Meaning of mal du siècle | Babel Free

Definitions

Apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past, originally in the context of French Romanticism; Weltschmerz.

uncountable

Examples

“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;[…]”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[Michael] Gove started carrying Eurosceptic books as a sign of his mal du siècle:[…]”

CEFR level