Agnès Michaux

Agnès Michaux's novel trilogy "La fabrication des chiens" (The Making of Dogs) and her later biography of Joris-Karl Huysmans together form an extraordinary double project: a literary reconstruction of the fin de siècle and, at the same time, a fresh perspective on Huysmans as a seismograph of modernity. The first volume of the trilogy (1889) follows the young provincial journalist Louis Daumale through the Paris of the Exposition Universelle, the Eiffel Tower's opening, and the enthusiasm for progress, while beneath the glittering surface, nationalism, eugenics, social anxiety, and cultural exhaustion are already becoming visible. At the heart of the story is Daumale's encounter with Huysmans, who appears not as a museum-like icon of decadence, but as a radically honest diagnostician of his time: "unjust, sometimes only, but with complete sincerity." Michaux's argument is that decadence should be read not as a pose, but as a precise diagnosis of civilization. Des Esseintes from "À rebours" is not understood as an aesthetic ideal, but rather as a symptom of a society whose sensory overload and artificiality deform humanity. This idea is reflected in the titular motif of the "fabrication" of dogs: optimization, breeding, and social conditioning become a metaphor for a modernity that standardizes all living things. In her biography, Michaux further radicalizes this approach by reading Huysmans not intrinsically, but physically and socially—as a shivering, nervous civil servant whose art arises from physical hypersensitivity, urban weariness, and uncompromising truthfulness. Thus, the result is not a nostalgic image of the Belle Époque, but an analysis of modernity itself: for Michaux, 1889 appears as that historical tipping point at which progress and decay, rationalization and spiritual yearning, surface and inner turmoil become inextricably intertwined.