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walhiskaI'm writing my dissertation on the luxury debate during the French Enlightenment, specifically as it played out in the military sphere during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV; I really like the topic because it allows me to bring in a lot of Classical sources, which I'm familiar with from my undergraduate. One of the interesting little side points I've noticed is an ambiguity about what, exactly, Francophone writers meant by the word décadence in this time period.
Decadence is derived from the Medieval Latin decandentia, decay, lapse, or decline. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (if not before?), it was associated with civilisational - and hence military - downfall, usually that of the Roman Empire. My dictionary of Middle French (which deals with the language up until 1500), describes décadence as "tait de tomber en ruine, état d'une construction qui tombe en ruine" - to fall into ruin, the state of a construction which is falling into ruin." [x]. I guess this could be either material or moral ruin. In my primary sources, I consistently see decadence defined in terms of une chute, a falling-off from a previous state of virtue, which for me always recalls the Ancient Greek term καταστροφή (katastrophḗ), which literally means 'a downturn' (c.f. katabasis). This is great for my argument that luxury was still very inescapably seen as a negative force into the eighteenth century (even among the milieux of Versailles' court and Baroque aristocrat-warriors).
I know that by the late nineteenth century, decadence became almost synonymous with the word 'luxury', thanks to the Aestheticism artistic movement - but if I could link the usage of the terms 'catastrophe', 'decadence' and 'luxury' it would be a great way of arguing for limitations to the arguments of some recent scholarship which points to the 'demoralisation' of the term luxury during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (my main argument is that writing about and from the French military sphere was more conservative, and an exception to the trends noticed elsewhere, while still being influenced by other Enlightenment ideas). Nearly all the usage examples on TLFi [x], however, are sourced from the first half of the nineteenth century, which is just a hundred years too late for my purposes ...
Decadence is derived from the Medieval Latin decandentia, decay, lapse, or decline. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (if not before?), it was associated with civilisational - and hence military - downfall, usually that of the Roman Empire. My dictionary of Middle French (which deals with the language up until 1500), describes décadence as "tait de tomber en ruine, état d'une construction qui tombe en ruine" - to fall into ruin, the state of a construction which is falling into ruin." [x]. I guess this could be either material or moral ruin. In my primary sources, I consistently see decadence defined in terms of une chute, a falling-off from a previous state of virtue, which for me always recalls the Ancient Greek term καταστροφή (katastrophḗ), which literally means 'a downturn' (c.f. katabasis). This is great for my argument that luxury was still very inescapably seen as a negative force into the eighteenth century (even among the milieux of Versailles' court and Baroque aristocrat-warriors).
I know that by the late nineteenth century, decadence became almost synonymous with the word 'luxury', thanks to the Aestheticism artistic movement - but if I could link the usage of the terms 'catastrophe', 'decadence' and 'luxury' it would be a great way of arguing for limitations to the arguments of some recent scholarship which points to the 'demoralisation' of the term luxury during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (my main argument is that writing about and from the French military sphere was more conservative, and an exception to the trends noticed elsewhere, while still being influenced by other Enlightenment ideas). Nearly all the usage examples on TLFi [x], however, are sourced from the first half of the nineteenth century, which is just a hundred years too late for my purposes ...
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Date: Tuesday, 20 July 2021 00:41 (UTC)