FRENCH LITERATURE

Literature written in the language of France from about the end of the 11th century to the present day. Before the 9th century, Latin was the literary language of France.

PRECLASSICAL LITERATURE

In the 11th century the first notable works written in French, the chansons de geste, appeared. These works narrated heroic exploits and are early forms of poetry.

The Medieval Period.

The chansons de geste were long poems relating the deeds of Christian knights and were composed possibly by wandering minstrels, known as jongleurs, to entertain pilgrims or the feudal courts. The authors of the chansons, the troubadours and trouvèrs who originally sang their own poems, drew their inspiration from three main sources; accordingly their poems are classified as belonging to one of three groups: the French, Breton, or Classical cycles.

The Cycle de France is primarily concerned with the French heroes who put their arms at the service of religion. The central figure is Charlemagne, who is made the champion of Christianity. The most famous epic of this group, composed at the beginning of the 12th century, is the Chanson de Roland.

The Cycle de Bretagne (Brittany) is based largely on Celtic folklore. Its principal poet was Chrétien de Troyes, who lived during the latter part of the 12th century.

The Cycle antique is the least original and therefore the least important group. Turning to classical antiquity for their material, the authors Christianized Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus (in Latin, Ulysses), and the heroes of Thebes, Troy, and Rome (see Rome, History of). The best-known work of the Cycle antique is the Roman d'Alexandre, about Alexander the Great.

Concurrently a more popular literature of short stories in verse existed. At first these stories were concerned only with religious subjects, indicating the Roman Catholic church's domination of literature. Later the church monopoly of culture was broken when lay authors began to write secular works. The fabliau flourished during the 12th and 13th centuries, and in this period appeared the satires Le roman de Renart and Le roman de la rose.

Le roman de Renart is an animal allegory of about 32,000 verses (later increased to 100,000), in which certain classes of medieval society, including the clergy and nobility, are cautiously criticized. The way for this type of literature had been prepared by collections of ancient animal fables, particularly by a verse translation of selected fables by Marie de France during the 12th century.

Allegory is carried still further in the 13th-century Roman de la rose, a work of more than 21,000 lines in which the rose symbolizes love and abstract ideas are personified. The first 4058 lines were composed by Guillaume de Lorris, and Jean de Meun (or Meung; c. 1240–1305) later added the remainder of the poem. The influence of this poem persisted throughout Europe well into the 17th century.

Encouraged by the academies that organized contests and awarded prizes, lyric poetry became increasingly popular, especially in the south of France. Unquestionably the greatest lyric poet of medieval France was François Villon. His two major works, Le petit testament (1456) and Le grand testament (1461), were composed in the form of burlesque wills. Le grand testament was interspersed with ballads (see Ballade). Those works, which together contain fewer than 2500 lines, introduced a vigorous self-expression into French poetry. They are self-revelations of a man with a lusty appetite for life, yet sharing the medieval sense of sin and preoccupation with death. Because of their expressiveness and individuality, Villon's poems have exerted a continuous influence over lyric poetry even into the 20th century.

The evolution of French medieval literature from religious to secular forms emerges most clearly in the theater. The drames liturgiques of the 11th century were composed, in Latin prose, of sentences from the Bible. As a rule, they concerned the nativity and passion of Jesus Christ (see Passion Play). With the appearance of lay actors during the 12th century, the French language was adopted in the drame profane or drame sécularisé, which still employed biblical episodes. The scope was extended in the 13th century to include miracle plays about the saints and the Virgin Mary. This period also contains the first pastoral play and comic opera, Le jeu de Robin et Marion (The Play of Robin and Marion, c. 1283) by the trouvère, or poet-composer, Adam de la Halle. The miracle of the Virgin Mary remained the favorite subject during the 14th century, and scenes from the chansons were further adapted for use in religious plays. In the succeeding century, popular interest in the theater increased, and theater production was freed from ecclesiastical influence. See also Drama and Dramatic Arts: Religious drama—mystery and miracle plays; Miracle, Mystery, and Morality Plays.

Except for its historical interest, prose is of little importance in French literature before the 16th century. The long Romans d'aventure (Romances of Adventure) consisted merely of prose versions of the chansons.

Only a few historians need be mentioned, among them Geoffroi de Villehardouin (c. 1150–1213) and Jean de Joinville, chroniclers of the Crusades; Christine de Pisan, author of graceful verse chronicles of the court; and Alain Chartier, verse chronicler of the disastrous Battle of Agincourt. All were overshadowed by Jean Froissart, whose Chroniques vividly pictured the age of chivalry. The Mémoires (1524) of Philippe de Comines, whose ideas are similar to those of his Italian contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli, provide the first connected French account of political events from the point of view of a statesman.

The Renaissance.

In the 16th century French literature came under the sweeping influence of the Italian Renaissance. Petrarchan verse forms (see Petrarch; Sonnet) and classical concepts, particularly those of Platonic philosophy (see Plato), were enthusiastically accepted. They were espoused at the court of Margaret, queen of Navarre, which became the center of French culture of that period. Chief among the early French Renaissance poets was the 16th-century writer Maurice Scève (c. 1510–64), whose work reflects the intellectuality of the Renaissance. Instead of the intimate emotional expressiveness of Villon and of the later Pléiade poets (see below), Scève's verse is characterized by a formalized expression of perception and knowledge. In this regard and in his obscure allusiveness his poetry has a certain similarity to some 20th-century poetry.

