French literature

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. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were models for Paul Valéry 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 Péguy and then, in a second generation, François 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 Française, 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 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 Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière 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 Léger) depicted the triumphant recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’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: André Gide, Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, 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 past—the family and the society—in which it begins. Proust and Claudel

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; 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.

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. Valéry

The life and work of Paul Valéry, 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 Soirée 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 Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière 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, Valéry 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 Française 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 Party—whose revolutionary movement and review Clarté, founded in 1919, advocated pacifism and popular power—were 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 Zürich in 1916, joined forces with the writers clustering round the review Littérature (André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and, later, René Char) in Paris in 1920. Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (“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 écriture 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 (1924–32), directed by Valéry, Larbaud, and the poet Léon-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 Édouard 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 André 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 Chéri (1920; Eng. trans. Chéri) and Le Blé 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 (1933–34) 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 Léon Blum, that came to power in 1936 and ended the following year. Many writers joined the fray. Politics in the novel Céline and Drieu

The novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, notably Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night) and Mort à 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, Céline’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 light—especially as Céline himself published anti-Semitic pamphlets, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937; “Trifles for a Massacre”) and L’École 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-Eugène 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. André 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 Bloyé (1933; Eng. trans. Antoine Bloyé). 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 Bâle [1934; “The Bells of Bâle”]). But most eagerly read were the novels of André 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-Républicain, 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 joins the beckoning enigma of a dream woman as a figure of erotic desire and the fascination of Paris. François Mauriac’s Catholic novels Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927; Eng. trans. Thérèse Desqueyroux) and Noeud de vipères (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 curé 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 Cimetières 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 (1922–40). 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 volonté (1932–46; 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-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931; Night Flight) was a popular adventure novel. Poetry

Valéry, Claudel, and Fargue continued writing poetry throughout this period, as did Breton, Aragon, and Éluard, the latter two both closely connected with the Communist Party. In such books as Capitale de la douleur (1926; Capital of Pain), Éluard’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. René 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 tradition—Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff, and Gaston Baty, known collectively as the Cartel—rebuilt 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 theatre—by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Armand Salacrou, and the early Jean Anouilh—have 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 mélange more appropriate, as it turned out, to the new medium of cinema than to the stage (Orphée [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 audiences to the realities of repressive power structures from which they were muffled by habit in their everyday lives. But his Le Théâtre 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 à Marie (1912; “Tidings Brought to Mary”) is a simpler, low-key evocation of the miracle of rebirth. (Partage de midi and L’Annonce faite à 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 Nausée (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 Céline, whose reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.

Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André 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 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 Éluard 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 Crève-Coeur (1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-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 prestige—for the time being, at least—to 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’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. 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’Écume 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’Étranger (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 révolté (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 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 Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (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 Cérémonie 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, Françoise Sagan (pseudonym of Françoise 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 fiction—chronology, plot, character—and 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 desire—complex, 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" class="md-crosslink">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 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 ʾ50s was to show systems of values in conflict. From Les Mouches (produced 1943; The Flies), written for a France suffering Nazi oppression, to Les Séquestrés 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 Théâtre National Populaire and the Compagnie Jean-Louis Barrault–Madeleine 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, Eugène 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 Nègres (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 Prévert 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 Valéry, 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 René Char and Pierre Emmanuel (pseudonym of Noël 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 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’immobilité 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, Eugène 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 Littérature 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 constraints—often mathematical—as the best way of liberating artistic potential. Queneau, most widely known as the author of Zazie dans le métro (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 poèmes (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 theory—the 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 Damnés 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 René 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 nécessité (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 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 Lévi-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 Lévi-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 Degré zéro de l’écriture (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 raised—the autonomy of the individual subject, the nature of creative inspiration—were important ones. Lacan and Foucault

The teaching and writing, much of it dating to the 1930s, of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (Écrits [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 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 Société 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’Écriture et la différance [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-Œdipe: capitalisme et schizophrénie (1972; The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia), Gilles Deleuze and Félix 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 sexualité (1976–84; 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 Libération 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 Révolution du langage poétique (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 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 Bâtarde (1964; “The Bastard”; Eng. trans. La Bâtarde) 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 siècle (1961; “Children of the Times”; Eng. trans. Josyane and the Welfare) and Claire Etcherelli’s Élise; 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 Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, 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 Née (1975, in dialogue with Cathérine Clément; 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 Médicis, Révolutions 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 Théâtre 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, Beckett—the 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 années 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 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 bruyère (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 Clézio’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 Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move beyond escapism. Mémoires 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 Éden, Éden, Éden (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’Insuccès de la fête (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 Géorgiques (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 Provençal 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 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 Frédéric 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 stage—not 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’Indiscrétion faite à 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 mémoire (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 Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (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 established—in 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”). Regional literature

Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric 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 (1977–85; “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-Franƈois 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’économie 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 télévision [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 Hervé 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 sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of women’s writing was 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’Événement (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. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa (1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved 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 Rédemption (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 élémentaires (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 pig—and 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 poètes”). 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 (Poésies) 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, Andrée 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 developing their own stagecraft and improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply disaffected—who 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 Koltès, is focused in the deal—in 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 live—on 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 Koltès’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 intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise. Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett

Citation Information

Article Title: French literature

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 21 July 2016

URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/French-literature

Access Date: August 17, 2019

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. (1992–94). 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, 1100–1500 (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. 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, Chrétien 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 Trouvères (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 1470–1589 (1974). Among studies of the Pléiade are Henri Weber, La Création poétique au XVIe siècle en France de Maurice Scève à Agrippa d’Aubigné (1956, reissued 1994); and Grahame Castor, Pléiade 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. 1570–1613 (1969). Jean Céard, La Nature et les prodiges: l’insolite au 16e siècle 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 “Pléiade” (1972). The subject of drama is covered in Geoffrey Brereton, French Tragic Drama in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1973); and Madeleine Lazard, Le Théâtre en France au XVIe siècle (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, 1715–1789,” 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 Bruyère (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, 1715–1789,” in P.E. Charvet (ed.), A Literary History of France, vol. 4 (1967); and Jean Ehrard et al. (eds.), Le XVIIIe Siècle, 4 vol. (1974–77), 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: Crébillon, 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: 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); György Lukács, 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, 1848–1898: 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, 1885–1895, 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 1870–1914 (1986); and Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (1966). The 20th century

An overview of the period from 1920 to 1970 can be found in Germaine Brée, 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, 1940–1990, 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, 1850–1950 (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.