Joris-Karl Huysmans

status of poets such as Mallarmé, Verlaine and Baudelaire, and artists such as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau – all of whom were seen as marginal cultural figures at the time the novel was published – would be very different today if Against Nature had never been written.

Against Nature gave form and substance to a certain nebulous spirit of the times which up until then had remained undefined.

book had next to no plot, a single, unpleasant – if not downright immoral – leading character who was neurotic, self-obsessed and, what was worse, an effete aristocrat.

Against Nature is one of the successes of Naturalist literature, and Naturalist literature is the literature of the Republic.

Against Nature was what happens when the strict morality of the Church is relaxed and the individual is left to his own devices

in the late 1870s he had exalted the modern as the proper subject of art, but by the end of the 1880s he saw it as synonymous with crassness and ugliness – there is a certain ambiguity at the heart of the novel

Barbey d’Aurevilly’s infamous review

ended with the same prophetic challenge he had made years before to Baudelaire on the publication of Les Fleurs de mal: that after such a book, there logically remained only the barrel of a gun or the foot of the Cross: ‘Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross; but what will the author of Against Nature choose?’

Catholicism that he would later fully embrace following his conversion in 1892

Chateau de Lourps for the first time, a partially ruined chateau which not only served as the model for des Esseintes’ ancestral home in Against Nature, but also formed the backdrop to Huysmans’ subsequent novel En rade (At Harbour) of 1887.