Axël was written by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, and short story writer. Villiers was well-regarded during his lifetime, influencing W.B. Yeats among others, and is now seen as an important figure in the history of French literature. His work is valued for its imagination and its combination of the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century and the Symbolist movement of the early twentieth century. Axël is a historical artifact that modern readers will respect, if not enjoy.

Set in 1828, the play is about Count Axël d’Auersberg and his struggle with the temptation of materialism, in the form of a great treasure of gold in a cavern beneath his castle, and love, in the person of Princess Sara de Maupers. Axël lives in a remote castle in the Black Forest and devotes his time to studying alchemy under the tutelage of his occult mentor, the Rosicrucian Master Janus. The gold in the castle was collected from the people around Frankfurt, who sent it away so that Napoleon’s forces, laying siege to Frankfurt, would not steal it. The gold was hidden in the castle by Axël’s father, the Count, before he was murdered by corrupt government officials who were trying to get the gold. The Count did not divulge where the money was hidden, and Axël did not know it was in the castle. But Axël’s cousin, Commander Kaspar, finds out about the gold. Kaspar is a materialist and realist and finds Axël’s ideals foolish and morbid, while Axël has only contempt for Kaspar’s ideals of honor and self-indulgent pleasure. So when Kaspar visits Axël he plots Axël’s death in order to acquire the gold. Axël suspects Kaspar and kills him in a duel. But Axël begins to give in to the temptation of the gold and weakens in his resolve to remain apart from the world. Because of his faltering resolve Axël is abandoned by Master Janus.

Depressed by the loss of his master, Axël decides to commit suicide in the cavern, but he discovers Sara there. She heard about the gold and escaped from her convent to retrieve it. She is a patriot and a Rosicrucian and wants to use the gold against the German government, which oppresses the German people. Axël wants the gold for himself, and Sara tries to fight him for the gold. As they fight they realize how beautiful the other is, and they instantly fall in love. They exult in their love, but Axël persuades her that the world is too coarse, too mundane, too ordinary for the holy beauty of their love, and that they can never be as happy in life as they were at that first moment when they fell so rapturously in love. So they commit suicide together.

Axël is clearly not meant to be performed, but instead read. It is full of pages-long monologues and dialogues which are not realistic but instead are direct expressions of Villiers' idealism and anti-materialism. The modern reader’s pleasure in the play will depend in large part on their tolerance for declamatory, philosophical theater, especially the impassioned, idealistic, world-weary variety which is Axël’s specialty. Axël will likely be appreciated but not enjoyed.

Axël influenced an entire generation of French and German readers, though not to the degree of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers. “The French called Axël a bible of symbolism and a ‘true summa of mystical idealism,’ while the Germans gave it their inimitable stamp of approval by calling it the only true example of a French Weltanschauungstragödie (ideological tragedy) of the nineteenth century.”¹ The play directly communicates Villiers’ disgust with industrialization, mechanization, and modernization which his bourgeois contemporaries approved of. Kaspar embodies the middle-class approval of such things, and Axël makes a point of mocking Kaspar’s ethics before killing him. As a statement of disillusioned idealism and how glorious it is to have principles and ideals too high for a world too coarse and uncaring to appreciate a true artiste, Axël is excellent. But as a reading experience, Axël is annoying. Axël’s paean to overly-sensitive personalities who find pleasure in alienation is self-indulgent, and Axël’s vain, self-righteous haughtiness leaves him unlikable. Axël is a kind of existential übermensch, but no übermensch is enjoyable unless they are tempered with compassion, a quality which Axël lacks. Axël is a passionate, articulate expression of ideals which will strike most modern readers as juvenile and self-serving.

A major theme of Axël is Axël’s struggle to keep his philosophical faith (see: Rosicrucians) in the face of material, emotional, and carnal temptation. Axël’s inability to follow Master Janus’ teachings and abjure worldly achievement and fame leads to Janus’ abandonment of Axël and possibly Janus’ complicity in Axël’s death. Villiers took the occult aspects of Axël from Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni and from the French occultist and author Eliphas Lévi (1810-1875). The unwritten final section of Axël, “Le Monde Astral,” would have begun after the double suicide and conveyed the Rosicrucian idea that the mundane world is only a weak shadow of the ultimate, true reality.

Axël is at least a century old and is possibly immortal, thanks to his occult arts. He is a self-appointed exile, an isolationist and visionary with a distaste for materialist bourgeois life and for the German government, although he loves the German people. Axël’s most famous line, “Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous”² (“Live? Our servants will do that for us”), is not an indication of haughty superiority on Axël’s part but rather his world-weariness. He is in several ways a fin-de-siècle version of the “man of feeling” of Sensibility (see: The Gothic), only smug and willing to die rather than be forced to abandon his dreams for reality.

Print: Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Axël: A Symbolist Drama. London: Soho Books, 1986.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001802572 (French only; there is no English language edition available online).

¹ Thomas Reed Wissen, Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 21.

² Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Axel (Paris: Societe Francaise D’Editions D’Art), 283.