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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 ...
no subject
Date: Tuesday, 20 July 2021 00:41 (UTC)no subject
Date: Thursday, 22 July 2021 17:52 (UTC)x
Date: Wednesday, 28 July 2021 09:57 (UTC)and yeah you're completely right ... the whole decadence debate heats up again in the nineteenth century. plus their idea of luxury certainly didn't come from nowhere, the Romans themselves often criticised their society in these terms (Tacitus complaining about Domitian and holding up Agricola as an Ideal Roman Man; Cato the Elder's speeches, and a lot of the moral theory that Sallust fits in between his history). luxury is such an interesting way of analysing these problems, to me, because on one hand it's hyper-individualistic, but at the same time they do try and eneralise about society from the lifestyles of these individuals. and 'luxury' to us, usually is over-indulgence and material opulence, but for them it was this, and morals too.
and YES exactly, the fun thing about a lot of the seventeenth-eighteenth century essays I'm reading argue that you can have a little bit of luxury because the authors belong to the upper middle class or to the aristocracy itself, and their own lifestyle is not exactly frugal ahah
hmm!! the Russian novel ... it's not something by Turgenev, no? I'm not sure myself actually.
thank you for replying! <3 <3 <3
Re: x
Date: Wednesday, 28 July 2021 18:08 (UTC)i do think it's turgenev, but it might be that my professor talked about fathers and children (i hear thats more accurate but lmk where the consensus is rn if you know) in the same lecture. unfortunately, i dont seem to have saved my notebook from that class :( but it was a scene w a nobleman laying on the couch doing jack shit and his manservant being active. hopefully that was about decadence. sometimes it's a toss up between that and nihilism.