Decadent and Anti-Decadent Networks of the Belle époque: littérature coloniale as a Rhetorical Alliance

When it first entered the vocabulary of literary criticism near the end of the Belle époque, the expression littérature coloniale française did not designate a unified movement or tendency. Rather, I argue that this watchword should be viewed as a sign of a rhetorical alliance between authors and literary circles divided along geographical, but also aesthetic lines. To support this claim, I will focus on two literary networks, ‘Les Français d’Asie’ (1909-1914) and La Grande France (1900-1903), and analyse the manner in which the invention of littérature coloniale helped bring proponents of decadent and anti-decadent aesthetics and discourses closer together.
Several key figures of the “Français d’Asie” network (Jean Ajalbert, Albert de Pouvourville, Claude Farrère) moved in symbolist and decadent literary circles. Unsurprisingly, the network members’ first-hand contact with French Indochina often found its literary expression in imagery (the opulence of a declining Chinese Empire) and themes (fascination with opium and ambivalent sexuality) connoted as ‘decadent’. The choice of Pierre Loti as the group’s honorary president and of Jules Boissière, who died in Hanoi at the age of 34 after extended periods of struggle with opium addiction, as its forefather, as well as the network’s private and homo-social ethos, further hint at a shared espousal of a ‘decadent’ lifestyle. Yet the act of forming the ‘Français d’Asie’ is accompanied by programmatic critical discourse which insists on the invigorating and regenerating influence of Asia on French culture and society, and proclaims adherence to littérature coloniale. Appropriation of familiar colonialist tropes thus provides the network of ‘esthètes’ with a social purpose, while distancing them from the morally- and socially-nefarious influences ascribed to ‘decadents’.
Reunion-born Marius and Ary Leblond, and the Algerian settler Robert Randau were the kingpins of the network that initially formed around the short-lived journal 'La Grande France' (1900-1903). Transposing the political tropes of societal renaissance and national regeneration brought about by colonisation into literary criticism, they championed the roman colonial as the antidote to the Belle-époque’s self-diagnosed ‘crise du roman’. Fittingly, they hailed Louis Bertrand, author of novels set amongst the settler communities of French Algeria, as the initiator of a ‘new exoticism’ (Jean Rodes), closer to naturalist than to decadent aesthetics.
Colonialist tropes, borrowed from the turn-of-the-century political arena and propagandist discourse, thus afford a rallying point and a respectable social purpose to a range of diverse and sometimes opposed literary aesthetics, uniting the contrasting representations of French-governed Asia and Africa under the banner of littérature coloniale.