and hermetic withdrawal, Potolsky contends that their ultimate aim was not an escape from community, but the imagination of new communities, constituted by other means. The decadents, Potolsky writes, sought to look “decisively beyond the frame of any localized national coterie to new and radically international frameworks for sociocultural belonging.”

The greatest obstacle to this opinion of the decadents – and so to Potolsky’s central thesis – is the decadents themselves. After the failure of the 1848 uprisings and the December 1851 coup that installed Louis Napoleon at the head of France’s Second Empire, the revolutionary socialist and street fighter Baudelaire wrote in a letter to his tutor that he had become “physically depoliticized.” He dropped all utopian hope from his writing, and adopted the putrescent imagery and sneering tone for which he is remembered today. His critics have long drawn the obvious conclusion, distinguishing between a sanguine, public young Baudelaire, and an older poet quarantined in the fetid chamber of his own fantasy. In the decades to come, this essential trajectory would become the endlessly recapitulated ur-text of decadent art. In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours, the wealthy Des Esseintes retires in disgust from concupiscent Parisian society, into the seclusion of a country estate he designs according to his own aesthetic whim. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray leaves bourgeois respectability behind for a descent into the caverns of his own depravity. And in his poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé took Baudelaire’s trajectory to its necessary conclusion, bringing his oracular lyrics beyond even the grammar and syntax of common society. Such a conception seems difficult to reconcile with Potolsky's notion that they were working towards establishing new "frameworks for sociocultural belonging.”

To describe the decadents as a gang of aesthetic social activists, then, might seem almost perversely contrarian. But the common opinion of them as hermetic geniuses forced into productive solitude, Potolsky contends, falls apart when one takes note of how interested they were in each other’s work. Des Esseintes packs his mansion with Silver Age Roman poetry, medieval manuscripts, and the work of contemporary French writers – Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé – we would now describe as decadent. The Picture of Dorian Gray describes the mysterious yellow book that precipitates Dorian’s corruption as similar to “the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Décadents.” And Mallarmé paid homage to the master in his ode “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire.” Everywhere Potolsky looks in the decadent landscape, he finds the terrain shaped by tributaries and rivers of artistic influence.

Potolsky identifies his own watershed in his title. Although the phrase “Le république des lettres” was originally coined by Baudelaire himself, it also makes inevitable reference to the French literary critic Pascale Casanova. Her Le république mondiale des lettres (1999; translated into English in 2004 as The World Republic of Letters) took Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital into the arena of international affairs, describing a world system of competitive literary prestige independent of the more apparent systems of commerce and sovereignty. Casanova took the vernacular nation-state as the most intelligible unit of literary production: so Irish writers fled to Paris to escape English literary hegemony, even as writers in the French colonies viewed Paris as the great obstacle to a living native culture. For Potolsky’s decadents, the axis of literary purpose runs not between particular nation-states, but instead between the very bourgeois concept of the nation-state as such and the various sons of Baudelaire who refused to mentally inhabit it. Their knees bent for authority not political, but aesthetic: “The decadents were arguably the first literary group to realize the now-familiar, even banal association of subcultural affiliation with taste – the sense of attachment felt not by virtue of national origin or religious affiliation but through a liking for certain cultural forms.” As nationalism spread over industrialized, colonial Europe, decadence preserved some of the spirit of transnationalism that universal notions like Catholicism and enlightenment had previously nourished. Ostensibly exclusive in temperament, they were eager to include those who joined them in what they rejected.

Essentially, Potolsky argues, in imagining “a community founded on admiration and the exchange of texts,” the works of the decadents acted to oppose liberalism’s monadic conception of the individual. Unconvinced that enlightened self-interest or jingoistic nationalism were suitable foundations for a viable community, the decadents laid their own foundations deeper, in the bedrock of taste and personal relations. Toward the end of the book, Potolsky gives examples from Vernon Lee, Walter Pater and Aubrey Beardsley of decadent fantasies of “republics of nothing but letters,” entire societies knit by aesthetic principles, as he builds toward the claim that for the decadents, literature and art deserved status alongside paving stones and the police, as a veritable “public good.”

Potolsky’s first chapter rewrites the familiar story of Baudelaire’s epiphanic discovery of the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In the standard version, Baudelaire found an alter-ego in the tortured Poe, whom he studied assiduously for instruction on how to make alienation into art. Potolsky downplays the psychological aspects of the encounter in favor of its political dimension, arguing that the American was especially significant for Baudelaire because of the democratic country he felt was crushing him. In teeming egalitarian America, a “fervent of mediocrities,” Baudelaire saw the lurid direction commercializing Europe seemed to be leaning. “What is difficult enough in a benevolent monarchy or a regular republic becomes well-nigh impossible in a kind of nightmare chaos in which everyone is a police-constable of opinion, and keeps order on behalf of his vices.” For Baudelaire, Poe’s example seemed to confirm the antidemocratic political philosophy of Joseph de Maistre, who warned that government by the mediocre many would doom the talented few. The only hope of those few could be to constitute an “aristocracy of taste” founded on appreciation, imitation and mentorship.

With origins like these it is no surprise that decadence has usually been interpreted as a profoundly conservative movement, scornful of the broader public when it was acknowledged at all. For Potolsky, though, Baudelaire’s “brotherhood based on contempt” offered not primarily insulation from the howling masses, but rather a model by which they might learn the civic function of beauty. In the chapters that follow, the task Potolsky sets for himself is to reinterpret every act of decadent affiliation as an implicit act of political theory. Often, he is simply thwarted by intractable source material: his efforts to find civic humanism beneath Baudelaire’s apparent political despair, or veiled reference to the revolutions of twenty years earlier in Théophile Gautier’s “Notice” to the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, are forced. But more often, Potolsky is ingenious in turning decadent writing back on the society it claims to reject. In the proliferation of cosmopolitan collections like Des Esseinte’s library, for instance, he sees a complaint against nationalist literary canons. And in the many scenes of libertine education in the writing of the later decadents, he reads a sophisticated criticism of public schooling.

Potolsky’s book tells an important if long-obscured story about the origin of modern cultural politics. As he briefly notes, the decadents anticipate the public-minded concerns of contemporary post-liberal theorists of community, notably Georgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy. They also prefigure the many esoteric forms of community that have proliferated since the Second World War and its bonfires of nationalism; Potolsky specifically names gay camp, industrial metal, the hopped-up underground of William S. Burroughs, and social-networking sites.

A question Potolsky does not raise, however, is how in this postindustrial age of creative consumption, when “subcultures of taste” command just as much fealty as any nation-state, some might retain their critical potential. A stuffed Edgar Allen Poe doll, raven perched atop its shoulder, retails for $18.95 at a bookstore near you. If Julie and Boris fell in love again today, would they shop together at Hot Topic?