Stéphane Mallarmé in the context of "Soup-conferences"

Literary Impressionism is influenced by the European Impressionist art movement; as such, many writers adopted a style that relied on associations. The Dutch Tachtigers explicitly tried to incorporate Impressionism into their prose, poems, and other literary works. Much of what has been called "impressionist" literature is subsumed into several other categories, especially Symbolism, its chief exponents being Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Laforgue, and the Imagists. It focuses on a particular character's perception of events. The edges of reality are blurred by choosing points of view that lie outside the norm.

Impressionistic literature can be simply defined as when an author centers their story or attention on the character's mental life (such as the character's impressions, feelings, sensations and emotions) rather than trying to interpret them, or "narrates events from an optically restricted rather than omniscient perspective". Authors such as Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway) and Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness and "The Lagoon") are among the foremost creators of the form. These novels have been said to be the finest examples of a genre which is not easily comprehensible.

The Lycée Condorcet (French: [lise kɔ̃dɔʁsɛ]) is a secondary school in Paris, France, located at 8, rue du Havre, in the city's 9th arrondissement. Founded in 1803, it is one of the four oldest high schools in Paris and also one of the most prestigious. Since its inception, various political eras have seen it given a number of different names, but its identity today honors the memory of the Marquis de Condorcet. Henri Bergson, Horace Finaly, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Proust, Jean-Luc Marion, Francis Poulenc and Paul Verlaine are some of the students who attended the Lycée Condorcet.

Some of the school's famous teachers include Jean Beaufret, Paul Bénichou, Jean-Marie Guyau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Symbolist painting was one of the main artistic manifestations of symbolism, a cultural movement that emerged at the end of the 19th century in France and developed in several European countries. The beginning of this current was in poetry, especially thanks to the impact of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire (1868), which powerfully influenced a generation of young poets including Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. The term "symbolism" was coined by Jean Moréas in a literary manifesto published in Le Figaro in 1886. The aesthetic premises of Symbolism moved from poetry to other arts, especially painting, sculpture, music and theater. The chronology of this style is difficult to establish: the peak is between 1885 and 1905, but already in the 1860s there were works pointing to symbolism, while its culmination can be established at the beginning of the First World War.

In painting, symbolism was a fantastic and dreamlike style that emerged as a reaction to the naturalism of the realist painting and Impressionist trends, whose objectivity and detailed description of reality were opposed by subjectivity and the depiction of the occult and the irrational, as opposed to representation, evocation, or suggestion. Just as in poetry the rhythm of words served to express a transcendent meaning, in painting they sought ways for color and line to express ideas. In this movement, all the arts were related and thus the painting of Redon was often compared to the poetry of Baudelaire or the music of Debussy.

Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.

In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The term "symbolist" was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and art.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (UK: /ˈboʊdəlɛər/; US: /ˌboʊd(ə)ˈlɛər/; French: [ʃaʁl(ə) bodlɛʁ] ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhythm and rhyme, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.

His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist.

Paul Bénichou (French: [beniʃu]; 19 September 1908 – 14 May 2001) was a French/Algerian writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian.

Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with Morales du grand siècle, his work on the social context of the French seventeenth-century classics. Later Bénichou undertook a prodigious research program, seeking to understand the radical pessimism and disappointment expressed by mid-nineteenth writers. This project resulted in a series of major works, beginning with Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750-1830 (1973; Eng. trans. 1999 [The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830]). A 1995 volume, Selon Mallarmé, may be considered an extension of this series. Together, these works amount to an important reinterpretation of French romanticism. Critic Tzvetan Todorov described Bénichou’s special interest as “the thought of poets.” More generally, though, Paul Bénichou’s work contributed to the understanding of the creative writer's place in modernity, and illuminated the role of writers in legitimating the institutions and values of modern society.