ABSTRACT
The fin de siècle is emblematic of a decadent lifestyle, a movement in literature and art, and thirdly, for the end of the nineteenth century as an epoch. The French phrase fin de siècle was originally used as an adjective: Être fin de siècle means to be in a mood of decadence, pessimism, and irresponsibility mixed up with a preference for the advanced, modern, and urban way of being. The ideal figure of the finde-siècle age, created by authors like Oscar Wilde and JorisKarl Huysmann, is the dandy or the decadent, a civilized person, beyond all measure sensitized to exceptional aesthetic, mental, or physical experiences but without interest in a respectable or healthy lifestyle. On the one hand, the fin de siècle seems to be the secular heir of apocalyptic traditions. On the other hand, the epoch of the fin de siècle coincided with an era of industrial and economic development. Its distrust of the course of progress and bourgeois lifestyle can be considered as the beginning of a pluralistic system of values in the twentieth century.
