French Literature

French literature ebcid:com.britannica.oec2.identifier.ArticleIdentifier?tocId=910941...
1of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Introduction
the body of written works in the French language produced within the geographic and political
boundaries of France. The French language was one of the five major Romance languages to
develop from Vulgar Latin as a result of the Roman occupation of western Europe.
Since the Middle Ages, France has enjoyed an exceptional position in European intellectual life.
Though its literary culture has no single figure whose influence can be compared to that of
Italy's Dante or England's Shakespeare, successive periods have seen its writers and their
language exercise an influence far beyond its borders. In medieval times, because of the
far-reaching and complex system of feudal allegiances (not least the links of France and
England), the networks of the monastic orders, the universality of Latin, and the similarities of
the languages derived from Latin, there was a continual process of exchange, in form and
content, among the literatures of western Europe. The evolution of the nation-states and the
rise in prestige of vernacular languages gradually eroded the unifying force of these
relationships. From the early modern period onward, France developed its own distinctive and
many-stranded cultural tradition, which, while never losing sight of the riches of the medieval
base and the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, has come chiefly to be thought of as
Mediterranean in its allegiance, rooted in the imitation of Classical models as these were
mediated through the great writers and thinkers of Renaissance Italy.
The version of French tradition that began in the 17th century and has established itself in the
cultural histories and the schoolbooks was given fresh force in the early 20th century by the
philosopher-poet Paul Valry and, especially, his English admirers in the context of the
political and cultural struggle with Germany. In this version, French culture prizes reason,
formal perfection, and purity of language and is to be admired for its thinkers as much as for
its writers. By the end of the ancien rgime, the logic of Descartes, the restraint of Racine,
and the wit of Voltaire were seen as the hallmarks of French culture and were emulated
throughout the courts and salons of the Continent. Other aspects of this legacythe skepticism
of Descartes, calling into question authoritarian axioms; the violent, self-seeking intensity of
Racinian passion, fueled by repression and guilt; and the abrasive irony that Voltaire turned
against established bigotry, prejudice, and injusticewere less well viewed in the circles of
established order. Frequently forced underground, these and their inheritors nevertheless gave
energy to the revolutionary ethos that constituted another, equally French, contribution to
the radical traditions of western Europe.
The political and philosophical revolutions installed by the end of the 18th century, in the
name of science and reason, were accompanied by transformations in the form and content of
French writing. Over the turn of the 19th century and beyond, an emergent Romantic
sensibility challenged the Neoclassical ideal, which had become a pale and timid imitation of
its former self. The new orthodoxy asserted the claims of imagination and feeling against
reason and of individual desire against social and moral convention. The 12-syllable
alexandrine that had been used to such effect by Jean Racine remained the standard line in
verse, but the form was relaxed and reinvigorated; and the thematic domain of poetry was
extended successively by Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur
Rimbaud. All poetic form was thrown into the melting pot by the Modernist revolutions at the
turn of the 20th century.
As the novel overtook poetry and drama to become the dominant literary form in the 19th
century, French writers explored the possibilities of the genre and, in some cases, reinvented
it. The novel cycles of Honor de Balzac and mile Zola developed a new mode of social
realism to celebrate and challenge the processes at work in a nation that was being
transformed by industrial and economic revolution. In the work of other writers, such as
Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, each following his own distinctive path, a
different kind of realism emerged, focused on a preoccupation with the analysis of individual
Encyclopdia Britannica Article
French literature
2of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
action, motivation, and desire as well as a fascination with form. Between them, the
19th-century French novelists traced the fate of the individualistic sensibilities born of
aristocratic and high bourgeois culture as they engaged with the collectivizing forms of a
nation moving toward mass culture and the threshold of democracy. Joris-Karl Huysmans's
aristocratic hero, Des Esseintes, in rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the Grain),
offered a traditionalist, pessimistic version of the final outcome. Halfway through the next
century, Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy Les Chemins de la libert (1945; Roads to Freedom)
responded to a world in which the balance of the argument had visibly shifted.
During the first half of the 20th century, Paris remained the hub of European intellectual and
artistic life. Its position was challenged from the 1930s, and especially after World War II, by
Anglo-American writers, many of whom honed their own skills within its culture and its
borders; but it still continued to generate modes of thinking and writing that others followed.
From the 1950s, proponents of the nouveau roman, or New Novel, mounted a radical attack on
the conventions of the genre. At the same time, boulevard drama felt on its neck the breath of
the avant-garde; and from the 1960s onward French writers began stimulating new approaches
to almost every field of rational inquiry. The international status of the French language has
declined steadily since World War II, with the rise of American market hegemony and,
especially, with the rapid spread of decolonization. French is still, however, the preferred
medium of creative expression for many in Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, France's former
colonies in Africa and Asia, and its Caribbean dependencies. The contribution of Francophone
authors outside its borders to the renewal of French literary traditions has become
increasingly significant.
Jennifer Birkett
This article focuses on French literature produced within the Hexagon, as the country of
France is often called because of the configuration of its boundaries, from the 9th century (to
which the earliest surviving fragmentary texts belong) to the present day. Literary works
written in French in countries outside the Hexagon, including former dependencies, are
discussed under the appropriate national entries. For the French literature of Belgium, for
example, see Belgian literature: French. Other related entries of significance are Anglo-Norman
literature and African literature: Modern literatures in European languages.

The Middle Ages
The origins of the French language
By 50 BC, when the Roman occupation of Gaul under Julius Caesar was complete, the region's
population had been speaking Gaulish, a Celtic language, for some 500 years. Gaulish,
however, gave way to the conquerors' speech, Vulgar Latin, which was the spoken form of
Latin as used by the soldiers and settlers throughout the Roman Empire. In different regions,
local circumstances determined Vulgar Latin's evolution into the separate tongues that today
constitute the family of Romance languages, to which French belongs. This linguistic
development was speeded by the empire's collapse under the impact of the 5th-century-AD
barbarian invasions and isolation from Rome. Gaul was overrun by Germanic tribes, in the
north principally by the Franks (who gave France its name) and by the Visigoths and
Merovingians in the south. But the Latin speech survived: not only was it the language of the
majority of the population, but it was also backed by its associations with the old Roman
culture and with the new Christian religion, which used Low Latin, its own form of the Roman
tongue. While it retained relatively few Celtic words, the developing language had its
vocabulary greatly enriched by Germanic borrowings, and its phonetic development was
influenced by Germanic speech habits. The 9th-century Norse incursions and settlement of
Normandy, by contrast, left few traces in the language.
The Romans had introduced written literature, and until the 12th century almost all
documents and other texts were in Latin. The first text in the vernacular is the Serment de
Strasbourg, the Romance version of the Oath of Strasbourg (842), an oath sworn by Louis the
German (Louis II) and Charles the Bald (Charles II) against their brother Lothar in the
3 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
partitioning of the empire of their grandfather Charlemagne. A German version also survives.
Only a few other texts, all religious in content, survive from before about 1100.
Early texts show a broad division between the speech of northern Gaul, which had suffered
most from the invasions, and that in the more stable, cultured south, where the Latin spoken
was less subject to change. The tongue spoken to the north of an imaginary line running
roughly from the Gironde River to the Alps was the langue d'ol (the future French), and to
the south it was the langue d'oc (Occitan), terms derived from the respective expressions for
yes.
Vulgar Latin's development had not been uniform throughout the area of the langue d'ol;
and, by the time a recognizable Old French had developed, various dialects had evolved,
notably Francien (in the le-de-France, the region around Paris), Picard, Champenois, and
Norman. From the last one stemmed Anglo-Norman, the French used alongside English in
Britain, especially among the upper classes, from even before the Norman Conquest (1066)
until well into the 14th century. Each dialect had its own literature. But, for various reasons,
the status of Francien increased until it achieved dominance in the Middle French period
(after 1300), and from it Modern French developed. Old French was a fine literary medium,
enlarging its vocabulary from other languages such as Arabic, Occitan, and Low Latin. It had a
wide phonetic range and, until the decay of the two-case system it had inherited from Latin,
syntactic flexibility.

The context and nature of French medieval literature
Whatever Classical literature survived the upheavals of the early Middle Ages was preserved,
along with pious Latin works, in monastic libraries. By encouraging scholars and writers,
Charlemagne had increased the Latin heritage available to educated vernacular authors of
later centuries. He also left his image as a great warrior-emperor to stimulate the
legend-making process that generated the Old French epic. There one finds exemplified the
feudal ideal, evolved by the Franks, that was the means of establishing a hierarchy of
dependency and, thereby, a cohesiveness that would lead to a national identity. The warrior's
code of morality, founded on loyalty to the monarch and on the bond between brother
knights, bolstered the entire political system. As stability increased under the Capetians,
windows opened onto other cultures and elements: that of the Arabs in Spain and, with the
Crusades, the East; the advanced Occitan civilization; and the legends of Celtic Britain. The
Roman Catholic church grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century its schools were
flourishing, training generations of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became less
embattled, and the nobility became more leisured and sophisticated. The machismo of the
epics was tempered by the social graces of courtoisie: generosity, modesty, and consideration
for others, especially the weak and distressed, and by a concept of love that did not view it
as a weakness in a knight but as an inspiration consistent with chivalry.
By the 13th century an additional source of patronage for writers and performers was the
bourgeoisie of the developing towns. New genres emerged, and, as literacy increased, prose
found favour alongside verse. Much of the literature of the time is enlivened by a rather
irreverent spirit and a sometimes cynical realism, yet it also possesses a countercurrent of
deep spirituality. In the 14th and 15th centuries France was ravaged by war, plague, and
famine. Along with a preoccupation in literature with death and damnation, there appeared a
contrasting refinement of expression and sentiment bred of nostalgia for the courtly,
chivalric ideal. At the same time a new humanistic learning anticipated the coming
Renaissance.
Before 1200 almost all French literature had been composed as verse and had been
communicated orally to its public. The jongleurs, professional minstrels, traveled and
performed their extensive repertoires, which ranged from epics to the lives of saints (the
lengthy romances were not designed for memorization), sometimes using mime and musical
accompaniment. Seeking an immediate impact, most poets made their poems strikingly visual
in character, more dramatic than reflective, and revealed psychology and motives through
action and gesture. Verbal formulas and clichs were used by the better poets as an effective
4of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
narrative shorthand, especially in the epic. Such oral techniques left their mark throughout
the period.

The chansons de geste
More than 80 chansons de geste (songs of deeds) are known, the earliest and finest being
the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed
in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later,
rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered
from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often
pitting Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the
influence of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons
de geste lost some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures
more exotic, and their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned
into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already
familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi (Deeds of
the King), the king being Charlemagne, Roland's uncle, in whose service he perished with the
rear guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin's
great-grandson, Guillaume d'Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse
and Charlemagne's cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne's son
Louis) is the subject of a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume (Song of
William). The epics in the Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among
them Raoul de Cambrai, in a gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful
13th-century Huon de Bordeaux (Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon
(Shakespeare's Oberon), has been placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is
handled, with legendary embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is not
known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from
Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a
continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts
were retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were
associated with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few
texts belong to the period before 1150.

The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and
flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The
earliest romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas,
and Troy were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other
romances, such as Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur),
exploited Greco-Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were
capturing the public's imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the
chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting
them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more
authorial intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic
marvels and the cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (courtly love). There is more interest
in psychology, especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century,
apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in
Scotland and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the
Anglo-Norman poet Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Broul (rather later and possibly
5 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
composite). The legend was reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas's
version can be reconstructed from Gottfried von Strassburg's German rendering and another
in Old Norse). Chrtien de Troyes's treatment, mentioned in his Cligs, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent by
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (113538; History of the Kings of Britain),
translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155; Arthurian
Chronicles [containing Wace's Roman de Brut and Lawamon's Brut]). The Bretons and
Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material to
French writers such as Chrtien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who
wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and
Enide), is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic
enchantment. Cligs, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous
relationship, uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet.
Lancelot; ou, le chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the
infatuated hero's rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion
(The Knight with the Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide.
Chrtien's ironies and ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the
incomplete Perceval; ou, le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished
poems. The grail, first introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably
potent symbol. The verse romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century,
but by then Jean Froissart's contribution, Mliador (138388), was only a ponderous
valediction to romance's golden age, and prose was the principal form (see below Prose
literature). On the genre's periphery were short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de
France, treating Celtic themes and probably composed in England. The unique Aucassin et
Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly comic idyll told in alternating sections of
verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly fun at the conventions of epic and
romance alike.

Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as amour
courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin'amor). Its first exponents were the
Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval
Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and
female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of
men. On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman's love was a man's aspiration, achievable, if
at all, only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the
subject's service to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the
notion of an erotic, unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours' songs, whose
origins have been sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and
other, less likely sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a
summary envoi, was the favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other
forms, from dawn songs to satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted.
Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine (see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language,
mixed obscenity with his courtly sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful
Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel, who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant
love; the soldier and poet Bertran de Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut
Daniel.
The langue d'ol had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours exerted
by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of Aquitaine,
Guilhelm IX's granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of Henry II).
The troubadours' verse inspired a number of northern trouvres, including Chrtien de Troyes
(two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Bthune, and some nobles such
as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de Lion
(Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a group
6 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from Champagne
and is often compared with Franois Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even
autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of
subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the
religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his
disgust at clerical corruption.

Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of
the world's evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen's avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among
lawyers, doctors' quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and
didactic literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general
terms than as particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic
ends, as in the fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and
the 14th centuriesmost of which are anonymous, though some are by leading
poetsgenerate laughter from situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious,
built sometimes around simple wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and
counterdeceptions. They are played out in all classes of society but predominantly among the
bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals, inviting comparison with the didactic fables.
Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of everyday life in medieval France. They
ultimately yielded in importance to the farces, bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later
writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio.
Inspired partly by the popular animal fable, partly by the Latin satire of monastic life
Ysengrimus (1152; Eng. trans. Ysengrimus), the collection of ribald comic tales known as the
Roman de Renart (Renard the Fox) began to circulate in the late 12th century, chronicling
the rivalry of Renart the Fox and the wolf Isengrin, and the lively and largely scandalous
goings-on in the animal kingdom ruled by Noble the Lion. By the 14th century about 30
branches existed, forming a veritable beast epic. Full of close social observation, they exude
the earthy humour of the fabliaux; but, particularly in some of the later branches, this is
sharpened into true satire directed against abuses in church and state, with the friars and
rapacious nobility as prime targets.

Allegory
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as
Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was
used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Plerinage de la vie humaine
(The Pilgrimage of Human Life) by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante's contemporary and a
precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman
de la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then
undermined. The first 4,058 lines were written about 122530 by Guillaume de Lorris, a
sensitive, elegant poet who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of
a young couple's venture into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking
of a crimson rose by the dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume,
however, left the poem unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally
imprisoned. Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun
(or de Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume's delicate
allegory with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient
learning. Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the
world. Love, only one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with
procreation; and a misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two
characteristically medieval but diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the
Rose was immensely popular until well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the
earliest and most important instances of the Querelle des Femmes (Debate on Women; a
literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan's
attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The Romance of the Rose, in the pistre au Dieu
7 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
d'Amours (1399; Epistle to the God of Love), foreshadows her later extended allegory in
defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and immensely readable Livre de la cit des
dames (composed 140405; The Book of the City of Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405;
The Book of Three Virtues; Eng. trans. A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasure
of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important social roles of women of all classes.

Lyric poetry in the 14th century
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de
Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of
narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A
talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed
forms: ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps,
Machaut's great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal
note than many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private
affairs, sometimes satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to
music. Jean Froissart, the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did
Christine de Pisan, whose poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period
has an unreal air, as if, amid the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years' War, the
poets were voicing a yearning for humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of
courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political polemicist in both French and Latin, was most
admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424; The Beautiful Woman Without
Mercy), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by his lady.

Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years' War was Charles, duc d'Orlans, who was
captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is
an elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at
Blois became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as
Franois Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as Franois de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle, a
priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts
in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and
manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit
Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in
eight-line octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions
to people and events sometimes made cryptic by Villon's taste for antiphrasis. His main work,
the Testament (or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in
the bishop of Orlans's dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and
rondeaux and is similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a
bitter aftertaste. Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly
escaping hanging. Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he
brings a personal note to the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy
with irony, satire, and burlesque humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen
command of rhythmic effects, and an economy of expression that not only enhances his lively
wit but produces moments of intensely focused vision and, in individual poems, moving
statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his
verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they
favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair,
however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of
their art.

Prose literature
8 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de Boron
had used verse for his Joseph d'Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the Crucifixion) and
his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances adopted it,
notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches by
various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal
(whose Cistercian author used Galahad's Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian
truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing
the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose.
To spin out their romances while maintaining their public's interest, authors wove in many
characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory
simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view of
love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically
titled Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of
Matrimony) continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de
Saintr (1456; Little John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in
which hero and heroine both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own
ends; the work's realism and psychological interest have made it for some the first French
novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New
Tales), loosely modeled on the work of Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the
fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian court.
Pious and instructional works abound. More interesting are the chronicles, which avoid the
romantic extravagances of their verse predecessors. Geoffroy of Villehardouin's Conqute de
Constantinople (Conquest of Constantinople) is a sober, if biased, eyewitness account of
the Fourth Crusade (11991204). Jean, sire de Joinville, was 84 when, in 1309, he completed
his Histoire de Saint Louis, a flattering biographical portrait of his intimate friend Louis IX,
whom he had accompanied on the Seventh Crusade. (Both Villehardouin's account and
Joinville's biography are to be found in a 20th-century English translation as Joinville and
Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades. Jean Froissart, who traveled extensively in England
and Scotland and on the Continent, projected his admiration of chivalry into his four books of
chronicles. Covering the years 1325 to 1400, they contain much picturesque detail, largely
from personal observation. A far more cynical view of people, politics, and feudal values is
found in the Mmoires of Philippe de Commynes, composed over the period 1489 to 1498 and
published posthumously in 152428; these are the texts with which modern French
historiography may be said to begin.

Religious drama
Serious drama in Europe was reborn in the Middle Ages within the Roman Catholic church.
There, from early times, musical and dramatic elements (tropes) were introduced into
certain offices, particularly at Easter and Christmas. From this practice sprang liturgical
drama. Performances took place inside churches, with the cast of clergy moving from place to
place in the sanctuary. At first only Latin was used, though occasionally snatches of
vernacular verse were included, as in the early 12th-century Sponsus (The Bridegroom;
Eng. trans. Sponsus), which uses the Poitevin dialect. Stories from the Bible and lives of the
saints were dramatized; and, as the scope of the dramas broadened, more plays were
performed outside the church and used only the vernacular. The all-male casts employed
multiple settings (dcor simultan) and moved from one setting, or mansion, to another as
the action demanded.
The first extant mystre, or mystery play, with entirely French dialogue (but elaborate stage
directions in Latin) is the Jeu d'Adam (Adam: A Play). It is known from a copy in an
Anglo-Norman manuscript, and it may have originated in England in the mid-12th century.
With lively dialogue and the varied metres characteristic of the later mystres (all of which
were based on biblical stories), it presents the Creation and Fall, the story of Cain and Abel,
and an incomplete procession of prophets. Neither it nor the Seinte Resurreccion (c. 1200;
Resurrection of the Saviour), certainly Anglo-Norman, shows the events preceding the
9of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Setting for the
Valenciennes
mystery play,
miniature by
Hubert Cailleau,
1547; in the

Crucifixion, the matter of the Passion plays; these first appeared in the early 14th century in
the Passion du Palatinus (Passion of Palatinus). Of relatively modest proportions, this
contains diversified dialogue with excellent dramatic potential and probably drew on earlier
plays now lost.
The oldest extant miracle, or miracle play (a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles,
and martyrdom of a saint), is the remarkable 13th-century Jeu de Saint Nicolas (Play of
Saint Nicholas), by Jehan Bodel of Arras, in which exotic Crusading and boisterous tavern
scenes alternate. Rutebeuf's Miracle de Thophile is an early version of the Faust theme, in
which the Virgin Mary secures Thophile's salvation. From the 14th century comes the
Miracles de Notre-Dame par personnages (Miracles of Our Lady with Dramatic Characters),
a collection of 40 miracles, partly based on a nondramatic compilation by Gautier de Coincy.
These miracles probably were performed by the Paris goldsmiths' guild.