In the poets of the next generation the Renaissance came to its full flowering. Interested in introducing Greek- and Latin-derived words into the French language—and thereby into French literature—seven poets, forming a group known as the Pléiade (see Pleiad), under the leadership of Pierre de Ronsard, brought about a new literary era. Ronsard's widely imitated odes and sonnets, in Amours de Cassandre (Loves of Cassandra, 1552), and his unfinished epic, La Franciade (1572), made him the most famous poet of the century. Ronsard used the ancients as models, in accord with the poetic theories of Joachim du Bellay, second in importance among the Pléiade poets. In the perfection of his poetic forms, Ronsard helped prepare the advent of classicism (see Classic, Classical, and Classicism).

The new ideas of the Renaissance and especially the new concept of humanism made their first strong appearance in the writings of François Rabelais. Of his five books, the most celebrated are Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), epic comic stories of giants. Rabelais used the latter to personify the freedom and potentialities of humanism, which called for the full development of the body and mind. He urged a broad morality, called Pantagruelism, dedicated to satisfying all the demands of human nature, as a rational acceptance of reality. Rabelais projects a realism, germs of which are to be found in the medieval allegory Le roman de la rose, which was to reappear in the comedies of the 17th-century playwright Molière. One of the most powerful prose writers of France, Rabelais is remarkable for his vitality and inventiveness and for his boundless faith in the capacities of the human spirit.

Michel de Montaigne represents the supreme type of French humanist and scholar. He described his Essais (1571–88) as a self-portrait, an expression of his personal philosophy on all subjects that engaged his attention. He recommended a mild but universal skepticism as the philosophic means for escaping frustration and disillusion and achieving contentment in life. His pedagogical system stresses an open-minded spirit of inquiry rather than an accumulation of facts. In politics and religion Montaigne was a conservative, seeking social as well as individual serenity. The Essais offer the first model of the honnête homme, that is, the cultivated gentleman of the 17th century.

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The 17th century, known as Le Grand Siècle, is the classical period of French literature. It was marked by the long reign of Louis XIV, during which France reached the apex of its power and influence in European politics and culture. This period was followed by the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, during which French power declined and the intellectual energies of the nation turned toward change and reform.

The Classical Period.

A leading figure of the classical period was François de Malherbe, who, although a mediocre poet himself, fixed the literary criteria of the century: pure reason, common sense, and perfection of manner. Two influences contributed to the acceptance of these standards, the salon of the marquise de Rambouillet and the French Academy (see Institut de France).

The marquise de Rambouillet is regarded as the founder of preciosity, a reform in language, manners, and wit. For all its affectation and exaggeration, later satirized by Molière in his Les précieuses ridicules (The Affected Young Ladies, 1659), it promoted refinements in language, feelings, and social relations. The marquise de Rambouillet brought together in her salon the majority of contemporary literary figures. The question of content and form was the subject of the most notable literary controversy of the period. It was evoked by a critical discussion of two sonnets, “Job,” by Isaac de Benserade (1612–91), and “Uranie,” by Vincent Voiture (1597–1648). Other women influenced literary trends in that period, notably the marquise de Maintenon.

Originally a private society of scholars, the French Academy was transformed in 1635 into a state corporation at the insistence of the statesman Cardinal Richelieu. It was proposed that the academicians prepare a dictionary, a grammar, and a work on rhetoric. Of these, the dictionary alone was completed and published. Much of the work on this lexicon was done by Claude Favre Vaugelas (1585–1650), whose Remarques sur la langue française (Remarks on the French Language, 1647) did much to establish standards of usage. Among the other original members of the Academy were Valentin Conrart (1603–75), its first secretary, and the poets Jean Chapelain, François Maynard (1582–1646), the marquis de Racan (1589–1670), and Voiture. Antoine Furetière (1619–88), who became a member in 1662, was expelled in 1685 for having compiled a dictionary (not published until 1690) upon what is now recognized to have been a more logical plan than that adopted by the Academy.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was the principal literary theorist and critic of the classical age; his influence spread throughout Europe, affecting the work of such English masters as John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Believing in reason and natural law and fond of exact definitions, he sought to establish rules by which literature could be made a discipline as precise as science. His chief works, written in verse, are Satires (begun in 1660), Épîtres (Epistles, begun 1669), and L'art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry, 1683).

A powerful literary influence was exerted also by Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, the most celebrated preacher of the age of Louis XIV. He was tutor to the dauphin and held a succession of high church offices, becoming the principal spokesman for the church in France. His sermons and his funeral orations (Oraisons funèbres, 1689) are models of classical rhetoric.

Pierre Corneille was the first of the French masters of classical tragedy. His initial and greatest success was Le Cid (1636 or 1637). Corneille sought to realize the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and action, but the dramatic tension in his tragedies is psychological, deriving from the aspirations and frustrations of his characters in their efforts to achieve greatness by supreme exercise of the will. Jean Baptiste Racine, who followed Corneille, is even more highly regarded. Less rhetorical and less formal, his work gained in naturalness; his later dramas were enlivened by lyrical passages, by the use of choruses and spectacular settings, and by the turn from classical subjects, for example, Bérénice (1670) and Phèdre (1677), to biblical subjects in Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691). In all his dramas women are the chief protagonists, and the dramatic tensions derive chiefly from the vicissitudes of love.

