The concept of decadence dates from the eighteenth century,
especially from Montesquieu.
It was taken up by critics as a term of abuse after Désiré Nisard used it against Victor Hugo and Romanticism in general. A later generation of Romantics, such as Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire took the word as a badge of pride, as a sign of their rejection of what they saw as banal "progress".
In the 1880s a group of French writers referred to themselves as decadents. The classic novel from this group is Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature.
As a literary movement decadence is now regarded as a transition between Romanticism and Modernism.
