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

by Emily Herring  BIO

Problem (Symposium) (1894) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Courtesy Wikimedia

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.

Edited byNigel Warburton

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’).

Portrait of Alfred de Musset (1854) by Charles Landelle. Courtesy Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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?

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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........

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