Molière, third of the famous 17th-century playwrights, is the French master of comedy. His fine sense of theater, which makes his work playable even to modern audiences, may be attributed, at least in part, to his having been an actor and a director. Among his best-known comedies are Les précieuses ridicules, Tartuffe (1664), Le misanthrope (1666), and Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman, 1670). Molière satirized contemporary foibles, such as the affectations of the literary salons, and common human failings such as hypocrisy, gullibility, avarice, and hypochondria. Philosophically, he was akin to Rabelais and Montaigne in maintaining the right of individuals to develop according to their own inclinations.

Notable contributions were made in this period by the Jansenists (see Jansenism), a puritanical Catholic sect opposed to the Jesuits. Some of the most forceful and original French writers and thinkers of the age were Jansenists, among them the theological polemicists Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole (1625–95) and above all the philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and mystic Blaise Pascal. In the Pensées (1670), Pascal sought to confute skepticism by the use of skepticism and concluded that certain spiritual realities were beyond the range of human reason.

Among other notable writers of the period were the two moralists François de la Rochefoucauld and Jean de La Bruyère. La Rochefoucauld is regarded as one of the most brilliant epigrammatists of all time. In his Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (Reflections or Moral Thoughts and Maxims, 1665), he combines psychological insight with a concision that gives each of his epigrams a gemlike finish and compactness. His social standing as an aristocrat lent authority to his judgment of court life. Because the essence of his maxims is the vanity of human pretension and striving, he was enlisted as an ally by the Jansenists.

The moral judgment that La Bruyère made upon his time was harsher and more comprehensive than La Rochefoucauld's. His major work, Les “caractères” de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle (The “Characters” of Theophrastus, Translated from the Greek, with Characters or Customs of This Century, 1688), is a collection of epigrams interspersed with character studies portraying and satirizing personalities who embodied the vices and frailties of the time.

The best novelist of the period was Comtesse Marie Madeleine de La Fayette. Because of its psychological insight, her La princesse de Clèves (1678) is valued as an early example of the modern novel. Written with charming art, it is distinguished for its economy, having only two characters, the lovers whose relationship takes up the entire action.

Jean de La Fontaine, who must be ranked with Racine as a poet and with the great moralists, is one of the masters of the age. In his Fables (1668–94) he used the framework of the moral fable of Aesop. He brought to each fable, however, the ease and narrative interest of the short story. The use of animals as characters in an age of censorship enabled him to give free reign to his wit, fancy, humor, and observation on human weaknesses.

The Age of Enlightenment.

The 18th-century Age of Enlightenment was so named because much of the intellectual effort expended at the time went into dissipating superstition and the obscurantism of church and other institutional doctrines. Among its precursors were François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, and Pierre Bayle. In his Histoire des oracles (History of the Oracles, 1686) Fontenelle attacked the miraculous basis of Christianity and the church under the pretext of exposing the credulity of the Greeks and the Romans. Fénelon's Télémaque (Telemachus, 1699) advocated religious tolerance and was written as a guide to his royal pupil, the Duc de Bourgogne (1682–1712). Both writers were distinguished for the charm of their style.

Bayle's Pensées diverses sur la comète de 1680 (Diverse Thoughts on the Comet of 1680; 1682) and, in particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary, 2 vol., 1694–97) served the writers and thinkers who followed him as an intellectual armory. Imbedded in this mass of learning was an uncompromising religious skepticism that was supported by argument and examples.

The incarnation of the spirit of the Enlightenment was Voltaire. In his Lettres anglaises ou philosophiques (English or Philosophical Letters, 1734) he attacked the methods by which, in his view, the church exploited human weakness. He also attacked the theistic and optimistic systems of philosophers, theologians, and reformists, particularly those of the German philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz and the English philanthropist Anthony Cooper, 7th earl of Shaftesbury. In his own day Voltaire was regarded primarily as a philosopher, and his philosophical works overshadowed, until a later day, his satirical classics, such as the novel Candide (1759).

The English empiricism of Sir Francis Bacon and John Locke had its French disciples, principally Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. Calling themselves le parti des philosophes, the French rationalists rejected scholasticism and expounded the new mechanistic concepts. The latter were also embodied in the Encyclopédie, a work designed to comprehend and systematize all human knowledge (see Encyclopedia). This vast undertaking was directed by Denis Diderot, whose witty Le neveu de Rameau (1761, or later; Rameau's Nephew, 1964) and other works entitle him to separate distinction as a creative writer. On the Encyclopédie he had the collaboration of many distinguished contemporaries, including naturalists, ethnologists, philosophers, economists, and statesmen.

A notable book of this period, L'esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws, 1750) by Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, remains an important influence on modern political thought.

Eighteenth-century fiction, when it was not philosophical fantasy, like Voltaire's, was written in the spirit of La princesse de Clèves. Like that novel, Manon Lescaut (1731), by Abbé Prévost, and La vie de Marianne (The Life of Marianne, 1731–41), by Pierre de Marivaux, were limited to two characters and the crises of their love. More elaborate was the witty, scandalous novel of society intrigue, Les liaisons dangereuses (1782), by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803).