By the 15th century, societies had been formed in various towns for the
performance of the increasingly elaborate mystery plays. In Paris the
Confraternity of the Passion survived until 1676, though its production of
sacred plays was banned in 1548. Notable authors of mystres are Eustache
Marcad; Arnoul Grban, organist and choirmaster at Notre-Dame, and his
brother Simon; and Jehan Michel. Arnoul Grban's monumental Mystre de
la Passion (c. 1450, reworked by Michel in 1486; The True Mistery of the
Passion) took four days to perform. Other plays took up to eight days.
Biblical material was supplemented with legend, theology, and elements of
lyricism and slapstick, and spectacular stage effects were employed.

Secular drama
A crucial factor in the emergence of the comic theatre was the oral presentation of much
medieval literature. A natural consequence was complete dramatization and collaborative
performances by jongleurs and later by guilds or confrries (confraternities) formed for the
purpose.
The earliest comic plays extant date from the second half of the 13th century. Le Garon et
l'aveugle (The Boy and the Blind Man), a simple tale of trickster tricked, could have been
played by a jongleur and his boy and ranks for some scholars as the first farce. At the end of
the century, the Arras poet Adam de la Halle composed two unique pieces: Le Jeu de la
feuille (The Play of the Bower), a kind of topical revue for his friends, and Le Jeu de
Robin et de Marion (The Play of Robin and Marion), a dramatized pastourelle (a knight's
encounter with a shepherdess and her friends) spiced with song and dance. The first serious
nonreligious play was L'Estoire de Griseldis (1395), the story of a constant wife.
The profane theatre eventually had its own societies of actors, such as the Basoches
(associations of lawyers and clerks) and the Enfants sans Souci (probably a special group of
Basochiens) in Paris. The societies frequently presented plays in triple bills: first a sotie, a
slight, sometimes satiric, sketch; next a moralit (morality play), a didactic and often
allegorical piece; and finally a farce. Some 150 farces have survived from the 15th and 16th
centuries. Most are of fewer than 500 lines and involve a handful of characters acting out
plots similar to those of the fabliaux. They use the octosyllabic rhyming couplet and may
include songs, commonly in rondeau form. By far the best is the unusually long La Farce de
maistre Pierre Pathelin (c. 1465; Master Peter Patelan, a Fifteenth-Century French Farce), a
tale of trickery involving a sly lawyer, a dull-witted draper, and a crafty shepherd.
For information related to French literature of this period, see also Anglo-Norman literature.

D.D.R. Owen
Jennifer Birkett
The 16th century
10of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Language and learning in 16th-century Europe
The cultural field linking the Middle Ages and the early modern period is vast and complex in
every sense. Chronologically, there is no simple or single break across the turn of the
century, though there is indeed among many writers of the period the sense of a cultural
rebirth, or Renaissance. The term, first used during the 18th century, was given currency in
the 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt and Jules Michelet, who used it to describe what they
perceived as a movement representing a clean break with the medieval past and inaugurating
the forms and values of modern European secular and progressive nation-states. But the turn
to antiquity was already visible in France in the 12th century, and echoes of Classical
literature and traces of Latinizing style are present again from the mid-15th century in the
work of the Grands Rhtoriqueurs (poets such as Guillaume Crtin, Octovien de Saint-Gellais,
Jean Marot, Jean Bouchet, and Jean Lemaire de Belges), better known for their commitment
to formal play, rhyme games, and allegorizing, in the medieval tradition. Writing inspired by
the medieval tradition continued to be produced well into the 16th century. Old and New
Testaments of the Christian Bible were as much a sourcebook as any Latin or Greek text,
especially with the new impetus provided by the Catholic Reformation. Writers were certainly
grouping in new ways around their patron courts, and their writing was becoming attached to
the defense of particular positions within the nascent nation-state. Themes and forms would
mutate within the developing context, but the processes making the literature of early
modern France are characterized by struggle rather than by any clear moment of change.
Many of the thinkers and writers of the 16th century belong to Europe as a whole as much as
to a particular nation. Many still wrote and thought in Latin, and neo-Latin literature
continued to thrive. Even those who preferred the vernacular, however, saw themselves as
heirs and contributors to a European as much as a local inheritance. Erasmus, though born in
Rotterdam, Holland, lived in France, England, and Switzerland. The assignment of Jean
Lemaire de Belges to a particular country is equally difficult, for he was a Walloon who wrote
in French and traveled among various courts. During this period writers made many journeys,
either by choice or by necessity. Franois Rabelais, Joachim du Bellay, and Michel de
Montaigne all made the trip from France to Italy. Clment Marot died in Turin, and
Marc-Antoine de Muret, after a long exile, died in Rome. This was a time of intensive and
varied cultural exchanges, which focused on, for example, the crossroads city of Lyon, turned
as much toward Italy as toward Paris, or on the courts of a succession of great royal patrons,
such as Marguerite de Navarre (Margaret of Angoulme), in Barn, and Charles IX, in Paris.
The craving for new knowledge was fueled by the books coming off the recently developed
printing press, both original works and the great texts newly come into translation that were
to form the mind and manners of the cultured European: the Bible (available in full for the
first time in 1530, in the translation by Jacques Lefvre d'taples); Baldassare Castiglione's Il
cortegiano (Book of the Courtier), translated into French by Jacques Colin in 1537; and
Plutarch's Bioi paralleloi (Parallel Lives), translated by Jacques Amyot in 1559. Martin
Luther's writings helped spread the ideas of the Protestant Reformation swiftly through
France from 1519 onward. In 1536 the first version of the refugee John Calvin's study of
Christianity was distributed from Basel; by the early 1540s Calvin was finally settled in
Geneva, with the resources of Geneva's publishing trade at his disposal to disseminate the
French version of his work. The classical texts of Renaissance humanism moved with equal
speed, disseminating across Europe the Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino and the morality of
Plutarch and Seneca, along with the poetic forms of Ovid and Horace.

The elevation of the French language
Latin remained important as the language of diplomats, theologians, philosophers, and
jurists; though the Edict of Villers-Cotterts (1539), requiring judgments in the law courts to
be given solely in French, marked a turning point. Erasmus polemicized in Latin with the
Sorbonne or with Luther. Calvin used Latin to write the first version of his Christianae
Religionis Institutio (1536; definitive Latin version, 1559; Institutes of the Christian Religion).
Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Rame) created a sensation when, after earlier writings in Latin,
he produced his Dialectique (1555; Dialectics), the first major philosophical work in
11of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
French. In 1562 his Gramre (Grammar) was a significant contribution to a host of new
studies produced in the midcentury of the vocabulary and syntax of French. At the same
time, the poets began to declare their mission to work, through their writing, for the
elevation of the national language. Thomas Sbillet, a humanist of the school of Clment
Marot, who also looked back to the later Middle Ages, produced his Art potique franais
(The Art of French Poetry) in 1548. It was overshadowed in the following year by Joachim
du Bellay's Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549; The Defence and Illustration
of the French Language), which came to be considered as a manifesto by the group of young
poets known as the Pliade (Pierre de Ronsard, du Bellay, Jean Dorat, Jean-Antoine de Baf,
Rmy Belleau, tienne Jodelle, and Pontus de Tyard), who were totally committed to the
new learning in its classical forms, and who attached themselves to the service of the Valois
court. As the century drew to its close, the great political thinker Jean Bodin, the first
theorist who sought to define the powers and the limits of sovereignty, published in French
his Six livres de la Rpublique (1576; The Six Books of a Commonweale). The Latin version of
the work followed 10 years later.

Major authors and influences
Poetry
The art of Clment Marot, at least at the beginning of his career, took its inspiration and
the forms to express it from the Grands Rhtoriqueurs, as in the allegorical poem Le
Temple de Cupidon (The Temple of Cupid). But aspects of humanism in his culture, life
at court (a protg of Marguerite de Navarre throughout his life, he succeeded his father
as valet de chambre to Francis I in 1527), and, above all, the events of his day gave his
works a new dimension. Practitioner of a wide range of formsincluding the medieval fixed
forms of the ballade and the rondeau, chansons, blasons (poems employing descriptive
details to praise or to satirize), and elegiesMarot preferred the epistle for its freedom of
style and the epigram for its vivacity. With the epistle he reached the summit of the highly
subtle art by which he defined himself, a poet of the court and also a Protestant, aspiring
to a pure and simple happiness of true religious faith. He wrote his allegorical satire on
justice, L'Enfer (Hell), in 1526 after his brief imprisonment on charges of violating
Lenten regulations, and he fled into exile in 1534 to avoid persecution after the Affaire des
Placards (in which placards attacking the Mass appeared in several cities and on the king's
bedchamber door). His return to Paris in 1537 made him no more prudent; he continued his
translations of the Psalms, a brilliant literary achievement, publishing the first collection
in 1539. Marot's translation, continued by the Calvinist theologian Theodore Beza, became
the Huguenot psalter.
While Marot was translating the Psalms, other poets were engaged with a different kind of
mysticism. In Lyon an important group including Maurice Scve, Pernette du Guillet, and
Louise Lab were writing Neoplatonist and Petrarchan love poetry, highly stylized in form,
in which desire for an earthly Beauty inflames the poet with an inspirational frenzy that
elevates his creative powers and draws him toward the spiritual Beauty, Truth, and
Knowledge that she mirrors. In her Euvres (1555; Louise Lab's Complete Works), Lab
presents a collection of elegies, sonnets, and prose reversing the usual gender perspective
and summoning other women to follow her example in search of poetic fame. The love
poetry of the Pliade is in similar mode, as reflected in the sonnet cycles of du Bellay
(L'Olive, 1549) and Ronsard (from Les Amours [1552] to the Sonnets pour Hlne [1578,
1584, 1587; Eng. trans. Sonnets pour Hlne]) and in the metrical experiments of Baf. It is
more varied in its inspirations and in its technique; Ronsard, for example, uses a wide
range of Classical models to write poems in different registers to different
mistress-figures, and he often brings more sensuous variations to the stylized motifs. There
is also a conscious foregrounding of a more worldly dimension, especially in Ronsard. The
desire for fame, the recognition of one's creative genius by contemporaries and posterity,
merges with the aspiration to possess the mistress and the divine Truth she represents.
The themes and modes of Pliade poetry, however, ranged wider than love, even the love
12of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
that presides over the life of the entire cosmos, as sung by Jacques Peletier in L'Amour des
amours (1555; The Love of Loves). Ronsard's poetic debut, the first four books of his
Odes (1550), mixed politics and the pastoral, celebrating in Pindaric mode the great men
and women of Henry II's courtboth politicians and poetsand turning to Horace and
Anacreon for models to evoke the natural beauties of the landscape of a peaceful and
idyllic France. Du Bellay's sonnet collection, Les Regrets (1558), combines satire and
pastoral to depict the corruption of society in Rome, to which diplomatic duties had exiled
him, and to express his yearning for the beauty and peace of his native Anjou. A
scientific and philosophical poetry appeared, taking many formsnot least the hymn,
reinvented by Ronsard (Les Hymnes, 155556). In drama, tienne Jodelle revived the
themes and forms of Classical tragedy. Whatever form inspiration tooklove, nature,
knowledgeArt dominated them all. Refining the forms elaborated by fellow-craftsmen
from the high ages of human art, the poet demonstrated his ability to match the creative
powers that move the cosmos.
When the civil wars broke out in 1562, the Pliade was on the side of the great Catholic
families who occupied the throne. Ronsard eloquently defended the cause of Catholic
reform against the Protestant Reformers and their aristocratic allies in his Discours
(156263). Not all the members of the Pliade, however, were as absolute against the
Protestant enemy, especially as the century advanced and the atrocities increased. In the
massacre that began on St. Bartholomew's Day (August 24/25, 1572), some 3,000
Huguenots in Paris alone were murdered by Catholics on the rampage. The plays of Robert
Garnier frequently took subjects of biblical as well as humanist inspiration that reflected
the pain of all those caught in the violence of the times (Les Juifves, 1583).
The warrior-poet of Protestantism, Thodore-Agrippa d'Aubign, represented the perfect
synthesis of humanism and Calvinism. He studied to perfection the three traditional
languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and he was familiar with modern languages,
especially Italian. In his youth, between 1571 and 1573, he wrote love poetry modeled on
Petrarch. His master poem, Les Tragiques, composed for the most part at the end of the
century but not published until 1616, is a visionary, apocalyptic account of the civil
conflict from the perspective of the Protestant Reformers.

Prose
The production of poetry in the 16th century did not outdo the other genres in quantity.
Readers turned above all to works in prose, for accounts of voyages, lives of saints, and
collections of diverse leons or lectures (readings). Prose was slow in freeing itself from
the heavy yoke thrown over it by the medieval humanists. But with Jean Lemaire de Belges
prose became eloquent, and with Franois Rabelais it became a prodigious domain of
experimentation.
Rabelais's writing found some of its most appreciative readers and critics in the 20th
century, not least the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who celebrated the
revolutionary power of Rabelais's carnivalesque discourse. Humanism rightfully claims
Pantagruel (1532; Eng. trans. Pantagruel) and Gargantua (1534; Eng. trans. Gargantua),
with their celebrated giants, feasting, drinking, and discovering and proclaiming the new
and better ways of learning, of the conduct of war and peace, and of the true religion,
which, for Rabelais resided in individual prayer, charity, and the virtuous life. He called
Erasmus his spiritual father and befriended numerous Protestants. But uniquely, this voice
of Evangelical humanism speaks through the thundering roll of a laughter that spares no
one and nothing, keeping its best aim for the worst, most benighted, and most grotesque
exponents of the medieval theology, scholarship, medicine, and law that sought to stifle
the emerging individual. Rabelais's last three books, published long after the first two,
continue the search for the good life: Le Tiers Livre (The Third Book) in 1546, Le Quart
Livre (The Fourth Book) in 1552, and Le Cinquime Livre (The Fifth Book) in 1564 (of
questionable authenticity); these can be found in English translation in The Works of
Franois Rabelais (1970). The terror of cuckoldry experienced by Pantagruel's
all-too-human companion, Panurge, and the churchmen's theological nitpicking over
13 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
doctrinal irrelevancies and absurditiesthese are so many examples of what Rabelais
considered the absurd but tragic way men wasted in idle discourse time that could be
spent in the search for sound religion, good companionship, and the intoxicating wine of
the new life.
Rabelais dedicated his Tiers Livre to Marguerite de Navarre, patron of Evangelical humanist
reform and author of religious poetry. She is best known in the modern era, however, for
her Heptamron (published posthumously, 155859; The Heptameron), modeled on
Boccaccio's Decameron. Marguerite's collection of tales held together in a narrative frame
is one of the major landmarks in the creation of the modern French realist novel. The
games of courtly love are here played in the context of court life while more ribald games
are played by serving men, maids, and monks, and the players' motives and behaviour are
commented on by the courtiers, men and women, who form the audience for the tales.
Marguerite's language is more discreet than that of Rabelais, but there is the same mixture
of styles and tones, seriousness and bawdy, and the same awareness of the resources of
both spirit and body. With her fellow novelist Hlisenne de Crenne (Les Angoysses
Douloureuses qui procdent d'amours [1538; The Torments of Love]), Marguerite is one of
the few writers to mark the making of the new culture with a distinctive female sensibility
and voice.
In the closing years of the century, Michel de Montaigne continued his predecessors'
exploration of the newly discovered realms of body and mind and of the delights of
humanist learning and language, but he employed a very different tone and form. Engaged
in his youth in politics, war, and diplomacy alongside his peers, Montaigne largely withdrew
from public life in 1570 and thereafter spent much of his time in his library, writing the
works that established him as the founder of the tradition of self-exploration and
self-writing as well as an emblem of modern liberal individualism. The first two volumes of
his Essais (Essays) were published in 1580. A third was added in 1588, along with an
enlarged edition of the first two. When he died in 1592, he left his own copy of the Essays,
with numerous revisions written in his own hand. This revised text was published in 1595.
The earliest essais were to a large degree developments, increasingly elaborate, on the
themes suggested by his extensive readings in ancient authors, particularly Plutarch's
Lives. But as he wrote, Montaigne became more and more his own subject, exploring
through introspection his own experiencenot just as his own but also as the mirror of the
universal human condition, a life subject to death and defined by the relative
circumstance of historical place, moment, and society in which it is situated.
Remembering, analyzing, imagining, considering the operations of his intellectual faculties
and his bodily functions, observing himself sick, well, aging, Montaigne is especially
concerned with the concept of change. He is the writer who perhaps best represents the
16th century's achievement in placing the individual, body and soul, in the flow of history.
The form he conceived to carry the results of his meditations is perfectly adapted to this
purpose. Free in form, the sentences and paragraphs of the essai follow seamlessly the
movement of ideas, linked by their author's own associations and changing moods. The
language is clear, simple, and measured, giving a calculated but effortless appearance of
spontaneity, engaging readers in a conversation that takes them gently into the paths of
self-discovery.
The legacy to posterity of this most moderate and self-moderating of thinkers is a double
one. Montaigne's invention and celebration of the individual subject also contributes to the
antiauthoritarian direction of Western thought. In the 17th century he was anathematized
by Blaise Pascal for his foolish project to paint himself, which the Jansenist saw as a
challenge to the religious values of self-abnegation and submission. In the 18th century
Jean-Jacques Rousseau acknowledged the influence of Montaigne on his Les Rveries du
promeneur solitaire (1782; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), celebrating radical
individualism. No Western proponent of absolute authority or order would be immune to
the challenge posed by the humanist's discovery of the central place of change in the
affairs of men or by his unswerving advocacy of Pyrrhonism, the skeptical mind-set
opposed to all dogmas and dismissive of all claims by the human mind to possess absolute
truth. Corrosive and cleansing, Montaigne's skepticism cleared the way for the scientific
rationalism of Ren Descartes and the Enlightenment.

