Recommendations
Books Like Les Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Books for readers drawn to the femme fatale tradition and the Catholic novel of sin as genuine transgression
Les Diaboliques (1874) is Barbey d'Aurevilly's scandalous collection of six tales of women who destroy — prosecuted for obscenity and a founding text of Decadence. These 8 books share its femmes fatales, its Catholic framing of sin as real, and its sense that extreme passion is the only authentic response to a mediocre world.
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Buy on AmazonCarmen
by Prosper Mérimée
The pre-Barbey femme fatale — Carmen who destroys Don José not through calculation but through being irreducibly herself; Barbey's diabolical women are more extreme but share Carmen's power as natural force
- 2Buy on Amazon
À rebours
by J.-K. Huysmans
Huysmans absorbed Barbey's transgressive Catholic aestheticism — Des Esseintes's library contains Barbey as a required author, and the Decadent movement Huysmans defined descended from Barbey's excess
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Buy on AmazonLe Jardin des supplices
by Octave Mirbeau
The next generation inheritor — Clara in the torture garden is the Decadent version of Barbey's diabolical women; the femme fatale aestheticized and made philosophical
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Buy on AmazonNana
by Émile Zola
The Naturalist femme fatale — Nana destroys the men who desire her without malice or calculation, purely through existing; the same destructive femininity in a secular frame rather than Barbey's Catholic one
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Buy on AmazonSalomé
by Oscar Wilde
The fin-de-siècle femme fatale drama — Salome demands John the Baptist's head as the price of her dance; the same structure as Barbey's tales of women who destroy through desire
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Buy on AmazonThaïs
by Anatole France
Anatole France's 1890 novel of a monk who converts a courtesan and is destroyed by the process — the Catholic framing of female sexuality as spiritual danger that Barbey uses in his tales
- 7Buy on Amazon
L'Ensorcelée
by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Earlier Barbey novel of supernatural passion in Norman legend — the same atmosphere of Catholic mystery and female power that defines the Diaboliques, in extended novel form
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Buy on AmazonThe Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
James's ambiguous supernatural tale — the governess who may be hysterical or may be genuinely perceiving evil; the same Catholic atmosphere of sin as real presence that Barbey requires for his Diaboliques
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