The naturalist Georges Leclerc de Buffon devoted his life to the compilation of the monumental Histoire naturelle (44 vol., 1749–1804), a part of the vast reclassification of flora and fauna that preoccupied the 18th-century naturalists.

Although Jean Jacques Rousseau is now remembered mostly for his Confessions (1782; trans. 1783, 1790), he had a revolutionary effect on political thinking in his own time through his Du contrat social (1762; The Social Contract, 1797), in which the relations of the individual to society are conceived as a contract by which the individual surrenders some personal rights in return for equality of status and mutual assistance. The leaders of the French Revolution regarded themselves as his disciples. He also had a revolutionary influence on educational thinking, through his Émile (1762; trans. 1763), and on fiction, in which he inaugurated the romantic trend with his Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1760; Julie, or the New Eloise, 1773).

Finally, the work of André Chénier, who was guillotined at the age of 31, deserves mention. Although he completed an amazing number of remarkable poems, he was, like the English poet John Keats, only at the beginning of his mature powers when he died. Like Keats, too, his poetry is distinguished for its pure beauty. Chénier is regarded by some authorities as the greatest French poet of the 18th century.

In the period of reaction that followed the French Revolution, the principal creative writers were Comte Joseph de Maistre (1754–1821), who dwelt nostalgically on the glories of the ancien régime, and Vicomte François René de Chateaubriand, who promoted a revival of religion. Chateaubriand's Byronic individualism, dithyrambic celebration of nature, and emphasis on the esthetic values of religion helped usher in the romantic movement.

THE 19TH CENTURY

Numerous literary groups emerged in France in the 19th century. First came the romantics (see Romanticism: France), followed by the realists (see Realism), Parnassians, symbolists (see Symbolist Movement), and naturalists (see Naturalism).

The Romantic Movement.

Madame de Staël, despite her radical politics, anticipated in her novels the preoccupations and methods of the romantics of the following generation. Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807; Corinna, or Italy, 1807) is regarded as her masterpiece.

Chief of the early romantics was Alphonse de Lamartine, a sentimental writer and an accomplished craftsman. The romantics ventured to break rules and to replace classical restraint with ebullient emotion. The most productive and the most militant member of the movement was Victor Hugo, who, in Hernani (1830), used the stage as a forum from which to expound romantic ideas. He was supported by the novelists Alexander Dumas père and Théophile Gautier, and the poets Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, and Charles Nodier (1780–1844). The writings of the romantics influenced, and were influenced by, similar currents in painting and music, as in the works of the artist Eugène Delacroix and the composer Ambroise Thomas.

The conflict between revolutionary and reactionary thinking after the restoration of the French monarchy in 1815 was reflected in literature. The major writers on the conservative side have been cited above. The radical writers included the poet Pierre Jean de Béranger, twice imprisoned for the republican views expressed in his later verses; the novelist and early feminist George Sand, some of whose works were pioneer social novels; the historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874), who exalted the French Revolution; and such forerunners of socialism as Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Pierre Proudhon, and Louis Blanc. A middle view appeared in the work of the historians F. P. G. Guizot, Adolphe Thiers, and Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), and in the writing of Benjamin Constant (de Rebecque). Constant's novel Adolphe (1816; trans. 1959), however, for which he is chiefly known and in which he portrays his stormy affair with Madame de Staël, has no political overtones.

The Realists.

Honoré de Balzac may be said to bridge the romantic movement and the realist movement that followed it. In his vast force, variety, and comparative formlessness, he resembles the romantic writers. His materialistic cast of mind, minute observation, and preoccupation with factual detail, on the other hand, make him the first of the realists. His ambitious La comédie humaine (47 vol., 1829–50; The Human Comedy, 40 vol., 1895–98), composed over a period of 20 years, consists of related novels and short stories. The characters of this work include almost every class and profession and reproduce the social scene of 19th-century France.

Other great French realists include Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Prosper Mérimée. Stendhal's keen psychological perception, anticipating that of modern psychological novelists, was recognized and praised by Balzac. Stendhal's principal novels are La chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma, 1925) and Le rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black, 1926). Flaubert's meticulous realism was best exemplified in his Madame Bovary (1857). The effects of his method are subtle, for a growing sense of character and situation is constructed from a gradual accumulation of carefully observed details. Mérimée, in spite of certain romantic qualities, may be included among the realists because of the psychological truth in his characterizations. His best works are lengthy short stories, among them Colomba (1840; trans. 1853) and Carmen (1846; trans. 1881).

The greatest French critic, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, may also be included among the realists. He started as a partisan of the romantics but broke with them and became an advocate of realism. Believing that the critic's chief duty is not to judge but to understand, he explored biographical and environmental factors affecting an author's work. His essays are virtually the first and perhaps the best examples of sociological and psychological criticism. Among his chief works are Causeries du lundi (15 vol., 1851–62; Monday Chats, 1877); Portraits des femmes (Portraits of Women, 1844); Portraits contemporains (1846); and L'histoire de Port-Royal (1840–59).

Parnassians and Symbolists.