14of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Daniel Mnager
Jennifer Birkett
The 17th century
Literature and society
Refinement of the French language
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be
seen. A widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the
pressures to conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is
reflected in the numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared
through the first half of the century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet
men of letters, mostly of bourgeois origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable
society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings
did much to refine the literary language and also helped to prepare a cultured public that
could engage in the serious analysis of moral and psychological problems.
The formation of the Acadmie Franaise, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the
standardization of the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Acadmie's own
Dictionnaire of 1694, though by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of
Csar-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine Furetire (1690). A similar desire for systematic
analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques
sur la langue franoise (1647) records polite usage of the time. In the field of literary
theory the same rational approach produced the Potique (1639; Treatise on Poetry) of
Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardire and the Abb d'Aubignac's Pratique du thtre
(1657; The Practice of Theatre), both treatises instigated by Cardinal de Richelieu's
personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the
masterpiece of the genre was L'Astre (160727; Astrea) by Honor d'Urf. Manners are
stylized, settings are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of
the characters are highly refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply
analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of Franois de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pliade's exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of
the Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing
but to the critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple,
harmonious metre and a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His
influence helped to make French lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined
but lacking imaginative inspiration. Malherbe's alexandrine, howeverclear, measured, and
energeticwas a metre marvelously suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille's dramatic
verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe's lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Thophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style
and technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy.
Thophile's verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual
delight in the natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young
noblemen and men of letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy.
His persecution, imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went
underground, and repressive orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry
of Thophile and other independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant
15 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
manner developed in the late 16th century to which modern criticism has given the name
Baroque.

The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Pote gages (in-house writer) to the Comdiens du Roi,
the company established at the Htel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays,
of which 34 were published (162328). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the
tragicomedy and the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600
and 1630. In the theatre as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a
vehicle for the subtle analysis of feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy,
Thophile de Viau's Pyrame et Thisb (1623; Pyramus and Thisbe), which shares the
fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals, tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at
its best. Here the favourite theme of false appearances, the episodic structure, and
devices such as the play within the play reflect the essentials of Baroque art. During the
1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular type of drama and a simpler and
more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on the conventional rules (the
unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority of Aristotle), but
the biensances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less important in
determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as une
peinture de la conversation des honntes gens (a painting of the conversation of the
gentry), simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious
young playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre
companies, the Htel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama;
and Corneille, together with Jean Mairet, Tristan (Franois L'Hermite), and Jean de
Rotrou, inaugurated regular tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more
than his rivals, turned exclusively to tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated
by his L'Illusion comique (performed 1636; The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation
of the interplay between reality and illusion that characterizes Baroque art. The two
trends come together in Corneille's theatre in Le Cid (performed 1637; The Cid), which,
though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as a tragicomedy. The
emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something previously
unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece, but its
form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (quarrel of
The Cid) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who
referred the play to the judgment of the newly founded Acadmie Franaise.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille's evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna
(1641), and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright's highest
achievement. In terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action,
seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu's protgs, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of
Classicism in France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible
element (le je ne sais quoi) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l'Acadmie
(1638; The Opinions of the Academy), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid,
reflects prudent compromise, but one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain
comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and regularity that Classical tragedy was to
achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou's Le Vritable
Saint-Genest (1647; The Real Saint Genest), for example, provides an interesting
contrast with Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace
16 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
and conversion. By the 1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and
their public had become more responsive to various standardizing influences. Ren
Descartes's Discours de la mthode (1637; Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence,
Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partage (Good sense is of all things in
the world the most equally distributed), clearly assumes that the mental processes of
all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical conclusions. A similar assumption is
implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in Descartes's Trait des passions de
l'me (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the
century. The spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest
between 1648 and 1653, in which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial
bodies known as parlements in an attempt to reassert their independence of the
centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the writing of the time, not least in Corneille's
tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every challenge and overcoming every obstacle,
are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de
Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile resistance to Cardinal Mazarin.
Neither Corneille's heroes nor Mazarin's opponents show a devotion to cause that is free
from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as necessary as the
desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may seem
incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new
goal of admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and
the best of his plays are still capable of arousing this response.

The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L'Astre in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient
history. The two best-known examples, Artamne; ou, le grand Cyrus (164953;
Artamenes; or, The Grand Cyrus) and Cllie (165460; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by
Madeleine de Scudry, are set in Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the
society of the time. They also show again what influenced the readers and playgoers of the
Classical age: the minute analysis of the passions, when divorced from the superficial
concerns of these novels, looks forward to the psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social
and political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative
were the ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des tats et empires de la lune (1656;
Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Moon) and Histoire comique des tats et
empires du soleil (1661; Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun), collectively
published in English translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the
Moon and the Sun (1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his
death. Paul Scarron, an early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more
down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in Le Roman comique (165157) he set out to parody
the heroic novels.

The honnte homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept
of honntet. The word does not connote honesty in its modern sense but refers rather
to an ideal aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes
and manners. Unlike the aspirant after gloire (glory), the honnte homme
17 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
(gentleman) cultivated the social graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse.
A cultured amateur, modest and self-effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo
universale (universal man). Franois de La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played
a leading part in the Fronde, provides an interesting illustration of the transition between
the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and Moral Reflections), his principal
achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on human behaviour,
expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical, self-interest
being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is the
recognition of honntet as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However,
even this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld's view of honntet is a pragmatic
one, falling as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Mr, in his
Discours de la vraie honntet (1701; Discourse on True Honntet), as it does of the
example set by Charles de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-vremond, who, in the opinion of
contemporaries, most nearly lived up to such an ideal. Few honntes gens had the culture,
the taste, and the temperament to practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but
the ideal of tolerant, cultured Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society
in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of prciosit, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honntet stands
for moderation and achieved simplicity and prciosit for the cult of artifice and allusion,
the two phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by
Molire in Les Prcieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not
represent the whole picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers
of the mode led to ludicrous extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless clich,
prcieuses such as Madeleine de Scudry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety
into the language, establishing new standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and
propagating advanced ideas about the equality of the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus
ran parallel to those of the honntes gens, and the ideal of the educated, emancipated
woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined above.
The fullest representation of the honnte homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molire. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnte homme, Molire
was also an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre
troupe from about 1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molire soon succeeded in
winning audiences to a completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be
divided conventionally into literary comedy and popular farces, from L'cole des femmes
(performed 1662; The School for Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a
formula that combined the Classical structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal
of manners expected of comedy with the caricatural characterization proper to traditional
French farce and the Italian commedia dell'arte. Even in stylized verse plays such as The
School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le Tartuffe (first version 1664;
Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The Learned Ladies), the comedy
of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of a central character, in
which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical the subject and
however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molire's plays, his characters
always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays contain,
alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnte homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane
honntet. In Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric
implications were so provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief
that there were strong reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris
career Molire could count on the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his
plays were written for performance at Versailles or other courts; and Molire also wrote
several comdies-ballets and collaborated with Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other
divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry, music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille's younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept
at gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the prcieux novels
18 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
of Madeleine de Scudry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragdies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitus of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious
drama. Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several
more plays; but, though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Surna (performed
1674), bear comparison with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction.
While Corneille retained his partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who
appealed to a new generation.

Racine's fatalism
Whether Jean Racine's Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passionsor whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own playsis a question that cannot be answered. Certainly,
both are engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the
frustrating limits placed on individual desire by society's conventions and constraints. The
world and the sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of
Corneille's. Tragedy for Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable
and inevitable catastrophe. Plot is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis
point, and, once the first step is taken, tension mounts between a small number of
characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions and desires, in increasingly straitened
and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language represents preciosity at its best: the
intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown into relief by the cool,
elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard and a model
for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into the
20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and
Bernard-Marie Kolts interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of
Racinian style. In the 1960s and '70s the director Roger Planchon found in Brnice and
Athalie fresh relevance for contemporary society.
Racine's career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thbade (The Fatal Legacy,
a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus's sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from
Greek legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Brnice (1670), Racine turned to
topics from Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate
(1673) has as its hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays
with Greek mythological subjects: Iphignie en Aulide (1674; Iphigenia in Aulis) and
Phdre (1677). His last two plays, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the
professional theatre but for the girls' school at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de
Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie in particular, the challenge of
the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian father-god presents as
powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.

Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-Despraux's
L'Art potique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed are
the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires
(from c. 1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established
himself as the foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries,
his criteria were limited by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (167483; The
Lectern; Eng. trans. Boileau's Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope's
The Rape of the Lock, he produced a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner.
Jean de La Fontaine's Fables (1668; 167879; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la
Fontaine) succeed in transcending the limitations of the genre; and, although readers
19of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
formerly concentrated heavily on the moral teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate
beneath their apparent navet the mature skills of a highly imaginative writer who
displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic and metrical resources of
the Classical age.

The Classical manner
Though the novel was still considered to be a secondary genre, it produced one masterpiece
that embodied the Classical manner to perfection. In La Princesse de Clves (1678) by
Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette, the narrative forsakes the fanciful settings of its
pastoral and heroic predecessors and explores the relationship between the individual and
contemporary court society in a sober, realistic context. The language achieves its effects by
understatement and subtle nuance rather than by rhetorical flourish. The expressive medium
forged in the salons is here used to generate original insights into the inchoate feelings of
confusion and disarray that overwhelm the naive, unformed young woman confronted with
the experienced seducer. The other great woman writer of her age, Marie de
Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Svign, produced an intimate, informal style of letter writing
that was nevertheless composed with a careful eye to literary effect. Mme de Svign not
only was an admirable example of the cultured reader for whom the grands classiques wrote
but was herself one of the most skillful prose writers of her day.
The most distinguished prose writer of the age, however, was a man who, if he does reflect
the society he lived in, does so in a highly critical light. The Penses (166970; Thoughts;
Eng. trans. Penses) of Blaise Pascal present an uncompromising reminder of the spiritual
values of the Christian faith. The work remains incomplete, so that, in spite of the aphoristic
brilliance, or the lyrical power, of many fragments, some of the thinking is enigmatic,
incoherent, or even contradictory. Nevertheless, the central theme is clearly and strongly
posed. Pascal's view of human nature has much in common with that of La Rochefoucauld or
Mme de La Fayette, but Pascal contrasts the misery of godless man with the potential
greatness attainable through divine grace. Pascal is the first master of a really modern prose
style. Whereas Descartes's prose is full of awkward Latinisms, Pascal uses a short sentence
and is sparing with subordinate clauses. The clarity and precision he achieves are equally
appropriate to the penetrating analysis of human nature in the Penses and to the irony and
comic force of the Provinciales (165657; The Provincial Letters), his masterly satire of Jesuit
casuistry.

Religious authors
A new intellectual climate can be recognized from 1680 onward, as the centralizing
authority of absolute monarchy tightened its hold on nation and culture. An increased
spiritual awareness resulting from Jansenist teaching, the preaching of Jacques-Bnigne
Bossuet and others, and the influence of Mme de Maintenon at court marked French
cultural life with a new moral earnestness and devotion. The position of Bossuet is an
ambivalent one. In spite of his outspoken criticism of king and court, his view of kingship
and of the relationship between church and state made him one of the principal pillars of
the regime of the Sun King (Louis XIV), carrying Richelieu's policies to their logical
conclusion. His ultraorthodox views are expressed in writings such as the Discours sur
l'histoire universelle (1681; Discourse on Universal History); but he also exerted a
considerable moral influence in his sermons and funeral orations, which took the art of
pulpit oratory to a new high level. Franois de La Mothe-Fnelon was a much less orthodox
churchman, and the influence he wielded was of a more liberal nature. Like Bossuet, he
was a tutor in the royal household, and he was also author of a novel, Les Aventures de
Tlmaque (1699; Telemachus, Son of Ulysses), that combines moral lessons with Classical
romance.

Satire
20of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Just as Fnelon chose an ancient modelhis novel purports to be the continuation of Book
Four of the Odysseyso Jean de La Bruyre chose to write his Caractres de Thophraste
traduits du grec, avec les caractres ou les moeurs de ce sicle (1688; The Characters of
Theophrastus Translated from the Greek, with the Characters or Manners of This Century;
Eng. trans. The Characters, or the Manners of the Age) in the style of the Greek moralist
Theophrastus. However, his work, appended to his translation of Theophrastus, was from
the beginning more specific in its reference to his own times; and successive editions, up
to 1694, made of it a powerful indictment of the vanity and pretensions of the high-ranking
members of a status-conscious society. La Bruyre attacks the extravagance and
warmongering of the king himself. He writes as an ironic commentator on the social
comedy around him, in a highly personal, visual, fast-moving prose that brings his targets
to vivid life.
An equally satiric picture of the age is left by a number of Molire's successors writing for
the comic theatre (which, from the founding of the Thtre Franais in 1680, was
organized on a monopoly basis). Comedy, at the hands of such writers as Jean-Franois
Regnard, Florent Carton Dancourt, and Alain-Ren Lesage, continued to be lively and
inventive; but the writing of tragedy, by contrast, with the exception of the work of
Racine, already had become a much more derivative exercise.

The Ancients and the Moderns
The end of Louis XIV's reign witnessed the critical debate known as the querelle des
anciens et des modernes (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), a long-standing
controversy that came to a head in the Acadmie and in various published works (see
Ancients and Moderns). Whereas Boileau and others saw imitation of the literature of
antiquity as the only possible guarantee of excellence, moderns such as Charles Perrault
in his Parallle des anciens et des modernes (168897; Comparison of the Ancients and
Moderns) and Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, in his Digression sur les anciens et
les modernes (1688; Digression on the Ancients and Moderns), claimed that the best
contemporary works were inevitably superior, because of the greater maturity of the
human mind. It was a sterile and inconclusive debate, but the underlying issue was most
important, for the moderns both indirectly and explicitly anticipated those 18th-century
thinkers whose rejection of a single universal aesthetic in favour of a relativist approach
was to hasten the end of the Classical age.

William Driver Howarth
Jennifer Birkett
The 18th century to the Revolution of 1789
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715 is a
useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate
of independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a Protestant
forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved the way
for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
21of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Bayle's contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes's wake to make knowledge, especially
of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralit des
mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe in
simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the
basis for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly
shows. Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the
elimination of error, arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting
received ideas or from human love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of
society. His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set
of correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict
satirically a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion
and the freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of womentrapped in the
private space of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of
the Persians generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and
philosophical issues, all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of
individual desire.
Montesquieu's interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considrations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur dcadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome's
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit gnral (general spirit), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l'esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society,
to maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
Voltaire (Franois-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years
he remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (172628) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), whichtaking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and
science, and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation's
economic well-beingoffered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a
despotic, authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire's onslaught upon the
power of the Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and
practices in countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical
Dictionary), the vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his
life, producing most notably Le Sicle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai
sur les moeurs (1756; An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from
the Reign of Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million
words. Above all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded
his attention and formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a
savage denunciation of metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly.
Candide at last renounces the search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple
life of labours within his reach, cultivating his garden. The conte (tale) called L'Ingnu
(1767; The Naf; Eng. trans. in Zadig, and L'Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a
turn from metaphysics to social satire on the corrupt French government (which he prudently
set retrospectively in Louis XIV's reign). Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of
Voltaire's writings in his last 20 years, as he protested against such outrages as the
22of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his own
times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son matre [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot
seized on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy
and the unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe
where nothing is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices
already made by others, determines any individual's fate, and yet free will and responsibility
are among the highest human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet
loyally serves and protects his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his
own humane values, following his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty
and chance, is the model new man of the Enlightenment.
Diderot's interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with
an interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rve de
d'Alembert (written 1769, published 1830; D'Alembert's Dream). This work is written in the
characteristic form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions
rather than attempt firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and
explore the philosophical questions they posed. The Supplment au voyage de Bougainville
(1773; Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and
Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France), for example, takes the great explorer's landfall
in Tahiti to consider the relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again
politics founded on sexual repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopdie, a vast work in 17 folio
volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d'Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopdie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot's words from his key
article Encyclopdie, change the common way of thinking.

Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comdie-Franaise from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as
pathos reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or
the Abb Dubos, should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire's Zare (1732; The
Tragedy of Zara) aims to do just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance
overwhelming the eponymous heroine, torn as she is between the religion of her French
Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality
of character destroys her, but simply the failings of Christians unworthy of their creed,
allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic emotions are replaced by
simple bourgeois sentimentality.

Marivaux and Beaumarchais
23 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology
of love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to
her bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her
autonomy of judgment and action. La Surprise de l'amour, a title Marivaux used twice
(1722, 1727), becomes a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and
delicate changes of attitude and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty
discourse in which his characters' exchanges are couched. His sympathy for the generally
likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of indulgence. The action is dramatic
essentially because the characters' stubborn pride, central to their being, has to succumb
to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux's view, is endemic to human nature.
In Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and Chance), the plot of which
is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts, Silvia experiences
profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a valet. When she
learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to force her
lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal explicitly
with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; False Confidences). As the
subtlety of Marivaux's perceptions and the genius of his language have become better
understood, he has come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille,
Racine, and Molire) of the French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Sville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit
and generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary
sentiments in The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any
intention on the author's part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the
brilliance of structure wins admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The
Marriage of Figaro, with its 92 scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical
play) and profusion of theatrical business rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final
act.

Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (bourgeois drama or middle-class
tragedy) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique srieux (1767; Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of
Figaro in L'Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mre coupable (1792; The Other Tartuffe; or, The
Guilty Mother). The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical
to Classical comedy as to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both
serious and moralistic, such as Le Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe
Nricault Destouches or the comdies larmoyantes (tearful comedies) of Pierre-Claude
Nivelle de La Chausse, which enjoyed great popularity in the 1730s and '40s. Diderot's
Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel (1757; Conversations on The Natural Son') gave a
theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The author called for middle-class tragedies of
private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire strong emotions and incline audiences
to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting against the articulate tirades of
Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or inarticulate speech rather
than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot's plays did not live up to his theories, the
emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically effective in
Michel-Jean Sedaine's Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; The Unwitting Philosopher;
Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived, perhaps
because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.

Poetry
24of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great poetry
in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might
indicate genius is missing.

The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose
Illustres franaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales
intertwined, commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating
Stendhal. As the bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus
switched to exploring the textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (novel of
manners) became important, most notably with the novels of Alain-Ren Lesage: Le Diable
boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two Sticks) and especially L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane
(171535; The History and Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit
picaresque novel, recounts its hero's rise in society and concomitant moral education, set
against a comprehensive picture of the surrounding world. Characterization and the
representation of the new ethos of sensibility receive greater attention in the novels of the
prolific Abb Prvost, author of multivolume romances but best known for the Histoire du
chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731; Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon
Lescaut; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and
shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace but also, Prvost urges, a man of the most
exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and
forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar
money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as do precise notations of financial costs, in
a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis and the
moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (173141; The Life
of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (173435; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic
note that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon
conduct becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years,
comment and endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The
result provides a rich density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a
precise and witty prose. Both protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye
for the main chance, representative of a social class making its way from margins to
mainstream; yet they are also attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their
readership, in their disarming self-revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women's position in society, salon, or
family emerged from the pen of women writers. Franoise de Graffigny (Lettres d'une
Pruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrire use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the
pain and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization
were beginning to bring their own solutions to women's subordination. The educationalist
Madame de Genlis (Stphanie-Flicit du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a
Europe-wide readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adle et Thodore;
ou, lettres sur l'ducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which
offered enlightened and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all
classes, based on the recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities,
and work in the public sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage
their households and estates. The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis's
philosophy, and it was a theme emphasized in the highly popular historical and political
romances she would later write in exile, during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to
Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for all old hierarchies in Napoleon's restored court.

