لطفا منتظر باشید ...
French Literature
I INTRODUCTION
French Literature, the literature of France, from the mid-800s until the present. French literature is considered one of the richest and most varied national literatures, noted especially for its examination of human society and the individual's place within society. French literature does not include francophone literature—works written in the French language but originating in other countries, such as Canada or Senegal.
French literature reflects the cultural and political history of France. Until the French Revolution of 1789, France had a social and political system that was arranged by rank or class, with rules governing how members of one class interacted with members of another. Every aspect of culture and society followed a hierarchical structure, including literary genres and literary styles. The hierarchy of genres had epic poetry at the top and the more common prose genres, such as the novel, at the bottom.
The French Revolution, which lasted from 1789 to 1799, was a crucial time in French history, and it signaled a change in the French literary landscape as well. Conducted in the name of equality and freedom, it brought a democratic spirit that leveled rank, privilege, and hierarchical order in government and all other areas of society. Thus, for example, in the early 1800s writers associated with the romanticism movement called for the abolition of all the literary rules established by the L'Académie Française (The French Academy), which had been the chief institution of literary regulation under the old regime.
Since the time of the Revolution, French writing has been characterized by creative freedom and innovation, culminating in such 20th-century movements as dada, surrealism, existentialism, theater of the absurd, the new novel, and postmodernism. Paradoxically, despite these experiments and innovations, French literary traditions have endured, as have the values of the old order. Thus, the inventive and rebellious Albert Camus saw himself in the tradition of classical novelist Madame de La Fayette, and the 20th-century exponent of existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre claimed kinship with 17th-century playwright Pierre Corneille.
II THE MIDDLE AGES
The medieval period of French literature encompasses nearly six centuries, more than the remaining periods of French literary history combined. It begins with La séquence de Sainte Eulalie (The Life of Saint Eulalia), a church song in fourteen couplets that dates from the late 800s. The era ends with the printing of the complete works of poet François Villon in 1489. Much of French medieval literature is sacred in the sense that it deals with the lives of saints and the church lore of miracles and mysteries. At the same time, many writers addressed the deeds of French nobility and kings, as well as those of the Crusaders, who fought to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. By focusing on both religious and political subjects, literature was in harmony with the worldview of the time, which assigned equal power to church and state.
France's political situation was relatively stable during the Middle Ages, although after the reign of the emperor Charlemagne ended in 814, epidemics, famine, and war among the great lords nearly destroyed the country. The reign of Hugh Capet, which began in 987, brought stability to France and established a hierarchy with Capet at the top that promised social and political stability. His descendents led France in the long campaigns of the Crusades (1096-1291) and the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453).
The feudal social and political institutions of medieval France were based on a pact between a lower vassal and a higher lord: The lord gave land and protection to the vassal in exchange for vows of fidelity and service. The social and political hierarchy led downward from the king through the dukes and counts to the lower nobility, bourgeoisie (middle class), and peasants. This order reflected the medieval view that all of creation emanated downward from God and the celestial realm to nature and the earthly world. Literary genres fell into two competing categories in France during the Middle Ages. Some genres affirmed the hierarchical social structure, and others questioned it. Scholastic quests after eternal truths, liturgical dramas on biblical themes, and epic poems known as chansons de geste all affirmed the social structure. Courtly literature (cultivated literature written at French courts) and satirical literature questioned it, although in different ways.
A Early Literary Forms
Scholasticism is the name given to the medieval way of learning and teaching. It consisted of studying the Bible, the Sententiarum libri quator (Four Books of Sentences) by 12th-century Italian theologian Peter Lombard, and other texts considered authoritative. These books revealed sacred truths as they were understood in the medieval world order, and scholastics studied them by writing commentaries on points they felt the texts resolved inadequately or did not cover at all.
Liturgical dramas enacted in Latin the stories of Christmas, Easter, the Ascension, and other biblical events. Performance of these dramas dates from the beginning of the 10th century. To reach a larger audience these dramas became more theatrical and were often given in French, beginning in the 12th century. In addition, performances moved from in front of the altar to the open space in front of the church. Toward the end of the 12th century, priests began to mix into the plays comical and even grotesque elements to represent Hell and the Devil on stage. More sophisticated scenery represented the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other biblical sites. Le jeu d'Adam (Adam's Play) and La sainte résurrection (The Holy Resurrection), both written in the mid-12th century, are two prominent liturgical dramas.
Sacred theatre nearly disappeared during the Hundred Years' War, but it was revived in the 15th century in the form of mystery plays. Mystery plays were based on written texts with an average length of about 20,000 verses, primarily on subjects from the Bible. They had enormous stage settings and featured casts of hundreds. The plays often formed part of a larger festival that celebrated the life of a local patron saint or the founding of a city.