In poetry, the reaction against romanticism began with Émaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852; enlarged ed., 1872), by Théophile Gautier, who in his youth had been a leader of the romantic school. It was carried further in the work of the group known as the Parnassians, outstanding among whom were Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, and José Maria de Heredia. These poets sought and achieved a restrained, impersonal, and chiseled beauty, but their work may be regarded more as a return to classicism than as an advance from romanticism. Charles Baudelaire's work was different. Although the technical polish of his verse is as marked as that of the Parnassians, he is intensely personal in the expression of his bitterness, agony, and despair. His great work is Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857), the publication of which was suppressed until certain offending stanzas were removed.

Baudelaire was followed by the symbolists, sometimes derogatorily termed the decadents, whom he influenced. Their work was marked by experimentation, notably in free verse. Among the symbolists were Paul Verlaine, Henri de Régnier (1864–1936), Stéphane Mallarmé, the Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70), Tristan Corbière (1845–75), Charles Cros (1842–82), Jules Laforgue, and the American expatriate writers Francis Viélé-Griffin (1864–1937) and Stuart Merrill (1863–1915). Lautréamont's work Les chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror, 1868) subsequently influenced the surrealists. A number of Belgian writers were associated with the symbolists, among them Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916), and Maurice Maeterlinck. The most influential of the symbolists was, however, Arthur Rimbaud, most of whose powerful and vivid poems were written before the age of 19. Symbolist poetry has a suggestive, veiled quality that links it to the impressionist paintings of artists such as Claude Monet and the works of impressionist composers such as Claude Debussy.

In prose, several writers sought symbolist effects. Among them were Rémy de Gourmont, the literary critic; Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949), whose novel Les lauriers sont coupés (1888; We'll to the Woods No More, 1938) is an early example of stream-of-consciousness writing; and Henri de Régnier, a noted symbolist poet (see above).

The Naturalists.

During the late 19th century some of the realistic tendencies exemplified by the work of Flaubert led toward the movement known as naturalism, which stressed environment and heredity as the principal determinants of human action. The movement was given direction by the historian and critic Hippolyte Taine, whose best-known work is Histoire de la littérature anglaise (4 vol., 1863–64; History of English Literature, 1871–72). Taine believed that human values such as virtue and vice are products like sugar and acids, and that human culture is the result of such formative influences as race and climate. The brothers and literary collaborators Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were the precursors of naturalism in the novel, notably in Germinie Lacerteux (1864; trans. 1891). After his brother's death, Edmond de Goncourt (who endowed the prestigious French literary award, the Prix Goncourt) wrote several novels independently. He influenced the work of Alphonse Daudet, a realist novelist—best known for his sketches of Provence, Letters from My Mill (1869; trans. 1900)—whose work is lightened by humor in the manner of Charles Dickens.

Naturalism was adopted as a fundamental principle and literary method by Émile Zola, the most famous writer of the movement. He used the term particularly to describe the content and purpose of his novels, which were characterized by the type of historical determinism formulated by Taine. Zola's literary method is best seen in L'assommoir (The Dram Shop, 1877), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885; trans. 1901). The influence of this method was so extreme that in 1887 Edmond de Goncourt and Daudet, as well as five of Zola's own disciples, formed an opposition group responsible for a manifesto against Zola's novel La terre (Earth, 1888). Another counterforce is expressed in the work of Paul Bourget (1852–1935), best known for his novel Le disciple (1889). He stressed psychological rather than environmental motivation, an aspect of naturalism ignored by Zola. In the field of the short story, the most important naturalist writer is Guy de Maupassant, whose works include the collections Mademoiselle Fifi (1882) and Contes des jours et de la nuit (Tales of the Days and the Night, 1885), as well as several novels; as a short-story writer, de Maupassant, whose literary master was Flaubert, has no peers.

Opposed to the materialism of Taine and also to the romantic individualism of Michelet is the work of the influential historian and critic Ernest Renan. His principal work is Histoire des origines du Christianisme (8 vol., 1863–83; The History of the Origins of Christianity, 5 vol., 1888–90), dealing with the foundations of Christianity. Renan influenced the novelists Pierre Loti, Maurice Barrès, and Anatole France.

France had social views somewhat akin to Zola's, but he used irony for their expression. His books are a commentary on the irrational forces of society. They are filled with pity for the weak and anger against the abuses of power. Most characteristic of his works, perhaps, are his realistic short novel, Crainquebille (1901), and his satirical fantasies L'île des pingouins (1908; Penguin Island, 1909) and La révolte des anges (1914; The Revolt of the Angels, 1914).

Another great 19th-century writer was the entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. His delightfully readable studies of insect life have become a model for popularized scientific writing abroad as well as in France.

THE 20TH CENTURY

Literature in 20th-century France has been strongly affected by the ferment and change that have marked the entire cultural life of the nation. To the impulses supplied by the symbolist innovations were added strong foreign impulses, such as the modern dance introduced by the American dancer Isadora Duncan and the modern ballet introduced by Russian ballet; the music of the Russian-American composer Igor Stravinsky; primitive art; and, in literature, the impact of the Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky and, a little later, of the Irish novelist James Joyce. The trends are so interpenetrating and the changes so rapid that time will be necessary to set them in perspective.

Some Individualists.

