ABSTRACT
The fin de siecle first appeared in France in the 1880s. In Britain the fin de siecle mood had gone out of fashion even earlier; with the arrest of Oscar Wilde in 1896 the steam went out of the new movement. Symbolism and fin de siecle was a European phenomenon but the differences in various countries were as striking as the common features. Some critics argued that the idea of the fin de siecle had originated in Germany with Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Wagner who had decisively influenced French cultural life. Fin de siecle, decadence, and symbolism have been used in the foregoing without sufficient distinction. There were important differences between these phenomena quite apart from the fact that the terms had a different meaning in different places during different periods. The history of modern occultism begins with the Naturphilosophie of the romantic age. This was followed by a decline which lasted until the 1890s.
