Pierre Loti et le malaise fin de siècle

Pierre Loti is an author of the disenchanted generation that refused positivism and naturalism in favour of aesthetic refinement and structural decomposition. His work embodies perfectly the fin de siecle malaise that of seeking to evade the mundane, especially by traveling through time and space but also by eccentric clothing and aestheticism. This malaise shows itself also through his intense intellectual and moral crisis: suffering, the anxiety of death that torments the writer and also his desolate pessimism. Such exotic idylls and distant civilizations evidenced Loti ’ s need of evasion even though the idea of death and of the vanity of human actions constantly obsesses his anguished soul. This ambiguity of “happiness within pessimism” constitutes the unity of the fin de siecle state of mind.