Du côté de chez Swann (1913; Swann's Way, 1928), by Marcel Proust, the first volume of his À la recherche du temps perdu (16 vol., 1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922–32), is generally recognized as one of the greatest psychological novels of all time. Romain Rolland, whose most famous novel, Jean Christophe, appeared in ten volumes between 1904 and 1912, spent World War I in Switzerland, writing pacifist appeals to the combatants. His ideas on war were embodied in his novel Clérambault: histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre (Clérambault: History of a Free Conscience During the War, 1920). L'immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist, 1930) by André Gide expressed the conviction that, while freedom in itself is admirable, acceptance of the responsibilities demanded by that freedom is difficult, a theme which Gide carried further in La porte étroite (1909; Strait Is the Gate, 1924). Gide's work was distinguished by his independence of thought and expression. The widely read novel Jean Barois (1913; trans. 1949), by Roger Martin du Gard, is a study of the conflict between a mystical background and the scientific mind in the 1880s. Among outstanding Catholic writers were the mystical poet and novelist Francis Jammes (1868–1938) and François Mauriac. Mauriac's work, completely innocent of didacticism or proselytism, is devoted to the study of evil, sin, weakness, and suffering. His novels, plays, and poetry show the influence, not of novelists, but of Pascal, Racine, and Baudelaire, in all of whom a sense of tragedy fosters a certain aloofness of attitude and starkness of style.

Jean Cocteau, active in many different fields, was the author, among other works, of the book of poems Plain-Chant (1923), of the novel Les enfants terribles (1929; Children of the Game, 1955), of the play La machine infernale (1934; The Infernal Machine, 1936), of the film Le sang d'un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930), of criticism, as well as of ballets.

Jean Giraudoux first won attention by his realistic accounts of French provincial life (Les Provinciales, 1909). The impression he then made as a forceful and original writer was strengthened by the realism of his war books, one of which was awarded the Grand Prix Balzac. Later he established a comparable position as a dramatist, two of his plays, Amphitryon 38 (1929; trans. 1938) and La folle de Chaillot (1945; The Madwoman of Chaillot, 1947), having achieved international success. Most of Giraudoux's work exhibits inventive fantasy and graces of style that some critics have condemned as preciosity, although others have acclaimed him one of the great stylists of literature.

After writing first for the theater, Jules Romains turned to the novel. In Les hommes de bonne volonté (27 vol., 1932–46; Men of Good Will, 1933–46), he attempted to compress the whole of modern French life into a work of 27 volumes. The conception of the work draws upon the doctrine of unanimism, that is, that the individual and the society in which the individual lives are one. Jules Romains's novel portrays the collective soul of a society.

Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet and writer of cultural manifestos. His Cubist Painters (1913; trans. 1949) was instrumental in establishing the cubist school of painting. His volumes of poems Alcools (1913; trans. 1964) and Calligrammes (1918) were popular among the young surrealists, upon whom he had much influence.

The Catholic poet, playwright, and apologist Paul Claudel remained outside all literary coteries. Religious feeling dominates his work and is the inspiration for his lyric poetry, such as Cinq grandes odes (1910; Five Great Odes, 1967) and La cantate à trois voix (The Cantata in Three Voices, 1931), and plays such as Le livre de Christophe Colombe (The Book of Christopher Columbus, 1930).

The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, founded in 1913 by the actor and drama critic Jacques Copeau, did much to encourage young playwrights such as Claudel. It produced, during its first season, plays by him and by Martin du Gard, among others.

Beginning as a symbolist, Paul Valéry became one of the greatest philosophical poets of the time. Intent upon technique, he strove to express his abstract ideas within the strictest formal framework. Mallarmé and Valéry continued a tendency in modern French poetry introduced by Baudelaire, through his translations of works by the 19th-century American writer Edgar Allan Poe, and his own subsequent work. It is characterized, in part, by a special concern with significant sound. In his definition of symbolism, Valéry observes that the new poetry seeks to recapture from music what belongs to poetry. In practice, however, Valéry revived the classical rules of prosody. He believed that the act of writing poetry is a bending of the will to useful constraints.

The themes of the novels of Henry de Montherlant range from sports (Les olympiques, 1924) and bullfighting (Les bestiairies, 1926; The Bullfighters, 1927), to the place of woman in modern life (Les jeunes filles, 4 vol., 1936–39; Pity for Women, 1937, and Costals & the Hippogriff, 1940). Like Mauriac and Giraudoux, Montherlant turned to the theater, writing historical tragedies such as La reine morte (The Queen Dies, 1942) and a few dramas set and costumed in the modern period.

Because of her great popular success and her extraordinary productivity (her published works total more than 80 volumes), Colette (Sidonie Gabrielle Colette) was slow to win recognition as a serious writer. The literary value of her writing was eventually recognized in France by Marcel Proust and André Gide and in England by Somerset Maugham. The style of novels such as Chéri (1920; trans. 1929) and Gigi (1945; trans. 1952) has effortless grace, and their keen perceptions link Colette with the great psychological realists of world literature.

World War I.