The chansons de geste (songs of great deeds) of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries are epic poems that depict the Crusades and wars fought among the aristocracy. The first and most famous of these was the Chanson de Roland (1100?; Song of Roland). The Chanson de Roland describes Charlemagne's holy war against the Saracens in Spain, his relationships with his vassals, feudal rivalries within his army, and the martyrdom of the hero Roland, who according to tradition was Charlemagne's nephew. About 80 chansons de geste were written, and although their importance declined after the 13th century, prose versions continued to be written into the 15th century.
B Forms of Protest
Not all medieval writings accepted the established social order in medieval France. Courtly literature protested against the restrictions of the feudal system and its values, and satirical literature exposed that system's dark side. Courtly literature examined the social and personal consequences of a system that fostered arranged marriages and advocated the submission of the individual to higher forces and beings. Satirical literature expressed with realism, humor, and sometimes bitterness the reality of life behind the feudal ideal, often focusing on the lower classes.
A more refined culture began to emerge at the courts of the nobility in the late 11th century, an era of relative peace and economic prosperity. In 1137 Eleanor of Aquitaine became queen and brought to the court in Paris the rich and elegant culture of her home in southern France in the region of Provence. One tradition her reign fostered was that of the troubadours, lyric poets from Provence whose verses centered on love (see Courtly Love; Troubadours and Trouvères).
Eleanor's daughters Aelis and Marie married French noblemen and brought provençal tastes to their own aristocratic courts. Marie's court at Troyes became a center for discussions about the tensions between extramarital love and the institutions of marriage and the church. There Andreas Capellanus wrote in Latin his De Amore (1185?; Art of Courtly Love), and Chrétien de Troyes wrote his tales of Arthurian legend, Yvain, ou le chevalier au lion (1170?; Gawain, or the Knight of the Lion), Lancelot, ou le chevalier de la charrette (1170?; Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart), and Perceval, ou le conte du graal (1190?; Percival, or the Story of the Grail). These works immortalized the names and stories of the knights Gawain, Lancelot, and Percival.
Courtly literature also includes the Lais (1175?; Lays) of France's first great female poet, Marie de France; the versions of Tristan et Iseut (late 12th century) of Thomas d'Angleterre and Béroul; and the anonymous Auccassin et Nicolette (1225?). Along with the tales of Chrétien de Troyes, these works constitute courtly literature. Although concepts of love and the relationship between the lovers and social institutions differ from work to work, the central idea that is either upheld or attacked in courtly literature is that love cannot exist within marriage and that the church is wrong to condemn adulterous lovers. In the stories about Tristan and Iseut, for example, the narrator approves of the lovers, despite the fact that the deceived husband is a king and that the church disapproves of their love. The narrator suggests that their love is destined and that God, if not the church, understands this. Many of the heroes and heroines of the lays, or short narrative poems, of Marie de France are also adulterous lovers. Chrétien de Troyes, however, attacks adulterous courtly love in all but one of his works and advocates the compatibility of love and marriage. Courtly love is therefore less an ideology than a set of issues concerning the nature of love and its meaning to the individual and to society.
Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), begun by Guillaume de Lorris about 1235, is an allegorical poem in which a rose stands for the beloved and a garden for courtly life. It portrays a world in which love resembles the courtly love in literature of the time. The second part of the work, completed by Jean de Meun between 1275 and 1280, is very different. Although it continues the allegory of love, it contains long encyclopedic digressions that cover almost the whole field of medieval thought.
The chansons de geste and the courtly romances—despite their different positions on feudal society—were addressed to the same aristocratic audience. The middle class, however, developed a literature that reflected its own tastes and preoccupations. This was a narrative, satirical, picturesque, realistic, and sometimes smutty literature. Its masterpiece is Le Roman de Renart (The Romance of Reynard), a vast collection of fables featuring a wily character named Reynard the Fox and his adventures in an animal world that is organized in the image of French medieval society. Tales of Reynard were written in French from the 12th century into the 14th century. In the fables written in the 12th century, the literary parody and social satire are largely in good fun. But beginning in the 13th century, in works such as Renart le bestourné (Renard the Hypocrite) by Rutebeuf and Renart le nouvel (Renard the New) by Jacquemart Gelée, the authors strongly denounce feudal customs, abuses of justice, and religious hypocrisy.
Another middle-class form was the fabliau, a short narrative in verse that flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries. About 150 fabliaux survive. They consist of the contes rire (tales for laughing) and the contes moraux ou edifiants (moral or edifying tales). The contes rire are bawdy, realistic, and sometimes vulgar. The contes moraux, on the other hand, aim to teach moral principles or to decry social vices and hypocrisies.
