The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism

Paris might rightfully claim to be the capital of modernism. It was there that the first experiments in both poetry and the novel - as well as in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music - led to a rupture with the classical tradition. It was there that the avant-garde first launched its attacks on an ossified bourgeois culture. In the century spanning 1850 to 1950, Paris attracted writers and artists not only from all corners of France, or even Europe, but from around the world, who saw in the City of Light a beacon of artistic freedom, as well as a particularly fertile climate for artistic experimentation. The fact that so many of the terms and slogans we associate with modernism originated in French - la modernité, l'avant-garde, l'art pour l'art (“art for art's sake”), il faut être de son temps (“you must be up to date”), épater les bourgeois ("shock the middle class") - signals the extent to which modernism, despite its cosmopolitan ethos, bears a Gallic imprint.

And yet modernism as a critical category has never played a particularly enabling role in French cultural history. Unlike in other national literatures, such as the Anglo-American tradition, modernism in France does not designate a school or a movement. Few French writers or artists labeled themselves modernists.