From a historical standpoint, the metaphor of 'decadence' implies that art and society must age, decline, and die like a human body. Prestigious dramatisations by Baudelaire (for example in 'La Géante' of Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) and Laforgue, as later by Eliot, Toynbee and Spengler, perpetuated this notion. One cannot limit considerations of decadence to the novel or to France: decadence was an international intellectual current that left its mark on historiography, philosophy, poetry, drama, prose fiction and the visual arts throughout Western Europe and England.

In history, the degeneracy of French society seemed to have been foreshadowed by the decline and fall of the ancient Roman and Byzantine Empires. In these empires, moral decay had led to military defeats that recalled the humiliating rout of the French armies in the recent Franco- Prussian War (1870), and the three-month takeover of Paris by the revolutionary Commune in 1871. The self-selected title of 'Second Empire' (1851-70) for the government of Louis Napoléon, himself a pale reflection of Napoleon I, invited comparisons with Imperial Rome. Afterwards, France tried to live down its shame. The spectacular Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur (constructed between 1875 and 1914) stands today on Montmartre as a monument of national expiation and as an expression of the will to moral renewal after 1870.