C Lyric Poetry
Beginning in the 13th century, French literature began to break away from old forms. This change can be seen in the transformation of lyric poetry, which traditionally had been accompanied by music and had expressed the thoughts and emotions of an individual who spoke as “I.” In most of the rich body of medieval French lyric poetry, from the 12th to the 15th centuries, this “I” took a conventional form. In the aristocratic poems of both the poets of the north (trouvères) and the troubadours in the south, the “I” was a standard character who represented either the perfect lover or the ideal beloved.
In the 13th century, however, Jean Bodel, Colin Muset, and Rutebeuf wrote a less conventional kind of poetry in which the poet's personality played an essential role and established a distinctive voice. The works of these poets signaled an evolution in lyric poetry toward more personal expression. The change culminated in the works of one of the greatest of all French lyric poets, François Villon, whose Testament (1461) is a masterpiece of French literature. This work reviews Villon's own vagabond life and relates it to human life in general. Villon's radical individualism in making himself so much the subject of his work announces the next period of cultural history, the Renaissance.
III THE 16TH CENTURY
The Renaissance in France coincided with the 16th century. It was an age marked by intense intellectual and artistic activity during which writers explored new ideas and new literary forms. The Renaissance had begun in Italy in the 14th century, when influential thinkers challenged longstanding beliefs in all areas of society. With the challenge to dogma came a new awareness of beauty. The new way of thinking began to filter into France after the outbreak of the Wars of Italy in 1494. French armies returning from Italy brought a knowledge of the Italian Renaissance, of the taste and luxurious living of the Italian nobility, and of the new values of humanism. The Renaissance châteaux built in the valley of the Loire River in France testify to the impression Italian palaces made on the aristocratic leaders of the French army.
A Humanism
The school of thought known as humanism promoted the revival of Greek and Roman artistic and philosophical models that celebrated the worth of the individual. The royal courts of King Francis I and his sister Margaret of Navarre in particular fostered the humanist spirit. At these courts artists, poets, and philologists (scholars of language) received support for their work. In 1530 Francis founded an institution for the study of ancient languages. The study of the humanities was the core curriculum, replacing the formal logic of scholasticism. The institute eventually evolved into the distinguished Collège de France.
The arrival of the Renaissance in France did not, however, immediately produce works born from the new ideas. The rhétoriqueurs, a group of poets devoted to the old ideas of rhetoric (rules of composition) and form, dominated the first quarter of the century. Clément Marot, the son of one of these writers, was the first great poet of the century. Many of his writings belong to medieval genres, such as allegory, but he was also an innovator; in a sense he was the last representative of the Middle Ages and the first of the Renaissance. His primary accomplishment was the introduction into France of the sonnet, a verse form developed by the Italians.
The first great French writer of Renaissance prose, François Rabelais, brought together the humanist passion for knowledge and the Italian love of beauty and pleasure. The gigantic hunger and thirst of his fictional giants Pantagruel and Gargantua symbolize the new era's insatiable appetite for learning and pleasures of the senses. In his works Pantagruel (1532), Gargantua (1534), Le tiers livre (1546; The Third Book), and Le quart livre (1552; The Fourth Book), Rabelais satirized stupidity, snobbism, superstition, and contemporary institutions, and he offered insights on education, war, justice, and religion. At the same time he exalted the cultivation and blossoming of all human faculties and potentials.
Two other writers of Rabelais's generation merit particular mention: Margaret of Navarre and Maurice Scève. The sister of Francis I, Margaret was the author of L'heptaméron (1559; The Heptameron). Inspired by Il decamerone by the Italian Giovanni Boccaccio (1353; The Decameron), the work is a collection of tales supposedly recounted by travelers detained by bad weather in the Pyrenees Mountains. Scève was the chief representative of L'Ecole lyonnaise (The School of Lyons), which included two important female poets, Louise Labé and Pernette du Guillet. The latter inspired Scève's masterpiece, a collection of poems entitled Délie (1544). The Lyons poets wrote of spiritual love and yearning, and their poems indicate a new acceptance of human emotion in written works.
B Other Trends
In 1549 poet Joachim du Bellay issued a manifesto entitled La défence et illustration de la langue française (The Defense and Illustration of the French Language). This was the manifesto of a group of poets known as La Pléïade. The group took its name from the seven daughters of the Greek god Atlas and from seven poets in Alexandria in the 3rd century bc who had adopted the name for their poetic school. The French writers who claimed the hallowed title were du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, along with five lesser poets (Etienne Jodelle, Rémy Belleau, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Antoine de Baïf, and Pontus de Tyard). Du Bellay's Défence announced the group's goal of elevating the French language and its literature to a level at least as illustrious as that achieved by the Greeks, Romans, and Italians. For about 30 years, from 1549 to 1580, La Pléïade dominated French letters, especially through the odes and sonnets of Ronsard.
