Gen Z But Two Centuries Ago

A generation of young people with ‘full hearts in an empty world’ sought hope in the face of insurmountable malaise.

In 1833, the French dramatist and poet Alfred de Musset travelled to Venice with his lover, the novelist best known by her pen name, George Sand. The voyage was meant to ease the tensions of their turbulent relationship but, soon after they arrived, they both fell ill. As Musset’s condition deteriorated, Sand became infatuated with the Italian doctor who treated them. After a series of violent and jealous quarrels, Musset returned to Paris to do what he did best: write.

Drawing on fragments of his correspondence with Sand and on years of inner turmoil, he produced the semi-autobiographical novel Confession of a Child of the Century (1836). The story centres on Octave, who is driven to libertinage and near-madness by a duplicitous lover. Yet his unhappiness stems less from his mistress’s betrayal than from the disillusioned spirit of the age into which he was born. Feelings of melancholy and ennui were so widespread among Musset’s generation that they were grouped under a single diagnosis: le mal du siècle (literally ‘sickness of the century’).

Today, many of us feel we are living in unstable times, marked by AI, widening inequality, war and a looming climate catastrophe, among other deeply unsettling realities. Yet our attitudes towards unhappiness and anxiety often downplay the broader sociopolitical context, placing responsibility on the individual (to practise mindfulness, cultivate work-life balance, and so on). Two hundred years ago, Musset and many of his contemporaries instead blamed the times for the pervasive mood of dissatisfaction and unrest that gripped their generation. They believed that the mal du siècle was shaped less by individual temperament than by far-reaching historical, political and cultural forces. Could we benefit from reframing our current malaise in similar terms?

Musset was not the first to articulate the idea of the mal du siècle. Some decades earlier, François-René de Chateaubriand had expressed his own generation’s malaise, warning of the ‘unsettled state of the passions’, the ‘tedium of the heart’ and the ‘secret inquietude’ of young people whose environment offered no outlet for their intense feelings. ‘With a full heart,’ he sighed, ‘we dwell in an empty world.’ The Romantic novelist Jean Paul helped give conceptual form to a similar idea by popularising the German term Weltschmerz, or world-weariness, the sense that suffering arises from the very order of the world. As the first decades of the 19th century unfolded, a number of other writers, not least Musset’s lover and principal interlocutor Sand, theorised and dramatised the moral malady of their age. Of all the expressions of the mal du siècle, however, the one Musset presented in the story of his alter ego Octave proved the most emblematic and enduring.

In the opening chapters of the Confession, Musset offers a panoramic, almost sociological, view outlining his diagnosis of the causes and symptoms of the mal du siècle. The young men who came of age in France around 1830, ready to take their place in the world, discovered that history had already run its course. In their fathers’ time, the destiny of France had been tied to one man’s indefatigable sense of purpose. Napoleon Bonaparte, capitalising on the momentum and chaos of the revolution, had emerged equal parts daring leader and egomaniacal tyrant. In Musset’s words: ‘One man only was then the life of Europe; all other beings tried to fill their lungs with the air that he had breathed.’

The old world was slowly dying, while the promise of a brighter future was endlessly postponed

In France alone, hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives in Napoleon’s wars, yet both in victory and in defeat the emperor maintained his legendary aura. Musset writes: ‘Never were there so many sleepless nights as in that man’s time; never was such a people of disconsolate mothers seen reclining on city ramparts; never was there such silence around those who spoke of death.’ And yet, he insists, there was also ‘so much joy, so much life, so much flourishing of war trumpets in every court. Never were there suns so cloudless as those that dried up all that blood.’ The emperor was as brilliant a war strategist as he was a self-mythologiser. With every impossible exploit and every deadly campaign, from the sands of Alexandria to the snowy banks of the Berezina, Napoleon expanded his imperial horizons, infusing France with a conquering raison d’être. But after the empire crumbled in 1815, the young men ‘conceived between two battles’ discovered that their world, which had once seemed boundless, had become too small to accommodate their dreams.

Like many of his contemporaries, Musset felt he had come of age at the wrong time. The old world was ‘still quivering on its ruins, with all the fossils of the ages of absolutism’, slowly dying, while the promise of a brighter future was endlessly postponed. He believed that the opportunity for a meaningful existence had passed his generation by, and that it would not return in time for them to experience it: ‘What a thick night on the earth! And we shall be dead when day shall break.’ Or as he put it in his poem ‘Rolla’: ‘I came too late into a world too old.’ As Musset’s generation confronted the impasse of their historical in-betweenness, they were left with ‘a feeling of inexpressible unrest’ and ‘an unbearable wretchedness in the depths of their souls’.

