Decadent movement  The Decadent movement was a late-19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The visual artist Félicien Rops's body of work and Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel "Against Nature" (1884) are considered the prime examples of the decadent movement. It first flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United States. The movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness at the world, general skepticism, delight in perversion, and employment of crude humor and a belief in the superiority of human creativity over logic and the natural world. The concept of decadence dates from the 18th century, especially from the writings of Montesquieu, the Enlightenment philosopher who suggested that the decline ("décadence") of the Roman Empire was in large part due to its moral decay and loss of cultural standards. When Latin scholar Désiré Nisard turned toward French literature, he compared Victor Hugo and Romanticism in general to the Roman decadence, men sacrificing their craft and their cultural values for the sake of pleasure. The trends that he identified, such as an interest in description, a lack of adherence to the conventional rules of literature and art, and a love for extravagant language were the seeds of the Decadent movement. The first major development in French decadence appeared when writers Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire used the word proudly to represent a rejection of what they considered banal "progress." Baudelaire referred to himself as decadent in his 1857 edition of "Les Fleurs du Mal" and exalted the Roman decline as a model for modern poets to express their passion. He later used the term "decadence" to include the subversion of traditional categories in pursuit of full, sensual expression. In his lengthy introduction to Baudelaire in the front of the 1868 "Les Fleurs du Mal," Gautier at first rejects the application of the term decadent, as meant by the critic, but then works his way to an admission of decadence on Baudelaire's own terms: a preference for what is beautiful and what is exotic, an ease with surrendering to fantasy, and a maturity of skill with manipulating language. Though he was Belgian, Félicien Rops was instrumental in the development of this early stage of the Decadent movement. A friend of Baudelaire, he was a frequent illustrator of Baudelaire's writing, at the request of the author himself.