mal du siècle

A fashion prevailed in France, a generation or two ago, — originating, perhaps, in the vogue of Réné^([sic – meaning René]), — of calling this atrophy of the spirit by the special misnomer of the mal du siècle. In truth, it is a malady of all the ages, raging, like other plagues, with greater virulence in some, hut reappearing continually, — sporadic here, and epidemic there;[…]

1884 July, Harriet Waters Preston, “The Gospel of Defeat”, in The Atlantic, →ISSN

Both are struggling hard with the mal du siècle, the Romantic disease of the imagination, that makes it so difficult to convert private dreams into sustained social realities.

1987 February 8, Richard Holmes, “Hot and Bothered in Paris and London”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Sand frames her characters in an atmosphere of mal du siècle, placing Indiana in the tradition of René, with its reference to the gloomy “paternal castle” in “a remote province,” home to the hero's sickly and hypersensitive soul.

1991, Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand: Writing for Her Life, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, page 57

The mal du siècle was a motion sickness. The French Revolution had so jarred and jolted “nearly the whole of the universe” that time had been sped up.

1996, Hillel Schwartz, Century's End: an orientation manual toward the year 2000, revised and abridged edition, New York: Doubleday, →ISBN, page 114