25 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in
contrast to what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of
life attentive above all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men,
rather than dependent upon what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow
philosophes; he espoused untutored simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based
in the capacity for feeling that all men share; and he argued the importance of total
sincerity and claimed to practice it in his confessional writings, which are seminal
instances of modern autobiography. With these radical new claims for a different mode of
feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he stands as one of the
greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to, Voltaire. He
established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie; ou, la
nouvelle Hlose (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational
theory with mile; ou, de l'ducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is
brought up away from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man.
Emile learns to prefer feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious
sensibility is an essential element of his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from
Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvtius,
Paul-Henri d'Holbach, and Julien de La Mettrie, for whom the progress of the
Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age from superstition, fanaticism,
and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly
elaborated in the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'ingalit parmi les hommes
(1755; Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men; Eng. trans.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality
has come about because men have allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped
by the growth of competition, specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by
laws that consolidated the inequitable distribution of property. Further, he states that
elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality is endless posturing, hostility, injustice,
enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary implications of these beliefs are spelled
out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract), with its examination of the principle
of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and its formulation of a right of
resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to Rousseau, only on
the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by any form of
government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volont gnrale (general will), which
alone has sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be
developed. But such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the
prior existence of the higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and
foster. To break the vicious circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent
community a Lawgiver, who may use his authority, or the seductions of religion, to
persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his newly contracted society of truth,
sincerity, and respect for others' rights and freedoms, he must posit an authoritarian and
manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their readings of The Social
Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw himself as
unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917, revolutionaries
throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau's struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is
continued in the Confessions (written 176470; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests
that self-knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a
recognition of the importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the
role of sexualityan anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the
self, in its dreams, desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed
26 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
further in the Rveries du promeneur solitaire (written 177678; The Reveries of the
Solitary Walker), which has been seen as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic
Movement and the literature of introspection of the next century.

Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789the Great Revolution to
which the modern French state traces its originsis dominated by the masterpiece of
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and
its stylish account of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his
accomplice and rival, Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian
society that illustrates Rousseau's strictures: natural human values have no place in a
world of conformist expediency, cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos's novel is, he
claims, didactic, a moral satire of a dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the
cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and directs that world's viciousness, which the
highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and
subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's utopian Paul et Virginie (1788; Paul
and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of
Rousseauist ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became
the self-proclaimed chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man
of the generation that had gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his
philosophical treatises, novels, and short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners
and morals of men and especially women, in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois
mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street. Along with the work of
Louis-Sbastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (178189; Panorama of Paris
[selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning metropolis
prepare the ground for Honor de Balzac's analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from
Donatien-Alphonse-Franois, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade,
whose fascination with the connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals
and in society's larger structures, gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade's philosophy, where
the essential operation of Nature is not procreation but destruction, murder is natural and
morally acceptable. The true libertine must replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring
to the total freedom of individual desire. The language and thematics of Sade's fantasies
owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his antisocial egoism is, however, only a
perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les malheurs de la vertu (1791;
Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine's sister, Juliette (1797; Eng.
trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for fulfillment
in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journes de Sodome (written 178485,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the
imaginative forms of the modern unconscious.

Haydn T. Mason
Jennifer Birkett
From 1789 to the mid-19th century
Revolution and empire
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture of
the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feelingwhether based on reason, sentiment,
27 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
or an exacerbated sensibilityand most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789
to 1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime's centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or,
strictly speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and
literary forms that had dominated serious literatureand drama in particularin France for
almost two centuries. But Rousseau's emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its
heirs, as did the new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic
violence that had emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic
remained. The seeds of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before
writers began to turn to other nations to kindle their inspiration.

The poetry of Chnier
Andr Chnier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets,
who saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical
spirit, especially that of Greece, Chnier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes.
He began work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, Herms, a history of the
universe and human progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit
but also anticipate the episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chnier, though a
moderate in revolutionary terms, was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in
the scathing fierceness of his lyrical satires, the ambes, many of which were written from
prison shortly before his execution. His best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing
of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and lost happiness.

Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory.
Speaking in the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the
city-states of Greece as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as
Honor-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and
Louis de Saint-Just infused the intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a
sense of drama and passion. This renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded
political press, including Marat's L'Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People),
Jacques-Ren Hbert's Le Pre Duchesne (Old Duchesne), and Gracchus Babeuf's Le
Tribun du peuple (The Defender of the People). To some extent the proclamations and
communiqus of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary eloquence.

Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an migr of Franois-Auguste-Ren, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les rvolutions (1797; Essay on
Revolutions; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient
and Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in
general, the French Revolution in particular, and the individual's relationship to these
phenomena. Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe,
but his Gnie du christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of
return to religious faith based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic
superiority of Christianity. The impact of this work was enormous, not least in its
reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the lodging place of spiritual repose
and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng. trans. Atala, also translated
in Atala, Ren), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility, and Ren (Eng. trans.
Ren). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe's Werther, Ren, who flees pain and suffering
28 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent the mal du
sicle (world-weariness, literally sickness of the century), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness
that will always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand's works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mmoires d'outre-tombe (184850; Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the
vanity of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many
Romantic writers.

Mme de Stal and the debate on literature
Mme de Stal (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Stal-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any
narrow definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was
rebuffed, fiercely anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and
spiritualism, and determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved
most easily in a world of ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she
founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne
(1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits society tries to impose on the independent
woman and the woman of genius. The account of Corinne's personal drama is combined
with an examination of national identities in postrevolutionary Europe, offering original
insights into how new alliances can be forged across old, hostile boundaries and what part
artistic form and women's influence could play in making new communities. Her two most
influential works, De la littrature (1800; The Influence of Literature upon Society) and De
l'Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of literature with the claim that
different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular, postrevolutionary
society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it, between the
literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers
such as William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the
Germans Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and
writer Jean-Charles-Lonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Stal's points
in his De la littrature du midi de l'Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the
South of Europe). This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Stal's
French contemporaries in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.

Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers' sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a
very particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with
the burden of history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du sicle and
enfant du sicle (literally child of the century) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset
took the latter phrase for his autobiography, La Confession d'un enfant du sicle (1836; The
Confession of a Child of the Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a
liberal or conservative attitude or whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and
politics, asserted that their century was sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic
ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any simple notion of progress was shaken.
Some distinction can be made between the generation of 1820, whose members wrote,
29of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness, loss, and ennui, and
the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamismthough often in the form of
frustrated dynamism.

Foreign influences
When the migrs who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain
and Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically
conservative writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Stal, as a liberal
exile under Napoleon, was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and
had opened up the European cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other
sensibilities. From England the influence of Lord Byron's poetry and of the Byronic legend
was particularly strong. Byron provided a model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and
despair, and his death in the Greek War of Independence reinforced the image of the noble
and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy and Spain, too, exercised an influence,
though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their literature that attracted so much as
the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these countries offered: French
writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and revenge tales.

Colin Smethurst
Jennifer Birkett
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cnacles (clubs); later groups were to
centre on Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary
critic. The outstanding poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and
the way was opened for a variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression
(and bringing politics into poetry, writing ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic
extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830, there was a marked possibility that
French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics and the socialism of utopian
writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of l'art pour l'art, or art
for art's sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Branger is a reminder of the
existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the intimate
lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.

Robin Caron Buss
Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Mditations
potiques (1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and
remaining unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating
through the musicality of his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings
unfulfilled. This soft-centred elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and
Byronic revolt. The Harmonies potiques et religieuses (1830; Poetic and Religious
Harmonies; Eng. trans. in A Biographical Sketch), with their religious emotion,
reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened by unease and disquiet.
Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d'un ange (1838; The Fall of an
Angel) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine's
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading
role in the provisional government.

30of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Victor Hugo.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of
Victor Hugo emerged. In his first poems he was a supporter of the
monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman Catholic legitimism is a
common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early
poems lack the mellifluous quality of Lamartine's Poetical Meditations,
but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there are already hints
of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family
relationships and problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone,
and an eagerness to explore a wide range of poetic techniques. Hugo
called his Les Orientales (1829; Eastern Poems) a useless book of pure poetry. It can
be linked with Thophile Gautier's l'art pour l'art movement, concentrating on the
exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and
family life is interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration
of poetic consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the
prophetic, prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.

Vigny
In contrast to Hugo's scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more
limited and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however,
he proposed the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified,
moralizing philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense
expression of his thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble
stoicism, his work focuses on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the
poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His Les Destines (1864; The Fates),
composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies the high spiritual aspiration
that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and concentration of
expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.

Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1830; Tales of Spain and Italy). His exuberant sense of
humour led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them
ironically. Later, a trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of
emptiness and futility, sustained only intermittently by the linking of suffering with
love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense of self. The Nuits (Nights) poems
(La Nuit de mai, La Nuit de dcembre, La Nuit d'aot, La Nuit d'octobre, 183537)
express the purifying power of suffering in verse of sustained sincerity, purged of all the
early showiness.

Nerval
For a long while Grard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature
(notably Goethe's Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as
his real contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimres (The Chimeras),
composed between about 1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual
odyssey Aurlia (185354; Eng. trans. Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these
latter works is the poetic transcription of an anguished, mystical quest that draws on
31of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
the most diverse religious myths and all manner of literary, historical, occult, and
esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of achievement of that side of the
Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the spiritual reintegration of
the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the prose poem and his
use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stphane Mallarm.

Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived
throughout the period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often
physically engaging audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of
Romanticism against Classicism.

Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal's
call in the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal
to a contemporary public and Hugo's own major theoretical statement, in the preface to
his play Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama
of actionwhich he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and
spiritthat could transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque.
Hernani also benefited from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and
historical dramasin particular, a sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English
troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and
geographic local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with
whom young Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo's lyric
poetry to produce a dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas
(1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with
strong antithetical effects to provide the mingling of dramatic genres that the preface
to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic drama. The failure of Hugo's Les
Burgraves (1843; The Commanders), an overinflated epic melodrama, is commonly
seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.

Vigny
Whereas Hugo's verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny's most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity,
has many analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort
called for by Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a
symbolic figure of poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic
societya typical Romantic estrangement.

Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most
of his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works
have continued to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short
comedies and proverbesalmost charadesin which lighthearted fantasy and the
delicate hesitations of young love, rather in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted
with ironic pieces expressing underlying disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio
32of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
(1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one indisputable masterpiece of Romantic
theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with clear links to the disillusionment
of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological study of a once pure but
now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted youth and lost
illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a prose
that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical
of Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of
individuals and crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry
that stand comparison with Shakespeare.

The novel from Constant to Balzac
The novel was the most rapidly developing literary form in postrevolutionary France, its
enormous range allowing authors great flexibility in examining the changing relationships of
the individual to society. The Romantic undergrowth encouraged the flourishing of such
subspecies as the Gothic novel and the terrifying or the fantastic talethe latter influenced
in many cases by the translation from German of the works of E.T.A. Hoffmannworks that,
when they are not simply ridiculous, seem to be straining to provide a fictional equivalent for
the subconscious or an intuition of the mystical.
Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816; Eng. trans. Adolphe), presented as a fictional
autobiography, belongs to an important strand in the tradition of the French novelnamely,
the novel of concentrated psychological analysis of an individualwhich runs from the 17th
century to the present day. In that tradition, Adolphe has about it a Classical intensity and
simplicity of line. However, in its moral ambiguity, the hesitations of the hero and his
confessions of weakness, lies its modernity, responding to the contemporary sense of moral
sickness. In spite of the difference of style, there is a clear link with the themes of
Chateaubriand's Ren and tienne Pivert de Senancour's Oberman (1804; Eng. trans.
Obermann).

The historical novel
The acute consciousness of a changed world after the Revolution and hence of difference
between historical periods led novelists to a new interest in re-creating the specificity of
the past or, more accurately, reconstituting it in the light of their own present
preoccupations, with a distinct preference for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Until
about 1820 the Middle Ages had generally been regarded as a period of barbarism between
Classical antiquity and the neoclassical 17th and 18th centuries. Chateaubriand's lyrical
evocation of Gothic ruinsthe relics of the age of religious faithand young royalist
writers' attraction to a certain vision of feudalism provided a different evaluation of the
period. The vogue for historical novels was at its strongest in the 1820s and was given
impetus by the immense influence of the French translations of Sir Walter Scott (though
Madame de Genlis claimed strenuously that her own historical novels had established the
vogue long before). The best example of the picturesque historical novel is Hugo's
Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame). In it Hugo re-created an
atmosphere of vivid, colourful, and intense 15th-century life, associating with it a plea for
the preservation of Gothic architecture as the bearer, before the coming of the book, of
the cultural heritage and sensibilities of the nation.
A deeper reading of Scott's novels is implicit in some of Honor de Balzac's works. Balzac's
writing not only evoked the surface or the atmosphere of a precise period but also
examined the processes of historical, social, and political transformation. Scott's studies of
the aftereffects of the Jacobite rising can be paralleled by Balzac's analysis of the Breton
counterrevolution in Les Chouans (1829; The Screech Owls, a name given to any of a
number of bands of peasants [see Chouan]). The historical novel ultimately became the
staple of the popular novel, as in Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844; The Three Musketeers) by
Alexandre Dumas pre.

33 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Stendhal
The works of Stendhal (Henri Beyle), deeply concerned with the nature of individuality,
the claims of the self, and the search for happiness, represent an effort to define an
aesthetic for prose fiction and to establish a distinctive, personal voice. His
autobiographical sketches, such as his Vie de Henri Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard) and
Souvenirs d'gotisme (published posthumously in 1890 and 1892, respectively; Memoirs of
Egotism), give a fascinating insight into a highly critical intelligence trying to organize his
experience into a rational philosophy while remaining aware that the claims of emotion
will often undermine whatever system he creates. In many ways Stendhal is an
18th-century rationalist with a 19th-century sensibility.
He came to the novel form relatively late in life. Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and
the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma) are his finest
works. Both present a young would-be Napoleonic hero grappling with the decidedly
nonheroic social and political environment inherited by the post-Napoleonic generation.
The Red and the Black, a masterpiece of ironic realism both in its characterization and its
language, focuses on France in the late 1820s. The Charterhouse of Parma, both love story
and political satire, situated in Stendhal's beloved Italy (where he lived for much of his
adult life), often reflects a vision of the Italy of the Renaissance as much as that of the
19th century. His work had a quicksilver style, capable of embracing in rapid succession
different emotions, ideas, and points of view and creating a sense of immediacy and
spontaneity. He had a genius for precise and witty understatement, combined with an
ironic vision that was simultaneously cynical and tender. All these qualities, along with his
capacity for placing his floundering, aspiring heroes, with a few brushstrokes, in a
multilayered evocation of the world in which they must struggle to survive, make of him
one of the most individual, humane, and perpetually contemporary of novelists.

Sand
George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant) was a dominant figure in the literary life
of the 19th century, and her work, much-published and much-serialized throughout
Europe, was of major importance in the spread of feminist consciousness. For a long while
after her death, her literary reputation rested on works such as La Mare au diable (1846;
The Enchanted Lake) and La Petite Fadette (1849; Little Fadette), sentimental stories of
country life tinged with realistic elements, of little artistic value. More interesting are the
works modeling the subordinate position of women in the 19th-century family, such as
Indiana (1832; Eng. trans. Indiana), in which a wife struggles for independence, or novels
creating new images of heroic femininity, such as Llia (1833 and 1839; Eng. trans. Lelia),
whose heroine, beautiful, powerful, and tormented, founds a community to educate a new
generation of independent women. Sand's novel Mauprat (1837; Eng. trans. Mauprat) is
immensely readable, with its lyrical alliance of woman, peasant, and reformed aristocracy
effecting a bloodless transformation of the world by love. From the later 1830s, influenced
by the socialists Flicit de Lamennais, the former abb, and Pierre Leroux, she developed
an interest in humanitarian socialism, an idealism tinged with mysticism, reflected in
works such as Spiridion (1839), Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840; The Journeyman
Joiner; or, The Companion of the Tour of France), and Consuelo (1842; Eng. trans.
Consuelo). She is an excellent example of the sentimental socialists involved in the
Revolution of 1848her record rather marred by her reluctance to associate herself closely
with the rising groups of women engaged in their own struggle for civil and political rights.
A different perspective on contemporary feminism emerges in the vigorous and outspoken
travel writings and journal of the socialist and feminist activist Flora Tristan, notable for
Promenades dans Londres (1840; The London Journal of Flora Tristan) and Le Tour de
France: journal indit (written 1844, published 1973; The Tour of France: Unpublished
Journal).

Nodier, Mrime, and the conte
34of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Charles Nodier and Prosper Mrime both exploited the short story and the novella. Nodier
specialized in the conte fantastique (fantastic tale) to explore dream worlds or various
forms of madness, as in La Fe aux miettes (1832; The Crumb Fairy), suggesting the
importance of the role of the unconscious in human beliefs and conduct. Mrime also
used inexplicable phenomena, as in La Vnus d'Ille (1837; The Venus of Ille), to hint at
repressed aspects of the psyche or the irrational power of passion. More commonly,
combining a Classical analytic style with Romantic themes, he directed a cool, ironic look
at violent emotions. Short stories such as Mateo Falcone (1829) and Carmen (1845; Eng.
trans. Carmen) are peaks of this art.

Balzac
Honor de Balzac is best known for his Comdie humaine (The Human Comedy), the
general title of a vast series of more than 90 novels and short stories published between
1829 and 1847. In these works he concentrated mainly on an examination of French
society from the Revolution of 1789 to the eve of the Revolution of 1848, organically
linking realistic observation and visionary intuition while at the same time seeking to
analyze the underlying principles of this new world. He ranged back and forth, often
within the same novel, from the philosophical to the social, the economic, and the legal;
from Paris to the provinces; and from the summit of society to the petite bourgeoisie,
studying the destructive power of what he called thought or passion or vital energy. By
using techniques such as the recurrence of characters in several novels, Balzac gave a
temporal density and dynamism to his works. The frustrated ambitions of his young heroes
(Rastignac in Le Pre Goriot [1835; Old Goriot]; Lucien de Rubempr, failed writer turned
journalist, in Illusions perdues [183743; Lost Illusions]) and the subjection of women,
particularly in marriage, are used as eloquent markers of the moral impasse into which
bourgeois liberalism led the French Revolution. Most presciently, he emphasized the
paradox of moneyits dissolving power and its dynamic forceand of the
every-man-for-himself individualism unleashed by the Revolution, at once condemning and
celebrating the raw energies of a nascent capitalism. Vautrin, the master-criminal whose
disguises carry him across the frontiers of Europe, and Madame de Beausant, the doyenne
of old aristocracy, are the two faces of the powers that dominate this world, gatekeepers
of the two futures offered to its young inheritors.

19th-century thought
Literary criticism and journalism
The passionate, even virulent, political journalism of the Revolutionary period soon slowed
to a trickle under Napoleon. Literary debate interwoven with political considerations was
renewed after 1815, and a shifting spectrum of royalist Romantics and Neoclassical liberals
moved toward a liberal-Romantic consensus about 1830. The young critic Charles-Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, himself the author of poems, was an advocate of Romanticism about 1830,
but he progressively detached himself from it as he elaborated his biographical critical
method. Criticism in the major literary reviews tended to be from a modified Neoclassical
viewpoint throughout the 1830s and even the 1840s, the Romantics replying in
inflammatory prefaces attached to their own works. The surge in newspaper circulation
after 1836 tended to create a more popular market for serialized novels with strong
melodramatic effects, as in Eugne Sue's Mystres de Paris (184243; The Mysteries of
Paris).

