A winner of the Goncourt Prize,[1] he was also a member of the Académie Goncourt. Bourges, who accused the Naturalists of having "belittled and deformed man",[2] was closely linked with the Decadent and Symbolist modes in literature. His works, which include the 1884 novel Le Crépuscule des dieux ("the Twilight of the Gods"), were informed by both Richard Wagner and the Elizabethan dramatists.