Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France

"It was the best oftimes. It was the worst oftimes. " The famous open­ ing sentence ofCharles Dickens'' Tale oJ Two Cities can serve as a motto to characterize the mixture of optimism and pessimism with which a large number of nineteenth-century intellectuals viewed the con­ dition of their age. It is nowadays hardly necessary to accentuate the optimistic elements in the nineteenth-century view of...