The realistic account of World War I in Le feu (1916; Under Fire, 1917) by Henri Barbusse inspired Les croix de bois (1919; Wooden Crosses, 1921) by Roland Dorgelès (1886–1973), forerunners of the antiwar books of the late 1920s that appeared not only in France but also in Germany, England, and the U.S. The essayist André Maurois found war a subject for humor in his Les silences du Colonel Bramble (1918; The Silence of Colonel Bramble, 1920). Later he became one of the initiators of the novelized biography in his Ariel, ou la vie de Shelley (1923; Ariel, the Life of Shelley, 1924). The gentle irony with which the surgeon Georges Duhamel treated war in his Vie des martyrs (1917; The New Book of Martyrs, 1918) sets him apart both from those who looked upon war as a glorious experience and from others who found horror in everything connected with it. In his later novels Duhamel became a chronicler of bourgeois France. The full horrors of World War I found their expression in Le grand troupeau (The Great Herd, 1931) by Jean Giono, all of whose works express militant pacifism and antipathy to the machine age.

Dada and Surrealism.

The later years of World War I were notable for the growth (in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S.) of the movement of young poets and painters known as Dadaism (see Dada). In revolt against all traditional artistic forms, they set out with the declared intention of destroying art. About 1923, certain members of the group, under the leadership of André Breton, broke away and formed a new movement which, using a word invented by Guillaume Apollinaire (see above), they called surrealism. Breton, the leader and expositor of the movement, began his career as a medical student. In 1916 he fell under the influence of Jacques Vaché, whose proclaimed desire was to live in a continual state of mental aberration. The impression made by this almost legendary character, together with Breton's enthusiasm for the poems of Rimbaud, produced a philosophy of art and life in which the most important values were those dictated by the subconscious. Despite the attacks that were leveled at surrealism, the movement had its sources deep in the literature of France. Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Cros, Rimbaud, and the symbolists in general were its direct ancestors.

Because of Breton's dictatorial nature, which was matched by the independence of its other members, the group always had a shifting membership. Some of those who have, at one time or another, been important surrealists are mentioned below.

Beginning as a Dadaist, Louis Aragon became a surrealist in 1924 and produced several books of poems, including Le libertinage (Libertinism, 1924). In 1928, however, in Traité du style (Treatise on Style), he attacked the motives behind their works. Becoming a Communist in 1930, he was expelled from the surrealist movement. His novels Les cloches de Bâle (1934; The Bells of Basel, 1936) and Les beaux quartiers (1936; Residential Quarter, 1938) brought him acclaim at home and abroad. During the German occupation of France in World War II, he once more turned to poetry, in Le crève-coeur (1941; Heartbreak, 1943) and Les yeux d'Elsa (1942; The Eyes of Elsa, 1944), to lament the defeat of his country.

In Paul Éluard the movement found, perhaps, its greatest poet. After a Dadaist start, his poems, in Le necéssité de la vie et la conséquence des rêves (The Necessity of Life and the Consequences of Dreams, 1921), were patterns of images viewed in detachment. With his adherence to the surrealist movement, in about 1923, Éluard wove his images into a contemplation of love as a part of the universal spirit, particularly in Mourir de ne pas mourir (To Die of Not Dying, 1924) and Capitale de la douleur (Sorrow's Capital, 1926). In such works the images exist as a pure emanation of the poet himself, and have no connection with nature as a separate entity. Although no longer closely connected with surrealism, Éluard's poems of World War II, Poésie et vérité (Poetry and Truth, 1942) and Au rendezvous Allemand (At the German Rendezvous, 1945), employ the same technique of imagery to lament the fall of France and extol its subsequent resistance.

Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), founder of the surrealist movement with Breton, was disowned in 1930 for his failure to adhere to its principles in his studies Henri Rousseau, le Douanier (1927) and William Blake (1928; trans. 1928). His important books after that were Charlot (1931), an examination of the American comedian Charles Chaplin, and Souvenirs de James Joyce (Remembrances of James Joyce, 1944), in which Soupault recalled his experiences as one of the translators of Joyce's novel Ulysses.

Other Modes and Themes.

Certain novelists strove in a different, nonsurrealist way to express the spirit of the times. André Malraux, having lived in the presence of revolution and counterrevolution, mirrored a life always in the shadow of death in his novels La condition humaine (1933; Man's Fate, 1934), dealing with the revolution in China; Les temps du mépris (1935; Days of Wrath, 1936), dealing with the anti-Nazi underground in Germany; and L'espoir (1938; Man's Hope, 1938), dealing with the Spanish civil war. The American émigré novelist Julien Green, who wrote in French, depicted a strange hallucinatory world in an atmosphere of terror unrelieved by humor. He treated French provincial life in such novels as Adrienne Mésurat (1927; The Closed Garden, 1928) and Léviathan (1929; The Dark Journey, 1929) and American life in Mont cinère (1926; Avarice House, 1927) and Moira (1950; trans. 1951). Green's first play, Sud (1953; South, 1955), is a classical tragedy.

The aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry became known as the greatest writer of his generation on the conquest of the air with such works as Vol de nuit (1931; Night Flight, 1932) and Terre des hommes (1939; Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939). His humanistic approach is found also in Le petit prince (1943; The Little Prince, 1943), a gentle fable that has become a universal favorite with children and adults alike. For sheer misanthropy, on the other hand, the novels of Louis Ferdinand Céline have seldom been surpassed; Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934) depicts catastrophe without hope of relief, and in Mort à crédit (1936; Death on the Installment Plan, 1938) all human aspirations are subjected to contemptuous irony. Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–87), born in Brussels and holder of dual French and U.S. citizenship, is acclaimed for the classical purity of her style and her intellectual breadth. A writer of historical novels such as Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951; Hadrian's Memoirs, 1954) and her family biography Souvenirs pieux (Pious Memories, 1973), she became, in 1980, the first woman ever elected to the French Academy. In distinct contrast are the popular semiautobiographical stories of modern love by Françoise Sagan (1935–2004), one of the first novelists published after World War II. Sagan's first novel, Bonjour triestesse (1954; trans. 1955), which won the Prix des Critiques, established her celebrity.

Among the most distinguished poets of this century is Saint-John Perse. His Anabase (1924; Anabasis, 1930) paradoxically depicts the poet as both detached from human activity and deeply involved in it. The official attitude of the symbolists was aloofness, while that of the surrealists was aggressiveness. Perse represents a more balanced, classical attitude in which the poet both contemplates life and participates in it. This attitude is apparent in Amers (1957; Seamarks, 1958), his longest poem. René Char (1907–88) was one of the outstanding poets of his generation. His adherence to surrealism during the 1930s was modified in the early 1940s by his participation in the Resistance movement. His best poems, written between 1940 and 1944 and collected in Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946; Leaves of Hypnos), transcend the theme of war.

Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber (1924–2006), founder of the left-wing weekly L'Express (1953) and a member of the cabinet of President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1970, is now credited with having turned opinion against the war in Algeria with his controversial exposé of French atrocities, Lieutenent en Algérie (1957). Another influential work, Le défi américain (1968; The American Challenge, 1968), urged Europe to avoid being dominated by U.S. economic might and to develop itself economically, emulating American innovation.

Existentialism.

In the 1940s, under the leadership of the philosopher, dramatist, and novelist Jean Paul Sartre, existentialism developed as a major philosophical and literary movement. An underlying thesis of existentialism as elaborated by Sartre—in works such as his massive L'être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1953)—is that human existence precedes essence or nature, that human beings, though conditioned to a degree by circumstances,are faced with a radical freedom to create their own values and identity, without the crutch of adhering to any real predetermined values or norms. In his plays Les mouches (1943; The Flies, 1946), Huis-clos (1944; No Exit, 1946), and Les mains sales (1948; Dirty Hands, 1949), Sartre expanded on problems already raised before the war in his book of short stories Le mur (The Wall, 1939). In his trilogy Les chemins de la liberté (1945–49; The Roads of Liberty, 1947–51), he attempted to show the individual without illusions and aware of the necessity of participating in all functions of society. Sartre's most zealous disciple was his lifelong companion Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote, among many other works, the novel Les mandarins (1954; The Mandarins, 1956); it deals in a thinly disguised form with the private relationships of some leading French existentialists. Her La cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, 1984) is a memoir of her colleague. The writerAlbert Camus shows the influence of existentialism in works such as the play Caligula (1944; trans. 1948) and the novel L'étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946), which portray human existence in the world as basically absurd and meaningless. At the same time, in novels such as La peste (1947; The Plague, 1948), he places a distinctive stress on the nobility of courage in the face of adversity.

Late 20th-Century Trends.

During the 1950s, two schools of experimental writing flourished in France. The “theater of the absurd” or “antitheater” is best illustrated in the plays of Romanian-born Eugène Ionesco; Samuel Beckett, an Irishman who began writing in French after World War II; and Jean Genet. The popular En attendant Godot (1948; Waiting for Godot, 1952) of Beckett, and Les Negroes (1959; The Blacks, 1960) and Les paravents (1961; The Screens, 1962) of Genet exemplify this school of writing, which is opposed to the psychological analysis and ideological content of existentialism.

Simultaneously with the “antitheater,” the “antinovel” or nouveau roman (Fr., “new novel”)—a term first applied by Sartre to a book by Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99)—attracted considerable attention, chiefly through the novels and theories of Sarraute, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor (1926– ). Like the playwrights, the new novelists opposed the traditional forms of the psychological novel; they emphasized the purely objective world of things. Emotions and sentiments are not described as such; rather, the reader has to imagine what they are by following the relationship between characters and the objects they touch and see. Sarraute's Portrait d'un inconnu (1947; Portrait of a Man Unknown, 1958) led the way, followed by such works as her Vous les entendez? (1972; Do You Hear Them?, 1973) and, earlier, Robbe-Grillet's La jalousie (1957; Jealousy, 1959) and Butor's La modification (1957). Simon writes densely constructed historical novels, with much use of the stream-of-consciousness device. Most notable of his works is La route de Flandres (1960; The Flanders Road, 1961).

A new school of literary criticism, structuralism, based in part on the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, began to flourish in France in the 1960s and '70s. A leading exponent of this school was Roland Barthes (1915–80). His Elements of Semiology (1964; trans. 1967) is an introduction to semiotics; his Critical Essays and New Critical Essays were published in 1964 and 1972 (trans. 1972 and 1980, respectively). More recently, a mode of criticism known as deconstruction was pioneered by the philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida. W.F., WALLACE FOWLIE, M.A., Ph.D.