The notion of the mal du siècle cannot be dissociated from the spirit of Romanticism that was sweeping Europe when Musset was writing. This polymorphous, transnational and intellectually wide-ranging movement does not lend itself easily to neat definition but, in a broad sense, it can be understood as a general feeling of dissatisfaction with the excesses of rationalism and materialism in a post-Enlightenment, rapidly industrialising world. The rationalism of the philosophie des Lumières of the previous century had elevated reason, granting it the power to solve all of humanity’s problems. However, the cold, detached attitude of rationalism and empiricism left Musset’s generation feeling empty, searching for something to believe in that could not be explained away. In the Confession, Musset wrote: ‘you will feel that human reason can heal illusions, but not heal sufferings … You will find that the heart of man when he said: “I believe in nothing, for I see nothing,” had not said its last word.’

With industrialisation mechanising more and more aspects of 19th-century life, the Romantics sought to escape their disenchanted modernity by immersing themselves in distant cultures and epochs. The French writer Théophile Gautier, for instance, marvelled at the richness and vitality of his idealised vision of ancient Egypt: ‘Our world of to-day is puny indeed beside the antique world … The radiant suns which once shone upon the earth are forever extinguished in the nothingness of uniformity.’ Writers like Gautier and Musset yearned for emotional depth, imagination, higher meaning, self-expression, to glimpse the Absolute and touch the Infinite, but, in their view, reality mostly fell short.

In the 1830s, French Romantics encountered a further source of disaffection in the rise of a profit-driven bourgeois mentality. By the time Musset began writing the Confession, Louis-Philippe I was the third king to succeed the emperor Napoleon. The restored monarchy maintained a veneer of progress, aware that the people of France had retained their revolutionary muscle-memory and would not hesitate to use it at the first sign of absolutist relapse. In an effort to signal change, Louis-Philippe styled himself not ‘King of France’, but ‘King of the French’. In practice, however, his reforms were largely superficial and French society remained deeply unequal, with wealth and power still concentrated in the hands of an elite now dominated by bourgeois merchants and industrialists. Dreary considerations of material gain had replaced the greatness and glory of the past, and young men were ‘condemned to repose by the sovereigns of the world, given up to vulgar pedantries of all sorts, to laziness and to lassitude.’ This was not, Musset deplored, a world fit for ‘expansive souls’.

Octave finds no comfort, only cynicism and apathy, the postures of those seeking refuge in a disenchanted world

Musset’s relationship to Romanticism was ambivalent. On the one hand, he often derided Romantic pathos and refused to be labelled a Romantic author. On the other, in the character of Octave, he had created one of the movement’s most iconic heroes, embodying intense introspection and emotional excess while reflecting a profound dissatisfaction with the existence he has been given and the world around him. After his all-consuming first love ends in betrayal, Octave loses what had been, to his eyes, the only meaningful pursuit of his young existence and discovers that he has ‘no calling, no occupation’. None of the available career paths appeal to him, his ideas drift, shifting with each new influence, and even his tastes are scattered and eclectic, reflecting both his own and his generation’s state of disorientation: ‘Our age has no forms. We have not impressed the seal of our time either on our houses, or on our gardens … we live only in wreckage, as if the end of the world were at hand.’

Utterly directionless, Octave is forced to confront the unbearable discrepancy between his grandiose, idealistic and sublime aspirations of love and freedom, and what the fundamentally materialistic and unenchanting society he inhabits can realistically deliver. When he turns to his friends, he finds no comfort, only cynicism and apathy, the postures of those seeking refuge in a disenchanted world: ‘Mocking glory, religion, love, everything in the world, is a great consolation to those who know not what to do.’ Reflecting back on this time in her memoirs, Sand echoed this sentiment:

It was a time of horror and irony, consternation and impudence. Some mourned the ruin of their generous illusions; others laughed upon the first steps of an impure triumph. No one believed in anything anymore, some out of discouragement, others out of atheism.

For a while, Octave succumbs to the allure of cynical detachment, hoping to dull his restlessness through the sensual diversions of libertinage. But he emerges more restless and emptier still: ‘I expected something like forgetfulness, if not like joy; I found there what is worst in the world, tedium trying to live.’

It is difficult not to draw parallels between the suffering of Musset’s generation two centuries ago, and our present malaise. Of course, the causes and contexts greatly differ. While few today yearn for the glory of Napoleonic wars, a similar sense of a foreclosed future persists. Whether because of the climate, the lingering psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism, AI or the threat of nuclear war, many believe that the future will be worse than the present. While Musset’s enfants du siècle felt frustrated that a brighter future lay forever beyond their reach, many today don’t even dare to imagine that a better world is possible at all. Is this, then, a new mal du siècle?

Author: Emily Herring is a writer based in Paris, France. She is the author of Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024), and her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

- AEON