Historical writing
Early 19th-century historians were committed to historical erudition, but their works often
seem closer to the world of literature. Augustin Thierry's narratives present the histories of
35 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
England and France in terms of ethnicity (Normans against Saxons and Franks against
Gallo-Romans). This is essentially a poetic concept close to that of Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe. Similarly, the early volumes of Jules Michelet's great history of France (183344)
are constructed in terms of a poetic idea of intuitive sympathy with the subject, one that
would make it possible to resurrect the essence of a past period as encapsulated in the
symbolic figures of the historian's imagination. Alexis de Tocqueville represents a turning
away from Romantic historiography in his great analytic studies of social principles in De la
dmocratie en Amrique (183540; Democracy in America) and L'Ancien Rgime et la
Rvolution (1856; The Old Regime and the Revolution).

The intellectual climate before 1848
The counterrevolutionary era of the early 19th century saw a renewal of interest in
religion, ranging from the sentimental religiosity of Chateaubriand to the traditionalist and
antidemocratic theology of Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de Bonald, and Joseph de
Maistre, but 18th-century sensualism continued and was developed by the Idologues.
Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, and his followers tried to evolve a
synthesis, which proved unstable, between socialistic scientific analysis, particularly of
economics, and Christian belief. Flicit de Lamennais, a Roman Catholic priest, moved
toward a Christian socialism that ultimately estranged him from the church. The whole
first half of the century is marked by attempts to reconcile religious faith, and the
hierarchies it supported, with the legacy of the Enlightenment that increasingly governed
society and its structures: rationalist thought and the principles of democracy.

Renan, Taine, and positivism
After the failure of what was seen as the vague idealism of the 1848 revolution, a
consciously scientific spirit, directed toward observed fact, came to dominate the study of
social and intellectual life. Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (183042; The
Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte) fathered this new school of thought, called
positivism, which became almost a new religion. Ernest Renan adapted this scientific
approach to the study of religion itself, most notably in his Vie de Jsus (1863; Life of
Jesus), which placed Jesus in historical, not theological, perspective. Hippolyte Taine's
continuation of positivist analysis, which emphasized the importance of biological science,
produced a form of biological determinism to explain human conduct. His explanation of
how writers are made, by the triple force of race, milieu, and moment, had a
crucial impact on, for example, the Naturalist literary theories of mile Zola.

Colin Smethurst
Jennifer Birkett
From 1850 to 1900
Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends
already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the
same essential problems. They continued to use the language of universalism, addressing
themselves to the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of
morality, the pursuit of beauty, and the duties of the artist. But the insights gained since the
middle of the Enlightenment into the importance of historical and social specificitywhich
was, for the most idealistic of the Romantics, the mark of modernitycontinued to restructure
underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire
(185270), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of
positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of developing capitalist
society, even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed faith in
36 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
progress through science. The antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various
types of mysticism and aesthetic formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune, in
1871, there was writing that acknowledged the situation of the repressed elements of the
entrepreneurial world, workers and women, and sought to represent their search for different
forms of social organization. By 1891, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum
(New Things) on the need for social justice in a modern world, the voice of the masses was
already beginning to find literary expression.

New directions in poetry
The greatest changes occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th century is often treated
as a period of reaction against Romanticism. The important exception to this rule is Victor
Hugo, nearly all of whose major poetry was published after 1850. The three collections Les
Chtiments (1853; Chastisements), Les Contemplations (1856; Contemplations), and La
Lgende des sicles (1859, 1877, 1883; The Legend of the Centuries) are linked by their
epic quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone, each is loosely structured
to create an overall unity. Les Chtiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and
published clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of
Louis-Napolon (Napoleon III) and the society of the Second Empire, a deluge of brilliantly
comic and cutting satire, caricature, and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for
the poor and oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the
present and the light of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual
triumph of peace, liberty, and social justice. In contrast to this political saga, Les
Contemplations embodies Hugo's philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as prophet and
representative of humanity, penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the
metaphysical truths perceived. La Lgende des sicles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The
poems are a series of historical and mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific
spirit that informed Charles-Marie-Ren Leconte de Lisle's work but with none of the same
attention to preliminary scholarly research. Together they form not only an intensely
personal and imaginative account of the origins and development of French culture and
society but a key text for students of the representation of the European cultural tradition.
After the three epic cycles, Hugo returned to writing short lyrics on personal themes,
although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as the collections he churned out in
the 1880s testify.

Gautier and l'art pour l'art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on poetrystressing form over social
engagementwas incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat
grand themes in the grand manner, Thophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric
poetry by linking idealism with aesthetics. He thus became an advocate of l'art pour l'art,
or art for art's sakea belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose. From the first
edition of maux et cames (1852; Enamels and Cameos) to the posthumously published
Derniers vers (1872; Last Verse), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature
painting, attempting to make something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most
part deliberately chosen for their triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic
arts had grown up during the 1840s. Gautier simply developed the implications of this
trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the language of shape, colour, and texture and
limiting form almost exclusively to the very restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes
that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual unrest, such as the fluid nature of
identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion for virtuoso ornamental
elaboration. The best of these poems are transpositions from one art form to another,
particularly those based on music.

Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
37 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Gautier's cult of form is also to be met in the work of Thodore de Banville. But the
reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not
confined to the formalism of the l'art pour l'art poets. Charles-Marie-Ren Leconte de
Lisle, who came to be labeled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in
his Pomes antiques (1852; Antique Poems), Pomes barbares (1862; Barbarous
Poems), and Pomes tragiques (1884; Tragic Poems). Although his theoretical
pronouncements on the supremacy of beauty suggest affinities with Gautier, Leconte de
Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry was of no significance. He
wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth, and he believed in
the necessity of systematic research before composition. The highly material surface of his
poems is used to disguise a profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history of mankind
presents a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably toward
the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of evolution.
The stories recounted from European and Eastern mythology and the portraits of exotic
animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly
documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against
a destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de Lisle's
manner and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only
Les Trophes (The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of Jos Maria de Heredia,
written over a quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read.

Baudelaire
Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom
Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism,
didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn both by
the desire to express an urgent sense of personal and collective anguish (the dedicatory
poem opening Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] famously addresses the hypocrite
lecteurmon semblablemon frre [hypocrite readermy likenessmy brother]) and
an aesthetic conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on precision and control. It is
as misguided to look for consistency in Baudelaire's critical works (such as L'Art romantique
and Curiosits esthtiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his poetry,
since his ideas evolved constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative
period (184564). To two basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that it is the
responsibility of the artist, the representative of humanity, to create meaningsignifying
symbolsout of the raw material of life; and that the material world, like the artist
himself, is irredeemably corrupt, possessed by forces of inertia or dissolution. The first of
these explains the importance that he assigns to intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and
the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge himself into the world about him. The second
led him to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist could rise above material
corruption only through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur without the
stimulus of a reality that would always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images and
doctrinesthe language of his age and classin which he formulated his poems are to be
taken literally or whether they are best viewed as the discourse he chose to grapple with
in formulating the material and historical specificities of modern life, Baudelaire was a
poet deeply concerned with the relationship between humanity, morality, and art. He
located morality for the artist (pictured, as in Hugo, as the prophet and representative of
his generation) in his effort to see and communicate to his contemporaries the truth about
themselves. The artist must bring clarity of vision into a world he saw as given over to the
fogs and miasmas of hypocrisy, fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious self-seeking. He
was genuinely distressed by the official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du
mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within Baudelaire are depicted at their height in the second edition of Les
Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a self who struggles
to transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of
experiences that start with the poet himself, move out into the uglyand yet, he finds,
thrillingurban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually uncover the black
38 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
depths of deformation and decay within the men and women who inhabit this modern
landscape of masses and markets. In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic journey,
death stands revealed as the matter and the form of the whole social and poetic
endeavour, and the final thrill is the sadomasochistic tearing of the veil on his own and
society's bankruptcy. The stylistic antitheses mirror the content. Within individual poems
Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely
physical, concrete instance. He balances banality and originality, the prosaic and the
melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of opposites, the chaos of forms and
experience that he sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life, Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits
Pomes en prose (1868; Short Poems in Prose) is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal,
though the balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of artist
and crowd, and the degradations of urban poverty are given more space than is love. The
relative freedom of the prose form gave scope for the shifts of tone and the innovative
turns of syntax that, in Walter Benjamin's insight, enabled Baudelaire to write for himself
and his contemporaries their appropriate image, the man of the urban crowd: the
juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical, the interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and
reflection, the imaginative shock of the unexpected vision, the rhythms of pleasure and
terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase (in Benjamin's essay "On Some Motifs
in Baudelaire," 1939).

Realism in the novel
Diversity among the Realists
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet's realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its
ordinariness rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much
less easily definable concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it
was applied to works as various as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du mal, and the social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils. Even the members of
the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond Duranty, cofounder of
the monthly journal Ralisme (1856), supported the view that novels should be written in a
plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but he insisted that
the Realists' main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-Franois-Flix Husson
(known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those
labeled Realists was even more diverse than their theory. The writers who most fully
realized Champfleury's ideal of a documentary presentation of the day-to-day, Edmond and
Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic perfection of style that
Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In the Goncourts' six
jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels written by
Edmond Goncourt after his brother's death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the interest
of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological statethe upbringing of a middle-class girl in Rene
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Rene Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female
servant in Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).

Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such writers
as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability in
perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit
39of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
in attempting to transpose a slice of life onto the page in everyday language. For him,
only art could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only
through its reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness
of everyday use and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and
characters, that create a world.
Flaubert's juvenilia show the writer's struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and to
find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the
pettiness of contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess
was to reappear in Salammb (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic
subjects in a heightened lyrical fashion. However, his major novelsMadame Bovary (1857;
Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and L'ducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental
Education)fuse his poetic gifts with discourses closer to everyday experience to evoke the
thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in hopeless attempts to transcend the
banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the unrelieved dullness of
provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to base her life on
the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In her efforts
to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emmaat best a dreamer, at
worst a social climberis an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and
she is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma's own
mediocrity is part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory
view is paralleled by the various illusions entertained by all the major characters. Most of
these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they are
happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and conventionas, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the ides reues (received ideas) that
Flaubert so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pcuchet
[published posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pcuchet]). Sentimental
Education extends the study to cover the entire generation of 1848, showing how all
emotional, artistic, and social ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central
character, Frdric Moreau, is a passive version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of
prostitutionthe sale of love, talent, and principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it
evokes. Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character's own experience
and point of perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their
historical situation gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial
presence, unobtrusive but visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877;
Three Tales) is a stylistic tour de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives,
each lived at a distinct and significant moment of historical transition, and telling the tale
of each life in the language, artistic forms, and perspectives each moment offers.

Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third Republic,
did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850
to 1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other.
Social drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension
between new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the
threat to family life posed by extramarital sexual relationshipsall themes touched upon
previously in light comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugne Scribe). The settings and
character types were related to the audience's milieu; hence the plays were considered to be
realistic at the time, although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and
melodramatic turns of plot make them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major
writers of social drama were Dumas fils and mile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for
his romanticization of the courtesan in La Dame aux camlias (1848; The Lady with the
40of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Camellias), the novel and play on which the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata was
based, but the moralizing Les Ides de Mme Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social
redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical of his major works. Augier's morality
was more solidly conservative than was Dumas's, as can be seen from one of his best-known
plays, Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855; The Marriage of Olympia), which proposes that what
makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an innate propensity to vice. On the
other hand, Augier's treatment of the venality of the press and the corruption of financiers in
Les Effronts (1861; The Shameless Ones) is as trenchant as comparable portraits in the
Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social relevance,
with marriage, the mnage trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the main
subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and the
return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience's assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples
of the genre are the plays of Eugne-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d'Italie
(1851; The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but
not staged until the 1850s and '60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading
figure of the age was George Bernard Shaw's bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most
successful genre of all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the
collaborators Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halvy, whose work was set to music by Jacques
Offenbach. La Belle Hlne (1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical
legend is spiced by an acute satire on the manners, morals, and values of the court of
Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political satire that the French stage could boast for 20
years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely
realistic form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism
made experiment nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically
incompetent. The only effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-Franois Becque.
That Becque owed his success to Andr Antoine, the founder and director of the Thtre
Libre (188796), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation.
Antoine, who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play
and its content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen
and August Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Thtre d'Art, and his successor,
Aurlien Lugn-Po, who restyled the company as the Thtre de l'Oeuvre, applied Antoine's
principles to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental
companies that principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular
resources of the stage, including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre's
capacity to create a new antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most
productions were of minor work (by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
and Rachilde [Marguerite Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence
made itself felt throughout Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pellas
et Mlisande (1892; Eng. trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans.
Monna Vanna), and the celebrated children's play L'Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The
significance of such theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century.
Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi (King Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been
said to foreshadow Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Thtre
de l'Oeuvre on December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the
following night.

Naturalism
41of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soires de Mdan, a volume of short stories by mile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Card, Lon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of
reality than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description.
Hence Zola's attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the
positivist philosopher who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology.
It is difficult to find a coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola's work
notes are fragmentary, and his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their
polemical purposeparticularly the essay Le Roman exprimental (1880; The Experimental
Novel), in which he developed a parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of
the experimental scientist. An examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant
(in, for example, Le Roman, the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre
and Jean]), and Huysmans indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the
analytic study of a given milieu, the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu
and characters, the application of a (more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the
rejection of any sort of idealism. However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as
capable of any simple objective transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of
literary truth the transposition of reality through the temperament of the individual writer
and the role played by form in the construction of the real.

Zola
mile Zola's Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook before
writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire
(The Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire).
The linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the
deterministic effects of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola's
canvas is broader than Flaubert's or even Balzac's: he handles subjects as diverse as a
miners' strike in Germinal (1885; Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in
L'Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The Drunkard or L'Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the
upper classes in La Cure (1872; The Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the
ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there
are countless examples of manipulation of facts, particularly in the chronology of the
novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was not paramount. Indeed, his
work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the novels as a literary
device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality that they
contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes both
poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both
individual and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast
devouring those who work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of
both analysis and commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the
reinterpretation of the Genesis story in La Faute de l'abb Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father
Mouret). As the cycle progresses, the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the
apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola's penultimate novel, on the Franco-German
War, La Dbcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (189498; The Three Cities) and the unfinished tetralogy Les
Quatres vangiles (18991903; The Four Gospels), which followed Les Rougon-Macquart,
are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and socialist
humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola's
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention
in the Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, J'accuse, of January 13, 1898,
taking up the cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.

42of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protg of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in "Le Roman" (1887; "The Novel" ) by his declaration
that his intention was to write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal
state, involves the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires
masked by everyday appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or
Paris, rely on sharply reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite
targetswomen, the middle classes, the Prussiansand designed to bring out hypocrisy and
dishonesty as the central forces in human life (as in "Boule de suif" [1880; "Butterball" in
Butterball]). His tales of mystery and imagination (for example, "Le Horla" [188687]) bring
sharp psychological insight to the evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner
and matter from Une Vie (1883; A Woman's Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary,
through the detached but destructive portrait of the worlds of journalism and finance in
Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful evocation of the crippling effects of
jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).

The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition intensified
between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and those
who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of
both attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to
take one or the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of
disparate movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.

The Decadents
The basis of Decadencebitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the
masses (as workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the
increaseis well illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel rebours (1884; Against
Nature or Against the Grain) and the Culte du moi (Cult of the Ego) trilogy (188891) by
Maurice Barrs. It derives from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has
much in common aesthetically with Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively
perceived moments of physical experience, held to have no significance beyond
themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for inspiration to the strand of
Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and extreme sensation, cast
into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily with poetry (generally
of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of Baudelaire's admirer and
fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and tales of blasphemy
and sadism. Huysmans's L-bas (1891; Down There; Eng. trans. L-Bas: A Journey into
the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a
mixture of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols
and doctrine, other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both
content and form. The novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The
Torture Garden]) and Jean Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de
Phocas]), with their lyrical evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy,
evoking formations of homosexual as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric
edge; they criticize their own posturing, and they highlight the unjust class privilege on
which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes considered to belong to the Symbolist
movementmostly for her connections with its journal, the Mercure de France, edited by
her husbandher novels are best understood as productions of the Decadent ethos: for
example, Monsieur Vnus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing gender roles in the
43 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its vampiric
heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans's rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautramont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [186869; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and
Stphane Mallarm. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the
Decadent movement.
Much of Verlaine's early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in the
Ftes galantes (1869; Parties of Pleasure) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; Songs Without Words). In his famous manifesto poem, "L'Art potique" (
"The Art of Poetry" ), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Nagure (1885; Yesteryear
and Yesterday) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he
used lines with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual
collocations of abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the
technical range of French verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the
self is important and that the function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme
sensation and unique impression. These features, together with his experiments in
dissolving form, were seized on by the younger generation of poets in the 1880s and
developed in the review Le Dcadent, founded in 1886, whose title adopted a label coined
by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best exponent in Jules Laforgue, who
brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his studies in contemporary German
philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic contrast. His first two published
collections, Les Complaintes (1885; Lamentations) and L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la
Lune (1886; Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon), are a series of variations on the
Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored through a host
of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure Pierrot
[Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell'arte). Laforgue's fluid verse form, shaped by
rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French
poetry.

The Symbolists
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is slight and, in poetry at least, is
frequently as much one of allegiances to different networks as one of differences of
thematic content or formal practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the opposition is
between the Decadents' perception that the material world, and the galling limits of the
present, is all there is and the Symbolists' concept of the meaningful universe of signifying
forms and ideal, absolute meanings that it is the artist's task to evoke, or suggest, using
the tokens of the material world: images, which can be linked by the poetic imagination
into meaningful symbolizations.The narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the
case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud wrote all his poetry before the age of 21, beginning in
1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep frustration with an existence of marginalization and
repression. His poetic creed is contained in two letters of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he
prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own desires and sensations, break free of
conventional perceptions and rationalist categories, and constitute himself as a visionary.
The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems
reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary; he supported the Commune, the
failed workers' insurrection of May 1871. The poem "Le Bateau ivre" ( "The Drunken Boat" )
evokes the poet's fantasy journey from the bounds of conventional subjectivity and
common sense through a sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in the sea of
ecstasy in which all fixed references are gone, the categories of all sense experience blur,
and poetry and the poet are caught up together in boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of
fragmentary prose poems, Une Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell, published together
with Illuminations [1974]), reworks his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and his
frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry that could transform his captivity. The
aesthetic revolution is taken still further in Illuminations (written during the period
44of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
187175 and published posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and prose, outbursts of
destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustrationglimpses into the tumult of revolt
and despair that for him is the only honest expression of the modern unconscious.
Stphane Mallarm brought to poetry a very different temperament and intellectual
background. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 186668 led to a loss of religious faith and
a loss of faith in the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet must acknowledge his
inability not only to write a poem that could communicate the truth of its object but also
to communicate his own response to the object. In Mallarm's hands, the writing of poetry
progressively became a matter of finding ways to release words from their conventional
task of communicating functional meanings and of finding instead syntactic patterns and
rhythms that could bring images into new constellations and allow assonance and
alliteration to suggest new connectionsto model, in short, the creative movement of
poetic language.
As early as L'Aprs-midi d'un faune (1876; The Afternoon of a Faun; Eng. trans.
L'Aprs-midi d'un faune; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy), he concentrated
on multiplicity of meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun's
erotic desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. His later
poems are studies in the possibilities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images
and antithetical patterns reverberate together. Un Coup de ds jamais n'abolira le hasard
(1897; Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance), Mallarm's formal tour de force, co-opts
typography to the presentation of proliferating meanings. The material world may be a
desperate chaos of significations, ruled by chance, but human authorship can still be
asserted within it, by creating constellations of forms, one of which is the form of chance
itself, the constantly changing hazard of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by Jean Moras, who produced the first
manifesto of the movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through the journal and
publishing house of the Mercure de France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Among
his works in various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie crbrale (1890; Very Woman
(Sixtine): A Cerebral Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; Magical Tales), and Le Problme
du style (1902; The Problem of Style). Gourmont had a major influence both on the
founding of the Symbolist movement in France and, subsequently, on Anglophone
modernism. Symbolism continued to mark the 1880s and '90s, producing charming poems,
characterized by musicality, myth, mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major
poets. Among those whose works have survived in anthologies are Henri de Rgnier and
Francis Vil-Griffin and the Belgian poets Georges Rodenbach and mile Verhaeren.

