Saint-Georges de Bouhelier's «naturisme»

At the end of the nineteenth century in France, there arose a literary movement, termed le naturisme by its founder, Saint-Georges de Bouhelier. Anti-symbolist in its conception, le naturisme contained as its tenets a return to clarity and simplicity of expression and a strict avoidance of symbolist hermeticism, characteristic of Mallarme and others. Bouhelier and his disciples triggered a polemic that raged throughout the final years of the nineteenth century and involved writers such as Emile Zola and Andre Gide before its demise in the early twentieth century.