The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley by Matthew Potolsky (review)

Decadence has long been considered a literary movement focused on decline, decay, and degeneration, in which authors and artists withdrew from social and political life and escaped into artistic creation. Matthew Potolsky’s The Decadent Republic of Letters successfully challenges several of these notions. He presents a fresh and well-argued reading of decadence, viewing it as an aesthetic stance where authors engaged in anti-liberal and anti-nationalist debate by positing art as the only true public good. In this way, an elite international community of misunderstood writers and artists functioned as ‘paragons of civic virtue’ (p. 22) who upheld the true purpose of art against bourgeois philistines. Central to Potolsky’s thesis is the idea that the decadent ‘mode of reception’ is also a ‘crucial means of production’ (p. 4). In so far as this is the case, decadence is fundamentally social, based as it is on communities of taste. Chapter 1 shows how the decadent community was born through Baudelaire’s epideictic writing on Poe, which presents him as a martyr to art, while Chapter 2, ‘The Politics of Appreciation’, demonstrates that Gautier’s and Swinburne’s tributes to Baudelaire treat him in the same way, presenting him as a ‘citizen-warrior whose writings serv[e] […] an aesthetic republic in exile from the decadent empire of mass modernity’ (p. 47). The argument in favour of decadence as a cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist movement gains true momentum in Chapters 3 (‘Golden Books’) and 4 (‘A Mirror for Teachers’), which deal with decadent canons and decadent pedagogy in the post-1870 period. The omnipresence of libraries, reading lists, and collecting, Potolsky argues, exposes the artificial nature of canon formation in the age of nationalism. Through what Potolsky aptly calls repetitive ‘mimetic canonization’ (p. 92), the process of canon creation itself becomes a decadent theme. Libraries like those in Huysmans’s À rebours and Pater’s The Renaissance are distinctly cosmopolitan, consisting of volumes that cross generic, national, and linguistic borders. By denying any innate relationship between a nation and its language and literature, works like these highlight both the process by which canons are formed and the political ends to which they are put. The relationship between decadent pedagogy and public education functions in much the same way, with the teacher–student relationship on display in novels like Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus critiquing the way in which public education is a means of social control and nationalist indoctrination. The book finishes with a chapter on ‘A Republic of (Nothing but) Letters’, which looks at various types of decadent communities. Potolsky rightly focuses on the authors and texts themselves, and the only potential criticism is that more space could have been devoted to the other actors involved in the creation of this cosmopolitan community — the translators, publishers, journalists, etc. who helped to make the internationalization of decadence possible. Despite this minor quibble, The Decadent Republic of Letters is an important addition to the field and is sure to become an oft-cited part of the canon of decadent literary criticism.