The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence (with the exception of Huysmans's Against Nature and Mirbeau's The
Torture Garden) nor Symbolism generated novels of lasting significance. Within the new
vogue for the short story, fostered by the demands of the popular press, there was a
recrudescence of the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Villiers de
L'Isle-Adam (Contes cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul
Duval), and Mirbeau all contributed to this genre. But the major trends in the novel were
connected with the revival of Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the
aftermath of the Franco-German War. The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in
Huysmans's La Cathdrale (1898; The Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic and visionary, as in
Lon Bloy's Le Dsespr (1886; The Desperate Man) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The
Woman Who Was Poor). But the combination of Roman Catholic doctrine and right-wing
politics in the novels of Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889), gives the clearest
image of the spirit of the times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were
similar to those found in Maurice Barrs and other nationalist writers. Barrs moved from
decadent self-absorption to become the advocate for an extreme form of historical
determinism, which saw the individual as part of a collective inherited unconscious defined
by race. His trilogy Le Roman de l'nergie nationale (The Book of National Energy),
45 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
particularly Les Dracins (1897; The Rootless or Men Without Roots), is an important
document for an understanding of the attitudes of the French right during the Dreyfus Affair
and between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends and yet was a typical offspring of
the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel Prize for
Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of
Jacques-Anatole-Franois Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and
author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism
fashionable after Germany's victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in
the detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in La Rtisserie de la Reine Pdauque
(1893; At the Sign of the Reine Pdauque). But in Monsieur Bergeret Paris (1901; Monsieur
Bergeret in Paris), France's commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in the Dreyfus Affair
introduced both a more bitter note to his satire and an express commitment to humanitarian
ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the
Affair, a response typified by his extended satire of French society through the ages in L'le
des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the
French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers
right up to the end of World War II, he spoke for that Voltairean liberal humanism, reason,
and justice of which France became the symbol in a Europe twice overrun by German
imperial ambitions.

Christopher Robinson
Jennifer Birkett
From 1900 to 1940
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is
continuity with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarm and
Rimbaud were models for Paul Valry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation,
such as Charles-Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse)
followed Zola into the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and
rejected its claims to objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason, gave
ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche,
whose books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations
of the mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To the
continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and
state and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry's law of 1882 making
primary education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic
revival that emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel
and Charles Pguy and then, in a second generation, Franois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos.
Meanwhile, anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years
immediately preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Franaise, led by
Charles Maurras. Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore
the monarchy, the group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
46 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the
Nouvelle Revue Franaise, founded by Andr Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivire took over as its
director in 1919. The review, which became France's leading literary magazine while also
spawning the Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition.
Its articles represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially
tended to emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud's A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His Diary)
depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost
Content) by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Lger) depicted the
triumphant recovery of childhood in loges (1911; loges, and Other Poems); and Rivire's
essays on painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical
mind seeking to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its
most serious challenges.

Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: Andr Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition
of high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide's Les Nourritures
terrestres (1897; Fruits of the Earth) and L'Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged
a generation of French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be
guided by that part of themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or
repressed by a society with its own gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the
door to the political radicalism of postwar generations, though Gide's own immediate focus
was much less on colonial oppression in Africa than on the space the continent offered for
his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican (1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the
fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly because of its celebration of the acte
gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a gesture of authentic
self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on humanity's submission
to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was
becoming, thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel
addressed homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the
same time as it challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the
problematic nature of the relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the
centre of the work, which examines the extent to which any new life is already marked
out for corruption by the pastthe family and the societyin which it begins.

Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust's la recherche du temps perdu (191327; Remembrance of Things Past) had
no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination,
and, most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive
effects of time. If time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the
mediator of loss and death, history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only
art offers the possibility of retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The
novel reenacts the operations of imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as
they join the stimulus of sense impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and
associations of syntax.
47 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands
odes [1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of
Claudel's poetic gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be
discussed below.

Valry
The life and work of Paul Valry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even
more than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind.
His poetry is an exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills
of the trained poet, and the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of
sensations, memory, imagination, and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of
reason. The principles of a creative process that is not only a work of abstraction but also a
coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are theorized in La Soire avec Monsieur
Teste (1896; An Evening with Monsieur Teste, appearing in English translation in
Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on architecture and dance. They
are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as La Jeune Parque (1917;
The Young Fate, published in French-English edition as La Jeune Parque) and Le
Cimetire marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetire marin / The
Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important
collection Charmes (1922; Charms). Throughout his career, Valry also wrote and
worked tirelessly to argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance,
cradled in the Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and
the politics of the global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as La
Crise de l'esprit (1919; The Crisis of the Spirit), bringing together ideas he promulgated
not only in his writing but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the
League of Nations.

The impact of World War I
War novels and poetry
The liberal confidence displayed in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Franaise was
bolstered at the start of World War I by nationalist euphoria among a public kept in
ignorance by official propaganda. But it found its nemesis in the horrors of modern
scientific warfare as ordinary soldiers from the trenches finally found their own voice of
protest. Novels about war, such as Le Feu (1916; Under Fire), written by Henri Barbusse, a
leading member of the French Communist Partywhose revolutionary movement and
review Clart, founded in 1919, advocated pacifism and popular powerwere relatively
few in number, but their success was enormous. Guillaume Apollinaire's war poems,
Calligrammes (1918; Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War), with their unforgettable
images of darkness, gas, and blinding rain, provided new forms to represent the dislocation
of the European landscape and its human subjects. This was a black counterpart to the
other kinds of dislocation Apollinaire had recorded in the context of the modern metropolis
and its exciting new energies (as, for instance, in Zone, in Alcools [1913; Eng. trans.
Alcools]).

The avant-garde
These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous
resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held
responsible for Europe's decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zrich in 1916, joined
48 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
forces with the writers clustering round the review Littrature (Andr Breton, Philippe
Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul luard, and, later, Ren Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton's
Manifeste du surralisme (Surrealist Manifesto) appeared in 1924. Literature and
revolution were joined in an explosion of nihilistic gesture, black humour, and outrageous
erotic transgression, engendering new forms of perception and expression. Like Sigmund
Freud, Surrealists studied fantasy and desire, attempting to follow in poetic form Freud's
insights into dream processes while also invoking (with varying enthusiasm and effect) the
revolutionary banner of Karl Marx. Breton and Soupault together published their criture
automatique (automatic writing) and looked to the visual media (film and Cubist
painting and photography) as much as to language for contemporary images.
The early 1920s were a brilliant period, during which the cosmopolitanism of reviews such
as Commerce (192432), directed by Valry, Larbaud, and the poet Lon-Paul Fargue and
including texts from many countries, was a conscious attempt to overcome the rifts
created in Europe by the war. Paris again became a pole of attraction for European
intellectuals, not least the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American high priests of modernism:
James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. Joyce's Ulysses, first published in
Paris, demonstrates the mutual profitability of Anglo-French exchange. Indebted to the
interior monologue form developed by the poet and novelist douard Dujardin, it
influenced in its turn Larbaud's Amants, heureux amants (1923; Lovers, Happy Lovers).

Colette
Not all French writers shared the Surrealist impulse to revolt. The 1920s saw a withdrawal
into various forms of escapism: a cult of travel writing, for example, exemplified by Paul
Morand, and an interest in the regional novel, continuing well into the 1930s, in which a
refusal of the stresses of urbanization was expressed as a nostalgic poeticization of the
relationship of the peasant with the land (as in the works of Andr Chamson,
Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and Jean Giono). It was also in the 1920s that Colette, who had
already made her name in the first years of the century with her highly popular Claudine
novels, began to establish herself as a serious writer, with Chri (1920; Eng. trans. Chri)
and Le Bl en herbe (1923; Ripening Seed). In the 1930s she produced autobiographical
writings, including autobiographical fictions that, almost uniquely, provided a female
perspective on feminine experience in a male-centred age. Le Pur et l'impur (1932; The
Pure and the Impure), published with little success in 1932 as Ces Plaisirs (These
Pleasures), is one of the first major women's texts to be centred on lesbian themes.

Political commitment
From the mid-1920s onward, the pressure of international economic competition and the
growing self-awareness and organization of the working class, accompanied by the increasing
elaboration and spread of the polarized ideologies of communism and fascism, often polarized
writers as well. Julien Benda's plea for intellectual detachment, La Trahison des clercs (1927;
The Great Betrayal), caused a stir but sharpened divisions. Adolf Hitler's accession to power
in Germany in 1933 increased the possibility of a fascist Europe, the stability of the Third
Republic was undermined by economic depression, and the Stavisky affair (193334) led to
charges of widespread corruption in the parliamentary regime. By the time the Spanish Civil
War broke out in 1936, the battle lines were drawn between the right-wing patriotic
leagues and the Front Populaire (Popular Front), the left-wing alliance, led by Lon Blum,
that came to power in 1936 and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray.

Politics in the novel
Cline and Drieu
49of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Cline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to
the End of the Night) and Mort credit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan), were
radically experimental in form and language. They give a dark account of the machinery of
repressive authoritarianism and the operations of capitalist ambition in war and peace, and
across continents. With hindsight, Cline's novels can be seen as portraying the preparation
of the common man of Europe for fascism, and, though not originally designed as such,
they were read for a long time in that lightespecially as Cline himself published
anti-Semitic pamphlets, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; Trifles for a Massacre) and
L'cole des cadavres (1938; School for Corpses). During World War II he was an active
collaborator with the Nazis.
But it fell to another future collaborator, Pierre-Eugne Drieu La Rochelle, himself
converted to fascism, to write expressly in Gilles (1939) the archetypal itinerary of the
young French fascist, from defeat in the trenches of World War I, through failure and
despair in the 1920s, to the decision to help overthrow the elected Republican government
in Spain. Drieu's example was followed by younger men, such as Robert Brasillach, author
of Notre Avant-guerre (1941; Our Prewar), and Lucien Rebatet, who, like Brasillach,
contributed during the Occupation to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis
Partout.

Malraux, Gide, and others
On the political left, Joseph Stalin's decision to end the policy of hostility toward the
Socialist Party and to encourage party activists to work for the formation of popular fronts
brought many writers into or close to the Communist Party. Newspapers such as Commune,
which advocated that literature should serve the cause of working-class liberation, were
influential. Andr Gide's adherence to and defection from communism, depicted in Retour
de l'U.R.S.S. (1936; Back from the U.S.S.R.), were widely discussed.
The books of Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre's tutor and mentor, who had joined the
Communist Party, explore in the forms of Socialist Realism the tensions and temptations of
changing class loyalties; perhaps the best-known example is Antoine Bloy (1933; Eng.
trans. Antoine Bloy). Louis Aragon, at loggerheads with his Surrealist colleagues for his
espousal of Socialist Realism, published his own account of society's move from capitalism
to more-emancipated systems (Les Cloches de Ble [1934; The Bells of Ble]). But most
eagerly read were the novels of Andr Malraux, vigorous dramatizations of the heroism and
glamour of revolutionary fraternity. La Condition humaine (1933; Man's Fate) depicts the
communist uprising in Shanghai in 1927, while L'Espoir (1937; Man's Hope) is a lyrical and
epic account of the Spanish Civil War, evoking the passionate contemporary debates among
revolutionary factions about the best way to fight for the revolutionary ideal.
A few isolated writers dealt with political struggles outside the European arena.
Colonialism had been denounced by Gide in his Voyage au Congo (1927; Voyage to the
Congo) and Retour du Tchad (1928; Return to Chad; trans. jointly as Travels in the
Congo) and had been attacked by Nizan in Aden Arabie (1931; Eng. trans. Aden Arabie).
Henry de Montherlant's L'Histoire d'amour de la rose de sable (written in 1932 although not
published until 1954; Desert Love) offers another critique, using as its vehicle the figure of
a nationalist officer who loses his belief in French rule over Morocco. In the late 1930s
Albert Camus, still in his native Algeria working in the theatre and as a reporter on
Alger-Rpublicain, was starting to make his voice heard.

Politics subordinate to other concerns: Mauriac, Bernanos, and others
Few novels were in fact untouched by the political challenge, but many were more
concerned with other preoccupations. The Surrealists explored the romance of the modern
city. Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Paris Peasant), an innovative collage, was followed
by Breton's Nadja (1928; Eng. trans. Nadja), a distinctive contribution to the tradition that
50of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
joins the beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the
fascination of Paris. Franois Mauriac's Catholic novels Thrse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng.
trans. Thrse Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipres (1932; The Knot of Vipers), blind to the
romance and thrill of the modern, deployed the traditional form of the French
psychological novel to evoke the banal desolation of characters deprived of God's grace
and stranded in a desert of provincial middle-class society. Georges Bernanos, drawing
more explicitly on Catholic dogma and symbolism, addressed the same theme (Journal d'un
cur de campagne [1936; The Diary of a Country Priest]), but he was also concerned with
issues of class. His pamphlet La Grande Peur des bien-pensants (1931; The Great Fear of
the Conformers) is a blistering attack on bourgeois complacency; Les Grands Cimetires
sous la lune (1938; The Great Cemeteries in the Moonlight; Eng. trans. A Diary of My
Times) denounces General Francisco Franco's Falangists. The tradition of the family novel
was continued by Roger Martin du Gard's novel cycle Les Thibault (192240). A different
kind of family, reared in poverty and engaged in trade union action, was described by the
Breton writer Louis Guilloux in his autobiographical novel, La Maison du peuple (1927; The
House of the People). Guilloux's Le Sang noir (1935; Bitter Victory) is an even bleaker
depiction of provincial life, as experienced by a schoolmaster. In Les Hommes de bonne
volont (193246; Men of Good Will) the Unanimist Jules Romains delved into the history of
the Third Republic to try to show a transcendent, collective dimension connecting isolated
individual experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupry's Vol de nuit (1931; Night Flight) was a
popular adventure novel.

Poetry
Valry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did Breton,
Aragon, and luard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In such
books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), luard's free verse plays innovatively
with traditional ideas of order, focusing at least as much on the rhythms of syntax as on
images. The poet's own distinctive blend of poetics and politics is based on the theme of love:
a twin allegiance to the beloved woman and the ideals of the larger interrelationships of
humanity. Saint-John Perse produced what he himself described as a modern epic of interior
journey: Anabase (1924; Anabasis). Henri Michaux's prose poems in La Nuit remue (1934; The
Night Moves) are a striking example of that difficult genre. Ren Char's work exalts the
mystical forces that reside in the countryside of southern France, with its bare hills and its
twisted vegetation. Jules Supervielle's poetry of the 1920s and '30s conjures up the
mysterious spirit animating animals, plants, and objects.

Theatre
The great directors and actor-directors of the interwar years, who continued in Jacques
Copeau's traditionCharles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoff, and Gaston
Baty, known collectively as the Cartelrebuilt the commercial theatre. They fostered a
literary and poetic theatre, developing high standards of acting, production, and stage
design; and they tried (less successfully) to reach out beyond the traditional middle-class
audience. The plays produced for this theatreby Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand
Salacrou, and the early Jean Anouilhhave aged less well than the innovations in staging.
Giraudoux's La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English as Tiger at the Gates)
has remained famous for its encapsulation of the prewar debate on national differences and
the inevitability of war. Cocteau's best contribution was his merging of theatre with other
arts (including music) and spectacle, a mlange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the
new medium of cinema than to the stage (Orphe [stage version 1927, film version 1950;
Orpheus]).
The very different kind of theatre launched in 1896 by Alfred Jarry found its way back onto
the stage through the Surrealists, with, for example, Roger Vitrac's black comedy Victor; ou,
les enfants au pouvoir (1928; Victor; or, Children in Power). Antonin Artaud began to
formulate his Theatre of Cruelty, which would use stage resources enriched by Japanese Noh
theatre and the Balinese Theatre (in Paris in 1931), replacing words by spectacle, to expose
51of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by
habit in their everyday lives. But his Le Thtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its
Double), now a seminal point of reference for modern drama, began to exert its influence
only after republication in 1944.
Another major figure still awaiting full recognition was Paul Claudel. Former anarchist turned
religious convert, the most celebrated poet of the Roman Catholic revival had from the start
of the century been turning the traditionalist cult of suffering, and its symbols and myths,
into potentially great drama. The lyrical language of Partage de midi (1906; Break of Noon)
transformed an adulterous love affair into participation in the divine Passion. L'Annonce faite
Marie (1912; Tidings Brought to Mary) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of
rebirth. (Partage de midi and L'Annonce faite Marie appear in English translation in Two
Dramas [1960].) Claudel's experiments mixing the inspiration of Wagnerian drama, Japanese
Noh theatre, and film produced in the interwar years two major epics proclaiming the
absolute presence of divine order in the world. Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper) is
an account of the imperializing ambitions of Spain in the 16th century, in which divine grace
pursues the characters who try in vain to escape their destiny; Le Livre de Christophe Colomb
(1930; The Book of Christopher Columbus) is the story of the explorer whose faith joined the
two halves of the globe. Claudel's moment was to come in the 1940s, with the discovery of his
work by the great director Jean-Louis Barrault, who recognized its spectacular potential and
the dramatic heights of violence and passion it attained.

The eve of World War II
By the eve of World War II, new influences were at work on the French cultural scene. From
the mid-1930s onward, the novels of the American writers William Faulkner and John Dos
Passos, as well as the philosophies of the Germans Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger,
were finding a following in France. Camus published L'Envers et l'endroit (1937; Betwixt and
Between) and Noces (1939; Nuptials), two volumes of essays that revealed his sense of the
beauty and the emptiness of life on the edge of the Mediterranean. In La Nause (1938;
Nausea), unraveling the psychological novel and the diary form, and in the five nouvelles
collected in Le Mur (1939; The Wall), Jean-Paul Sartre was already transferring into creative
writing the insights into the problematic nature of perception, the nature of the real, the
alienated subject, and (as he saw it) the absurdity of the world that he had developed in his
meditations on phenomenology and existentialism.

Patrick McCarthy
Jennifer Birkett
The mid-20th century
The German Occupation and postwar France
France's defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the
war in the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options
made during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of
pacifist convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as
individuals and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying
forces or the Vichy government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and
later were criticized for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was
Louis-Ferdinand Cline, whose reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. Andr Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
52of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist Party,
which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of the
1930s and '40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who upheld
the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul luard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence
de la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and
reprinted in Allied countries, Vercors's short novel, like Aragon's collection of poems Le
Crve-Coeur (1941; Heartbreak; Eng. trans. Le Crve-Coeur), became an emblem of
French resistance and was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at
the end of the war, Camus's fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation,
returned to the issues of resistance and collaboration to present both a humane
understanding of the pressures and limits set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to
fail to recognize and fight evil is to become part of it.

Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestigefor
the time being, at leastto those who had made the right moral and political choices.
During the Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of
freedom and necessity, and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility
and action, in plays such as Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit,
also published as In Camera) and in the treatise L'tre et le nant (1943; Being and
Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and his ideas set the tone for a postwar
generation that congregated in the cafs and cellar clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prs. The
myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence, its jazz clubs, and its
worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian's L'cume des jours (1947; Froth on the
Daydream). Sartre's patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau's discovery, helped confirm the
reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.

Camus
At this period, Sartre's name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L'tranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider)
explored similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations
after Sartre's critique of Camus's L'Homme rvolt (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward
the existentialist Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of
Dialectical Reason) and Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute,
1956; The Fall) showing evidence of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over
France's war with Algeria.

Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
53 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre's lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral,
political, and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the
battle for hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women's
situation, Le Deuxime Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succs de scandale on its first
appearance, was to be a more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her
Mmoires d'une jeune fille range (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning
of a sequence of autobiographical works that tracked the different phases of her own life
and the exchanges within it between public and private experience. After Sartre's death
she gave a moving account of his later years in La Crmonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A
Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the 1990s of their letters and diaries
from the war years later brought the relationship between the couple, and their
relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising perspectives.

Toward the nouveau roman
The popular literary event of 1954 was Bonjour tristesse (Hello, Sadness; Eng. trans.
Bonjour Tristesse). Published when its author, Franoise Sagan (pseudonym of Franoise
Quoirez), was only 19 years old, this novel of adolescent love was written with classical
restraint and a tone of cynical disillusionment and showed the persistence of traditional form
in the preferred fictions of the novel-reading public. The Naturalist novel survived in the
work of Henri Troyat and others, while its assumptions about the role of the author and the
nature of fictional reality continued to be taken for granted by a host of novelists and their
readers.
These assumptions, challenged in the interwar years in the Joycean novel, had already found
opposition in the prose fictions of Samuel Beckett, Joyce's disciple and fellow Irishman, who
published his first major text in French in 1951. Molloy (Eng. trans. Molloy) was the first of a
trilogy exploring the constitution of the individual subject in discursive form, setting out the
framing limits of identity constituted by language, history, social institutions, family, and the
forms of storytelling (the other two volumes in the trilogy are Malone meurt [1951; Malone
Dies] and L'Innommable [1953; The Unnameable]). As the century progressed, it became
increasingly clear that Beckett's work was seminal in the understanding of the material
operations of writing: where writing comes from, how words work, and the extent to which
all individuals live in language.
In the mid-1950s, however, critical attention was focused on the group dubbed the nouveaux
romanciers, or new novelists: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel
Butor, and Robert Pinget. Marguerite Duras (Marguerite Donnadieu) is sometimes added to the
list, though not with her approval. The label covered a variety of approaches, but, as
theorized in Robbe-Grillet's Pour un nouveau roman (1963; Towards a New Novel), it implied
generally the systematic rejection of the traditional framework of fictionchronology, plot,
characterand of the omniscient author. In place of these conventions, the writers offer
texts that demand more of the reader, who is presented with compressed, repetitive, or only
partially explained events from which to read a meaning that will not, in any case, be
definitive. In Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (1957; Jealousy), for example, the narrator's
suspicions of his wife's infidelity are never confirmed or denied, but the interest of the
writing is in conveying their obsessive quality, achieved by the replacement of a chronological
narrative with the insistent repetition of details or events. Duras's Moderato cantabile (1958;
Eng. trans. Moderato Cantabile) favours innovative stylistic structuring over conventional
characterization and plot, her purpose not to tell a story but to use the play of form to
represent the movements of desirecomplex, ambiguous, and disruptive.
The nouveau roman (French: new novel) was open to influence from works being written
abroad, notably by William Faulkner, and from the cinema. Both Robbe-Grillet and Duras
contributed to the nouvelle vague, or New Wave, style of filmmaking. The nouveau roman
was taken up by the literary theorist Jean Ricardou and promulgated by him through the
avant-garde critical journal Tel Quel. (Founded in 1960 by Philippe Sollers and other writers,
Tel Quel reflects the transformation and politicization of Parisian and international
intellectual modes in that decade.) Its scope narrowed over the years, and texts written in
54of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
this mode were increasingly concerned with emphasizing their status as language games
divorced from the real.

Theatrical experiments
In the 1940s and early '50s, drama found immediate subject matter in the overt clash of
politics, ethics, and philosophies, public and personal, that were the substance of everyday
life. Jean Anouilh's many plays (exemplified by Antigone [1944; Eng. trans. Antigone]) are
lucid, classical moralities, showing that there is a price to be paid for loyalty to people and
beliefs. Henry de Montherlant's historical dramas explored the heroic inconsistency of human
behaviour and the fascination of secular and religious idealism. Sartre's expressed aim for his
theatre throughout the 1940s and 50s was to show systems of values in conflict. From Les
Mouches (produced 1943; The Flies), written for a France suffering Nazi oppression, to Les
Squestrs d'Altona (1959; The Condemned of Altona, also published as Altona), staged when
France had become the oppressor in Algeria, his work gives form to the conflicting
imperatives of personal survival and collective responsibility and the impossible choices set
for the revolutionary by the competing discourses of family, religion, nation, and class.
This was an outstanding moment for the French stage. At the same time, government policy
to provide state financial aid after the war led to the encouragement of great drama in the
provinces (the Avignon Festival, founded by the great director Jean Vilar in 1947 to reach a
younger public with more vibrant and modern acting and staging techniques) and the
establishment of remarkable and innovative theatre companies in Paris, such as the Thtre
National Populaire and the Compagnie Jean-Louis BarraultMadeleine Renaud. The work and
the theories of Jarry, Cocteau, and Artaud now began to bear their fruit. The plays of Anouilh
and, to a lesser extent, those of Sartre still conveyed their intentions effectively from the
author's script. Playwrights such as Jean Genet, Eugne Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, and Samuel
Beckett focused to a great degree on the realization of text in performance. Though Genet's
Les Bonnes (The Maids) appeared in 1947 and Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald
Soprano) in 1949, public recognition of the new theatre did not come until 1953, with Roger
Blin's production of Beckett's En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot). (Blin is notable
for his early presentation of plays by Beckett, Genet, and other important dramatists.) Their
antecedents as diverse as the fool of Shakespearean drama and the tramp of silent comedy,
Vladimir and Estragon are locked together in lyrical, violent, and trivial exchanges that model
the devastating absurdity of latter-day Western humanism in a highly stylized dramatic form
that brings together musical composition, high tragedy, pantomime, and knockabout farce.
Recognition, when it came, certainly answered fully Artaud's requirement for a theatre that
would shock its spectators into awareness of the darkness that shaped their world. Le Balcon
(1956; The Balcony), Genet's violently erotic representation of the spectacular fascination of
power and its corrupting effect on revolutionary impulses, waited two years before the
censor would admit it to the stage. Les Ngres (1958; The Blacks), less visual in its obscenity,
was no more careful of the audience's sensibilities, tearing apart the verbal and social
discourses that create and sustain racial oppression.

Postwar poetry
New currents in the novel and the theatre were easier to define than those in poetry, where
the lack of a broad readership was, in itself, an encouragement to fragmentation. The works
of Jacques Prvert and the songs of Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel did achieve the status
of popular poetry; but, apart from Saint-John Perse, there was no major figure in the
tradition of Claudel and Valry, and the poetry of the post-Surrealist generation appeared to
have no clear formal or ideological direction. In contrast to the tendency to abstract and
symbolic language that characterized the poetry of Ren Char and Pierre Emmanuel
(pseudonym of Nol Mathieu), the prose poems of Francis Ponge developed a materialist
discourse that aimed to allow the object to speak for itself, foregrounding devices such as
wordplay that emphasized the act of poetic perception and the role of writing in the object's
construction. This fascination with structures of perceiving, the forms that communicate
55 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
them, and the relationship of poet and poetry to the lived, material real is the great
preoccupation of Yves Bonnefoy, arguably the major French poet of the second half of the
century. Bonnefoy published his first important collection, Du mouvement et de l'immobilit
de Douve (On the Motion and Immobility of Douve), in 1953. A similar focus on the capacity of
poetry to engage poet and readers in the joint search for meaning in the external world is to
be found in the work of poets such as Philippe Jaccottet, Eugne Guillevic, and Michel Deguy.
On the whole, the intellectual bourgeoisie that might have provided the larger audience for
poetry's investigations into the working of words was at this point more interested in formal
experiments in the visual arts, especially the cinema. A younger generation, from the late
1960s, was more open to fantasy and the imagination but impatient of formal discipline. The
do-it-yourself poetry that appealed to this group's egalitarian instincts was as ephemeral as
the little magazines in which it appeared during the 1970s, and the crisis of verse that
Jacques Roubaud described in his study of French versification, La Vieillesse d'Alexandre
(1978; Alexander in Old Age), remained unresolved.
Roubaud's own poetry, including Trente et un au cube (1973; Thirty-one Cubed), looked to
Japanese literature as the inspiration for work that was structured yet free from the burden
of European rhetoric. He was associated with OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littrature Potentielle;
Workshop of Potential Literature), an experimental group of writers of poetry and prose
formed by Raymond Queneau and inspired by Alfred Jarry, who saw the acceptance of
rigorous formal constraintsoften mathematicalas the best way of liberating artistic
potential. Queneau, most widely known as the author of Zazie dans le mtro (1959; Zazie in
the Metro), had already in 1947 offered the example of his stylistic demonstrations in
Exercices de style. In his Cent mille milliards de pomes (1961; One Hundred Million Million
Poems), the reader was invited to rearrange 10 sonnets in all the variations possible, as
indicated by the title. OuLiPo's attachment to the serious pleasures of word games, and their
engagement in sometimes unbelievably demanding forms, has perhaps its best illustration in
the prose works of Georges Perec, discussed below. This renewal of interest in the playful
aspects of literary composition was consistent with contemporary critical theorythe revision
by Ferdinand de Saussure and, later, Roland Barthes, of the relation between
language-systems and meaning.

The 1960s: before the watershed
In the early 1960s, free of colonial entanglements, France enjoyed a period of perceived
increasing stability and affluence, managing for the time being to avoid facing the
consequences of the processes of decolonization, which were already creating the conditions
of far more radical sociocultural change. Frantz Fanon's Les Damns de la terre (1961; The
Wretched of the Earth), appearing with a preface by Sartre, made a considerable stir, but
there was as yet no effective audience for its sharp analyses of the damage done to European
culture and morality by Europe's destructive treatment of the Third World. Because of its
focus on French policy in Algeria, Genet's corrosively satiric drama Les Paravents (1961; The
Screens) premiered in Berlin and was not performed on the French stage until 1966, four
years after the war in Algeria ended. Despite le fast-food, le marketing, and le rock, French
culture was confident that it preserved an individual character, and the French enjoyed the
defense offered against such transatlantic imports by Ren Etiemble in his polemic
Parlez-vous franglais? (1964; Do You Speak Frenglish). The technocratic middle class, which
benefited most from the country's prosperity, was open to new ideas in science, and its
materialist outlook found expression in Jacques Monod's Le Hasard et la ncessit (1970;
Chance and Necessity). Monod, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for 1965,
rejected earlier ideologies, including religion, and drew on science for a view of the human
place in the universe. The new technology seemed to promise endless growth and the erosion
of class divisions. Other thinkers and creative writers doubted the value of society's new
directions.
The most significant developments in literature seemed to be outside the field of imaginative
literature, though more often than not they drew for their inspiration and power on the
radical writings of recent generations, and they themselves quickly engendered literary
56 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
innovations. In regard to these innovations, the journal Tel Quel was particularly
instrumental.

Structuralism
Learning to live with uncertainty and to take pleasure in the abandonment of absolutes
was the determining mode of thought in the 1960s and '70s, and in this French thinkers set
the international agenda. Structuralism, based on the analytic methods of the linguistic
theorist Ferdinand de Saussure, proposed that phenomena be considered not in themselves
but in terms of their working relationship to the organized structures within which they
exist. The structural anthropology of Claude Lvi-Strauss resulted in popular texts on social
and cultural practices that forced Western cultures to reconsider themselves in the light of
the other cultures they had exploited in order to flourish. Among Lvi-Strauss's influential
works are Tristes Tropiques (1955; Sad Tropics; Eng. trans. Tristes Tropiques) and Le Cru
et le cuit (1964; The Raw and the Cooked). The semiology (the science of signs) of Roland
Barthes gave impetus to the study of the political nature of language and the attempt to
understand the ways in which a society's discourses speak through and constitute both
writers and readers. His works include Le Degr zro de l'criture (1953; Writing Degree
Zero) and Mythologies (1957; Eng. trans. Mythologies). The latter offers readings of the
icons of contemporary culture and has become a basic text in the academic discipline
known as cultural studies. Barthes made a crucial distinction between the writerly and
the readerly text, emphasizing the scope a readerly text gives to plural, disruptive
readings. Le Plaisir du texte (1973; The Pleasure of the Text) pursued the concept of the
subversive pleasure of reading. The death of the author trumpeted by early Barthes
turned out eventually to have been much exaggerated, and his own later interest in
autobiography certainly went some way to disproving it; but the issues the provocative
concept raisedthe autonomy of the individual subject, the nature of creative
inspirationwere important ones.

Lacan and Foucault
The teaching and writing, much of it dating to the 1930s, of the psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan (crits [1966; Ecrits: A Selection]) influenced many major thinkers in the 1960s and
'70s. Lacan proved to be a major influence on avant-garde French feminism, and he led
Freudian thought in fresh directions through his work on the part played by language and
unconscious desire in the formation of a human subject that must always be seen as open,
incomplete, and in process. Michel Foucault has perhaps been even more influential than
Lacan, his studies carrying into the context of public and private life his explorations of the
relations of power to forms of knowing. In the early 1960s, writing in an accessible fashion
on gripping topics such as madness, Foucault showed how the individual subject is formed
inside the discourses of society's institutions. Louis Althusser linked Marxism, structuralism,
and Lacanian psychoanalysis in his "Freud et Lacan" (1964; reprinted in Writings on
Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan), which was published in the year that Foucault delivered
his lecture "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx."

La Nouvelle Critique (French New Criticism)
The new and subversive critical tendencies of the 1960s demanded more of the reader,
who was to become an active participant in decoding the text, not a passive recipient. The
term New Criticism (not to be confused with the Anglo-American New Criticism, developed
after World War I, whose proponents were associated with the maintenance of
conservative perspectives and structures) covers a wide range of very different practices
and practitioners, from Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard to the Marxists Lucien
Goldmann and Pierre Macherey and, later, Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva. Their new
modes of reading, which challenged the conservative traditions embedded in the
57 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
universities, contributed to the build-up of a wider demand for radical change. The New
Critics despised the university establishment and met with opposition from it about the
time that Barthes's Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) was published. The confrontation was
symptomatic. The educational system was itself rigid and outdated; a liberal university
admissions policy was combined with a teaching method based largely on formal lectures,
and the vast student body was without any say in the running of a system that seemed to
be largely irrelevant to its needs.

Approaching the 21st century
The events of 1968 and their aftermath
During the student revolt in May 1968, streets, factories, schools, and universities became
the stage for a spontaneous performance aimed at subverting bourgeois culture (a show with
no content, occluding real life, according to Guy Debord, La Socit du spectacle, 1967; The
Society of the Spectacle). Posters and graffiti, the instruments of subversion, were elevated
to a popular art form. Theatre experimented with audience participation and improvisation, a
movement that continued into the 1970s. Rock music and comic books flourished. In the late
1960s television, which had been closely controlled by the government under de Gaulle,
began to play an increasing role in cultural life; discussion programs and spin-offs from serials
or adaptations increasingly replaced newspapers in guiding taste. The immediate aftermath
of the May Events was a closing of conservative ranks, but this was short-lived. May 1968 has
become the newest icon in France's revolutionary cultural tradition.

Derrida and other theorists
The philosopher Jacques Derrida (L'criture et la diffrance [1967; Writing and
Difference]) contributed to the contemporary cult of uncertainty with his poststructuralist
project to deconstruct the binary structures of thinking on which Western culture
appeared to be based and to expose the hierarchies of power sustained by such simple
oppositions (such as the favouring of speech over writing or masculine over feminine).
Derrida challenged the conventional cultural markers of authority, attacking
logocentrism (the belief in the existence of a foundational absolute word or reality) and
phonocentrism (lodging authenticity and truth in the voice of the speaker). In their
L'Anti-dipe: capitalisme et schizophrnie (1972; The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia), Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari gave a radical thrust to the analysis of
individual desire, to be considered not in Freudian terms of repression and lack but as the
source of transformative, liberating energy. Foucault continued his enquiries into the
social forces and institutions that call individual subjectivity into existence, in volumes
such as Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison) and Histoire de la sexualit (197684; The History of Sexuality). Pierre
Bourdieu, who founded the sociology of knowledge, published La Reproduction (1970;
Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture), his seminal investigation into the social
processes that ensure the transmission of cultural capital in ways that reproduce the
established order.

Feminist writers
The Mouvement de Libration des Femmes (MLF; Movement for the Liberation of Women)
developed within the radical thinking and action that marked 1968 and produced feminist
extensions of the work of Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze. Combining the disciplines of
literary theory and psychology to explore language as an instrument for radical change,
Julia Kristeva wrote the highly influential La Rvolution du langage potique (1974;
Revolution in Poetic Language). Its account of two new areas of discourse, the semiotic
and the symbolic, proposed new ideas on the formation of identity, especially the
58 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
mother-child relationship, which have transformed ideas of women's function and
significance. Simone de Beauvoir's work provided inspiration for large sectors of the
movement. Autobiography or autobiographical fiction were popular modes, combining
lively linguistic experiment with innovative analyses of individual experience, focusing
especially on hitherto taboo areas, such as female sexuality and the family and its
discontents. Among writers in this vein were Violette Leduc in La Btarde (1964; The
Bastard; Eng. trans. La Btarde) and Marie Cardinal in Les Mots pour le dire (1975; The
Words to Say It). Creative writers in the realist mode addressed a widening popular
readership with accounts of the lives of women trapped in slum housing and dead-end jobs.
Notable works in this mode include Christiane Rochefort's Les Petits Enfants du sicle
(1961; Children of the Times; Eng. trans. Josyane and the Welfare) and Claire
Etcherelli's lise; ou, la vraie vie (1967; Elise; or, The Real Life). But an equally significant
impact was made by writers looking for ways of transforming masculine language for
women-generated versions of feminine subjectivity. The texts of James Joyce and Samuel
Beckett lie behind Hlne Cixous's criture fminine, a kind of writing that emblematizes
feminine difference. This writing is driven and styled by a feminine logic opting for
openness, inclusiveness, digression, and play that Cixous opposes to a masculine mode
that is utilitarian, authoritarian, elitist, and hierarchical. In the 1970s Cixous expressed the
theory of the new style in texts such as La Jeune Ne (1975, in dialogue with Cathrine
Clment; The Newly Born Woman), and she has continued to practice it in prose fictions of
varying value, such as Dedans (1969; Inside), awarded the Prix Mdicis, Rvolutions pour
plus d'un Faust (1975; Revolutions for More Than One Faust), and Angst (1977; Eng.
trans. Angst). The radical lesbian writer Monique Wittig made language experiments of a
slightly different kind in prose fictions that push the boundaries of genre and model
women's struggle for self-designation inside forms of language and social institutions that
are the product of masculine priorities and values. The novel L'Opoponax (1964; The
Opoponax) is a brilliant account of the making of a feminine subject, from childhood to
adolescence. Le Corps lesbien (1973; The Lesbian Body), a violent, sadomasochistic, and
lyrical text of prose fiction, is a unique attempt to evoke in its own language the body of
female desire.
In the theatre, feminism also made its own space. Marguerite Duras's India Song (1972;
Eng. trans. India Song) found new configurations of space and sound to describe the
protean nature of gendered desire. Cixous's Portrait de Dora (1976), initially a radio play,
is a psychodrama of the patient's escape from the interpretative webs of Freudian desire.
In contrast, her epics in the mid-1980s on the Cambodian and Indian struggles were
tailor-made for founding director Ariane Mnouchkine's Thtre du Soleil, a troupe known
for spectacular performances in large-scale venues.

