‘Le dandysme est un soleil couchant’, wrote Baudelaire in Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), an aristocratic mode of being which was doomed to extinction by the inexorable rise of republicanism in 19th c. France. It was in the 1820s and 1830s that the largely British phenomenon of the dandy, exemplified in different ways by Byron and Brummel, found a French home among the Anglophile aristocratic exquisites who cultivated in their art of dress and manners an aesthetic unity with which to express their superiority over the utilitarian values of the rising bourgeoisie. Mussetin ‘Mardoche’ (Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, 1830), Gautier in Fortunio (1838), and Balzac, in numerous essays and novels, gave the dandy a central place in their critique of contemporary culture. With Barbey d'Aurévilly's 1844 essay on Brummel, the literary representation of the dandy gives way to a philosophy of dandysme in which artificiality, detachment, self-control, and the cult of surprise become active spiritual exercises through which the dandy maintains a stoic, existential revolt. Baudelaire espoused these views except for the detachment, and saw Guys as the modern artist most representative of a less blasé dandyism. Mallarmé extended in La Dernière Mode (1874) dandyism's poetics of fashion, but le dandysme returned to marginality through association with the decadent spirit embodied in Des Esseintes's pursuit of refined, artificial sensation (Huysmans, A Rebours). The changes consequent on World War I consigned it to history, one which Camus analysed in L'Homme révolté (1951) as that of the destructive, nihilist side of the Romantic revolt.

— James Kearns