fin de siècle

Fin de siècle is composed of fin (end, from Latin finis — boundary, limit, end), de (of), and siècle (century, from Latin saeculum — a generation, an age, a period of time). Saeculum gave English 'secular' — in its original Latin sense, saeculum meant the span of a human lifetime or generation, and 'secular' originally contrasted the temporal human lifetime with the eternal divine. A siècle was thus more than a hundred calendar years; it was a felt period, a generation's span of time experienced as an era. Fin de siècle named the end of an era as much as the end of a century.

The phrase entered cultural discourse in France in the early 1880s, popularized especially after the 1888 French comedy 'Fin de siècle' by F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard, which used the phrase to describe a modern character type: cynical, fashionable, liberated from old moralities, world-weary in a stylish way. French critics and journalists picked up the phrase to describe the decade's mood — a combination of genuine exhaustion from the Franco-Prussian War's aftermath, rapid industrialization and urbanization, anxiety about degeneration (a major pseudo-scientific concern of the period), and the excitement and dread of an approaching calendrical threshold. By the 1890s, fin de siècle was the dominant self-description of the era across Europe.

In British culture, fin de siècle was inseparable from the Decadent movement: Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, the Yellow Book, the art of Gustave Moreau and Félicien Rops, the music of Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy. The Decadents embraced the designation — if the era was ending, that was reason for refinement rather than reform, for aesthetic intensity rather than moral improvement. Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1890), Beardsley's illustrations for 'Salome,' the Symbolist poetry of Verlaine and Mallarmé: these are fin-de-siècle works in that they consciously inhabit a sense of an ending, of overripeness, of civilization at its most elaborate and most fragile.

English borrowed fin de siècle as a compound adjective — fin-de-siècle decadence, a fin-de-siècle atmosphere — and it has never been translated, because no English phrase captures the precise combination of temporal anxiety, stylistic excess, and weary sophistication that the French implies. The term reappears at each century's turn: the late 1990s saw extensive use of fin de siècle to describe millennial anxiety, and cultural critics noted that the mood was structurally identical to the 1890s version — the same mixture of exhaustion and excitement, the same decadent aesthetics, the same anxiety about civilization's durability. The phrase is cyclical; the mood it names appears to be as well.