Other literature of the 1970s
After 1968, literature became committed to the search for different themes, perspectives,
and voices. The women's movement, with its insistence on seeking out a diversity and
proliferation of voices, was highly influential; another important factor, not unconnected
with this, was the rise of writing in French from France's former colonies. Other influences
must include, in academia, the commitment of critical theory to the business of finding fresh
angles and lines of investigation and, on the wider popular front, the exponential expansion
of the media and its unprecedented demand for fresh stories, images, and forms. Within this
growing commitment to the fashionable, the history of the novel became one of quickly
displaced trends and meteoric rises (and disappearances). At the same time, several writers
with established reputations continued to demonstrate their merit (Beauvoir, Duras,
Beckettthe latter in powerful pieces of increasingly minimalist prose), and they were joined
by others. Georges Perec, one of the best-known members of OuLiPo, had first made his mark
in 1965, with the novel Les Choses: une histoire des annes soixante (Things: A Story of the
Sixties), a devastatingly comic account of a young couple in thrall to consumerism and the
rhetorics of advertising. He followed this with other discourse games, such as La Disparition
(1969; A Void), a text composed entirely without using the letter e, and La Vie: mode
d'emploi (1978; Life: A User's Manual), his most celebrated work, constructed in the form of a
variant on a mathematical puzzle. Michel Tournier caught the public imagination with work
59of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
that set up an adult relationship with the heritage of children's stories. Vendredi; ou, les
limbes du Pacifique (1967; Friday; or, The Other Island) was followed by Le Roi des Aulnes
(1970; The Ogre, also published as The Erl-King), an extraordinary combination of myth and
parable. His short stories collected in Le Coq de bruyre (1978; The Fetishist and Other
Stories) and the novel Gaspard, Melchior, Balthasar (1980; The Four Wise Men) were
subversive rewritings of ancient tales. Other writers provided more direct responses to the
political and economic frustrations of the decade: J.M.G. Le Clzio's apocalyptic fictions, for
example, evoked the alienation of life in technological, consumerist society.
In the 1970s writers began to confront the events of the Occupation. Perec's W; ou, le
souvenir d'enfance (1975; W; or, The Memory of Childhood) is an autobiography formed of the
alternating chapters of two seemingly unconnected texts, which eventually find their
resolution in the concentration camp. The novels of Patrick Modiano used a nostalgic
fascination with the war years to explore problems of individual and collective identities,
responsibilities, and loyalties.

Historical fiction
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel,
which remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar,
who in 1980 became the first woman elected to the Acadmie Franaise, had shown that
the genre could move beyond escapism. Mmoires d'Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian)
and L'Oeuvre au noir (1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in
Europe, offered portraits of men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In
addition to proffering rich evocations of the past, Yourcenar's accounts had contemporary
political resonance. History proved able to accommodate a vast range of fiction, from
popular romance and fictionalized biography to the linguistic and narrative experiments of
writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose den, den, den (1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel
about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the Algerian desert, was banned by
the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel L'Insuccs de la fte (1980;
The Failure of the Feast); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning author Claude Simon,
many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The Flanders Road), Histoire
(1967; Tale; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Gorgiques (1981; The Georgics), not only
evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms of memory and
remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction was
sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault's studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated
with the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.

Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar
(discussed above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the
1970s to publish journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel
Pagnol's 1950s recollections of his Provenal childhood met with great success. The vogue
would gather momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly,
became technically innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland
Barthes), a contradictory, self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance (1983;
Childhood). Genre boundaries blurred: in Barthes's Fragments d'un discours amoureux
(1977; A Lover's Discourse: Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and
writing became an erotic act.

Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
60of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s
also turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of
Frdric Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but
the chief attraction of the thriller for more literary writers was its form, which they,
like a number of filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of
identity or moral and political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano's Rue des boutiques obscures
(1978; The Street of Dark Shops; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective
who has lost his memory looks for his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.

The 1980s and '90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and social
changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics was
accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stagenot least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France's
bid for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented
that French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be happening
elsewhere (as a character remarked in Alain Jouffroy's novel L'Indiscrtion faite Charlotte
[1980; Charlotte and the Indiscretion]).

Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of
the old regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora,
writing in 1992 the closing essay to his great project of national cultural
commemoration, Les Lieux de mmoire (Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck
by the elegiac tone of the finished work and commented that a different tone might
have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus on more marginal groups.
Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural life not only by
Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean but by
descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les
beurs, from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find
publishers and audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of
cross-cultural identity and the patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class
suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream
readership that was increasingly learning to see itself as formed in the crosscurrents of
internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right National Front (Front
National), as delineated in works such as Lela Houari's Zeida de nulle part (1985; Zeida
from Nowhere) or her Pome-fleuve pour noyer le temps prsent (1995;
Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In). The French also began to
come to terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of
Albert Camus's posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an
autobiographical novel based on his father's childhood in Algeria, in a working-class
European colonist milieu. Assia Djebar, one of the turn of the century's outstanding
novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain that is both European and transatlantic.
Having establishedin novels such as L'Amour, la fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian
Cavalcade)her reputation as both ardent defender and critic of her native Algeria,
which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still intact, she divided
her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions that look to
the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; Strasbourg Nights).

61of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
Regional literature
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frdric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th
century and relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the
Institute of Occitan Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (197785; The
Fortunes of France), Robert Merle's saga of the Wars of Religion (between the
Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries), helped keep the
Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the popular imagination.
Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived, and writing in
French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay's novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence
movement.

Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism,
which has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and
a return to conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franois Lyotard's La Condition
postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and
concepts that had fueled 18th-century scientific rationalism and the industrial and
capitalist society to which it gave birth: the grand narratives of historical progress
and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth. Societies were to be seen
instead as collections of games or performances, played within arbitrary sets of rules.
Jean Baudrillard's critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society and its
discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l'conomie politique du signe
(1972; For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work
was perceived as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that
history had no more use and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du
Golfe n'a pas eu lieu (1991; The Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the
posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced
meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history,
and morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its
way into the intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and
empirical studies of cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la
tlvision [1996; On Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass
culture was given a new positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in
Michel de Certeau's L'Invention du quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life),
which aimed to provide the tools for people to understand and control the discourses
that shaped the ordinary processes of living.

Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz's comic pastiches of adventure, detective,
and spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the
terrain in between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce
the photo-roman, concerned with exploring the relationship between the image,
especially images of the body, and the narrative work that goes into its construction and
interpretation. Good examples of the photo-roman are Barthes's La Chambre Claire
(1980; Camera Lucida) and Herv Guibert's Vice (1991). Gay writing, already becoming
more political and more polemic, found an important collective focus in the AIDS crisis,
most notably in Guibert's best-selling A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauv la vie (1990; To the
Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of women's writing was
62of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of Annie
Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man's Place) and Une
Femme (1988; A Woman; A Woman's Story), looked at the stresses between
generations created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux's later
writing was more directly personal: L'vnement (2000; Happening) is her account of an
abortion she underwent in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort's novel of child abuse, La
Porte au fond (The Door at the Back of the Room), appeared in 1988. Hlne Cixous's
feminist classic, Le Livre de Promtha (1983; The Book of Promethea)learned, funny,
sparkling, and innovativeachieved its writer's ambition to make a distinctive model of
the desiring feminine subject, within but not consumed by the inherited forms of
writing and culture. Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novels L'Amant (1984; The
Lover) and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China Lover) voiced their
author's own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; Virgil, No; Eng. trans. Across the
Acheron). Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet's prose
fictions sit at the edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy,
engaging in confident negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and
paternal inheritance. Chantal Chawaf's sensually charged prose offers a highly original
version of the blood rhythms of the body in Rdemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption),
a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain's magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past
painfully but also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de
Prague (1992; The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal
evocation of a city haunted by its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of
Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly,
medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq appears less pleased with the burden
imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal generation of the 1960s,
which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world. The narrative
personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules lmentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also
published as Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a
society in their own image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq's Truismes
(1996; Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an
imaginative political and moral satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young
working woman with a highly materialistic lifestyle who begins to turn into a pigand
finds her transformation both appropriate and satisfying.

Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world (
"A quoi bon encore les potes" ). His work and that of such well-established figures as
Philippe Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; The Second Sowing]) were
well-recognized at the turn of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected
poems (Posies) in 2000. Martin Sorrell's bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; They [the
women]), has shown the flourishing state of women's poetry. In it, Marie-Claire
Bancquart, Andre Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer their own insights into the
problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female poetic voice. Hyvrard
inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women across the world.

Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors' theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring
spectacular and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took
theatre to new audiences in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for
63 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
developing their own stagecraft and improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing.
Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie
Kolts, whose plays are concerned with individuals struggling with the institutional
discoursesfamily, law, politicsof which contemporary consumer society and their own
identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver's play L'mission de tlvision (1990;
The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the anxieties of a world in which
realities are constantly shifting. Kolts's work is especially concerned with the
marginalized individuals and groupsimmigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffectedwho carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des
champs de coton (1986; In the Solitude of Cotton Fields), written two years before his
death from AIDS and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant
two-actor play that embodies the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Kolts, is
focused in the dealin confrontations and negotiations between unequal individuals, client
and dealer, in struggles for power, which are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in
language, and what is acted out on the Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by
which people liveon the edge of darkness, at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the
surface of the language of the deal and constantly piercing its skin is the violence that, in
Kolts's view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and
performative nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the
century, the most modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel
Beckett, standing at the intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although
Beckett died in 1989, more than a decade before the close of the 20th century, his
importance, influence, and presence had never been greater. Shifting in its latter stages
to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist mode, variously exploiting and
offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in order to explore the limits
and the potential of form, Beckett's drama enshrines the serious nature of play. In so
doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French contribution
to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns
for others to see, in all their force and intensityand the driving desire to see them
otherwise.

Robin Caron Buss
Jennifer Birkett
Additional Reading
General literary histories
Among the literary histories and reference books available at the turn of the 21st century are
JENNIFER BIRKETT and JAMES KEARNS, A Guide to French Literature: From Early Modern to
Postmodern (1997); PETER FRANCE (ed.), The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French
(1995); DAVID HOLLIER (ed.), A New History of French Literature (1989, reissued 1994); and
ANTHONY LEVI, Guide to French Literature, 2 vol. (199294).
Middle Ages
Useful histories include JOHN FOX, The Middle Ages (1974), vol. 1 in the series A Literary
History of France, ed. by P.E. CHARVET; LYNETTE R. MUIR, Literature and Society in Medieval
France: The Mirror and the Image, 11001500 (1985); and PAUL ZUMTHOR, Speaking of the Middle
Ages (1986), translated by SARAH WHITE, originally published in French, 1980.
C.W. ASPLAND (ed.), A Medieval French Reader (1979); and BRIAN WOLEDGE (ed.), The Penguin Book
of French Verse, vol. 1 (1961), are anthologies.
The epic is discussed in JESSIE CROSLAND, The Old French Epic (1951, reprinted 1971); PIERRE LE
GENTIL, The Chanson de Roland (1969; originally published in French, 1955); and JOSEPH J.
64of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
DUGGAN, A Guide to Studies on the Chanson de Roland (1976).
Discussions of the romance can be found in ROGER SHERMAN LOOMIS (ed.), Arthurian Literature in
the Middle Ages (1959, reprinted 1979); L.T. TOPSFIELD, Chrtien de Troyes: A Study of the
Arthurian Romances (1981); DOUGLAS KELLY, Medieval French Romance (1993); and DAVID J. SHIRT,
The Old French Tristan Poems (1980).
SIMON GAUNT and SARAH KAY (eds.), The Toubadours: An Introduction (1999); L.T. TOPSFIELD,
Troubadours and Love (1975, reprinted 1978); and FREDERICK GOLDIN (comp.), Lyrics of the
Troubadours and Trouvres (1973, reprinted 1983) treat the lyric. JANET M. FERRIER, French
Prose Writers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1966), covers prose of the period;
and GRACE FRANK, The Medieval French Drama (1954, reprinted 1972), places medieval plays in
context.
The 16th century
A general background of the period is provided in FERNAND BRAUDEL, The Structures of Everyday
Life, vol. 1, The Limits of the Possible (1981, reissued 1992), originally published in French
(1967); and NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975, reissued
1987). A briefer overview is given in A.J. KRAILSHEIMER (ed.), The Continental Renaissance (1971,
reissued 1978); and I.D. MCFARLANE, A Literary History of France, vol. 2: Renaissance France
14701589 (1974). Among studies of the Pliade are HENRI WEBER, La Cration potique au XVIe
sicle en France de Maurice Scve Agrippa d'Aubign (1956, reissued 1994); and GRAHAME
CASTOR, Pliade Poetics: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Thought and Terminology (1964). The
poetry and prose of the time is treated in TERENCE C. CAVE, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of
Writing in the French Renaissance (1979, reissued 1985), and Devotional Poetry in France c.
15701613 (1969). JEAN CARD, La Nature et les prodiges: l'insolite au 16e sicle en France, 2nd
ed. rev. (1996), studies the philosophy and cosmology of Ronsard and his contemporaries; as
does GUY DEMERSON, La Mythologie classique dans l'oeuvre lyrique de la Pliade (1972). The
subject of drama is covered in GEOFFREY BRERETON, French Tragic Drama in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (1973); and MADELEINE LAZARD, Le Thtre en France au XVIe sicle
(1980), which explores the decline of the medieval styles and the return of Classical tragedy
and comedy.
The 17th century
Important works include P.J. YARROW, The Seventeenth Century, 17151789, in P.E. CHARVET
(ed.), A Literary History of France, vol. 2 (1967); JOHN CRUICKSHANK (ed.), The Seventeenth
Century (1969), vol. 2 in French Literature and Its Background; JOHN LOUGH, Paris Theatre
Audiences in the 17th & 18th Centuries (1957, reissued 1972); W.D. HOWARTH, The Seventeenth
Century (1965), vol. 1 in Life and Letters of France; and A.J. KRAILSHEIMER (ed.), Studies in
Self-Interest: From Descartes to La Bruyre (1962). Among works on the drama are C.J. GOSSIP,
Introduction to French Classical Tragedy (1981); GORDON POCOCK, Corneille and Racine:
Problems of Tragic Form (1973); and H.T. BARNWELL, The Tragic Drama of Corneille and Racine:
An Old Parallel Revisited (1982). ODETTE DE MOURGUES, Racine; or, the Triumph of Relevance
(1967), remains the model for all readings of Racine's poetic texts. Also useful is DAVID MASKELL,
Racine: A Theatrical Reading (1991).
The 18th century
Standard works on the period are provided by ROBERT NIKLAUS, The Eighteenth Century,
17151789, in P.E. CHARVET (ed.), A Literary History of France, vol. 4 (1967); and JEAN EHRARD et
al. (eds.), Le XVIIIe Sicle, 4 vol. (197477), available only in French. ERNST CASSIRER, The
Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951, reissued 1966; originally published in German, 1932),
provides an introduction to the philosophes; as do the lively essays collected in ROBERT DARNTON,
The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984, reissued 2001).
Works on the novel include PETER BROOKS, The Novel of Worldliness: Crbillon, Marivaux,
Laclos, Stendhal (1969); JOAN HINDE STEWART, Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late
Eighteenth Century (1993); and VIVIENNE MYLNE, The Eighteenth-Century French Novel:
65 of 65 05-Jul-1411:42PM
MLA Style: "French literature." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Ultimate
Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica, 2014.
APA Style: French literature. (2014). Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica
Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica.
To cite this page:
Techniques of Illusion, 2nd ed. (1981).
The 19th century
From 1800 to 1850
Excellent studies appear in D.G. CHARLTON (ed.), The French Romantics, 2 vol. (1984); and
W.D. HOWARTH, Sublime and Grotesque: A Study of French Romantic Drama (1975). Useful
works on the exchanges of fiction and history include CERI CROSSLEY, French Historians and
Romanticism (1993); GYRGY LUKCS, The Historical Novel (1962, reissued 1983; originally
published in Hungarian, 1947), and Studies in European Realism (1950, reissued 2002); and
HAYDEN V. WHITE, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(1973, reissued 1990).
From 1850 to 1900
Among the better overviews of the literature are CHRISTOPHER ROBINSON, French Literature in
the Nineteenth Century (1978); and F.W.J. HEMMINGS, Culture and Society in France,
18481898: Dissidents and Philistines (1971). Genres and movements are examined in G.M.
CARSANIGA and F.W.J. HEMMINGS (ed.), The Age of Realism (1974, reissued 1978); A.G. LEHMANN,
The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 18851895, 2nd ed. (1968, reprinted 1977); ANNA
BALAKIAN, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (1967, reissued 1977); MARVIN CARLSON,
The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century (1972); JENNIFER BIRKETT, The Sins of the
Fathers: Decadence in France 18701914 (1986); and RICHARD GRIFFITHS, The Reactionary
Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 18701914 (1966).
The 20th century
An overview of the period from 1920 to 1970 can be found in GERMAINE BRE, Twentieth-Century
French Literature, trans. by LOUISE GUINEY (1983). Works on the novel include HENRI PEYRE, The
Contemporary French Novel (1955, reissued 1959); JOHN STURROCK, The French New Novel:
Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet (1969); CELIA BRITTON, The Nouveau Roman:
Fiction, Theory, Politics (1992); EDMUND J. SMYTH (ed.), Postmodernism and Contemporary
Fiction (1991); MARGARET ATACK and PHIL POWRIE (eds.), Contemporary French Fiction by Women:
Feminist Perspectives (1990); and EVA MARTIN SARTORI and DOROTHY WYNNE ZIMMERMAN (eds.), French
Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book (1991). Among works on the theatre are
MARTIN ESSLIN, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed., rev. and enlarged (1980, reissued 2001); and
DAVID BRADBY, Modern French Drama, 19401990, 2nd ed. (1991). Poetry studies include MARCEL
RAYMOND, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (1970; originally published in French, 1933); PETER
BROOME and GRAHAM CHESTERS, An Anthology of Modern French Poetry, 18501950 (1976); MICHAEL
BISHOP, The Contemporary Poetry of France: Eight Studies (1985); and MARTIN SORRELL (ed.),
Modern French Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology Covering Seventy Years (1992), and Elles: A
Bilingual Anthology of Modern French Poetry by Women (1995). CHRISTOPHER ROBINSON, Scandal in
the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature (1995), is
an excellent study.

French Literature

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

French Literature

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

French literature ebcid:com.britannica.oec2.identifier.ArticleIdentifier?tocId=910941...

You might also like