Civil war between Roman Catholics and Protestants tore France apart from 1562 to 1598. The so-called Wars of Religion pitted family against family, lord against lord, and, most significantly, Catholic lords against their Protestant king. The most violent single incident came in 1572, when Catholics murdered about 2000 Protestants in Paris in the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day. Although the royal family was Protestant, the majority of the French people were Catholic, and the violence did not end until King Henry IV converted to Catholicism in 1593 and issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, granting freedom of worship to French Protestants. The great poet of the Wars of Religion was Agrippa d'Aubigné, whose epic Les tragiques (1616; The Tragic Ones) captured the suffering of the time and denounced the cruelty of war. The writings of Jean de Sponde and Jean-Baptiste Chassignet also reflect the turmoil of the time, often by focusing on pain and death.
One French writer who rose above the troubles of the period was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Although he was active as a diplomat in his early years and as mayor of Bordeaux for a time, Montaigne spent most of his life in his book-lined tower, where he read, reflected, and wrote his Essais (1580, with revised editions published in 1588 and 1595; Essays). The word essai means a testing or an effort; in Montaigne's work it refers to his efforts to search for, study, and explain himself and, by extension, the human condition. In writing the Essais, Montaigne created the modern personal essay and left an indelible example of Renaissance individualism.
IV THE 17TH CENTURY
For France, the 17th century was le grand siècle (the great century), l'âge classique (the classical age), and the century of le roi soleil (the sun king) Louis XIV. King Louis XIV, who ruled from 1643 to 1715, brought to fulfillment the idea of absolute monarchy, with all power centralized under the king. He resolved the continuing strife among nobles and between the nobility and the king by bringing them all to his court at Versailles, where he could keep an eye on them. The stability brought by centralized power came at a price, however. The great families continued to feud, and Louis XIV made it clear that he would deal ruthlessly with those who did not submit to his authority when he put to death several great lords.
French culture flourished under Louis XIV, and French culture, manners, and thought spread throughout Europe. The individualism and lyricism that had characterized French Renaissance literature gave way in the 17th century to classicism and an emphasis on classical ideas of order, restraint, clarity, and reason. To this end, French scholars formulated rules governing literary style. The chief literary forms of the time were drama, satire, and the novel. Two important and related questions dominated French literary discussions: What is the truth of the human heart? and what ideal should society have for its members? Both led to the great preoccupation of the century: the relationship between human passions and human reason.
A Baroque Period
The arts and culture that developed in the first half of the 17th century differed greatly from the classicism that followed. The period before classicism is often referred to as the baroque period. Whereas clarity, rationality, order, unity, and symmetry characterized classicism, it was illusion, mystery, emotionality, multiplicity, dynamism, and depth that were the hallmarks of the baroque style.
In 1600 France had just emerged from the Wars of Religion, and its cultural and social life not surprisingly lacked refinement. This situation gradually changed, as salons held in private homes became intellectual centers where the aristocracy discussed literature and philosophy. The aristocracy spoke in an increasingly witty and cultivated manner that was termed préciosité (preciosity or preciousness). It became the style that most fully represented the baroque period. The liveliest Paris salon was the Hôtel de Rambouillet, hosted by Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. Although the dramatist Molière mocked preciosity in his play Les précieuses ridicules (1659; The Conceited Ladies), the style reflected the desire of French society for a richer and more refined cultural life.
The important writers of this period included François de Malherbe, who helped create the literary language of French classicism; the clergyman Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, known for his sermons; and Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné. Sévigné is best known for her letters to her daughter, which provide a remarkably detailed picture of French society. Among the works discussed at Parisian salons were L'Astrée (1607-1627; The Story of Astrée) by Honoré d'Urfé and Clélie (1654-1660), a lengthy and sentimental romance by Madeleine de Scudéry. Clélie contains the Carte de Tendre (Map of Tenderness), an allegorical map purporting to show the way to a woman's affections.
B Classical Period
Cultural life in France had become centralized under King Louis XIII, the father of Louis XIV, and his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Among the aspects of cultural life that Richelieu wished to control were the French language and French literature. In 1634 he asked a group of writers who had been meeting informally to form the French Academy. A charter for the new organization was issued the following year.
The Academy worked on compiling a French dictionary and planned a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetic that would lay down the rules for literary composition. But it gained more attention for the rules it formulated regarding theater, the most important literary genre of the century, which precipitated a major literary debate. The rules centered on the notion of catharsis (emotional purging) as the function of tragedy, an idea put forth by Greek philosopher Aristotle. Catharsis meant that spectators were purged of their passions through the pity and fear inspired by the tragedy. For this to happen, the audience had to believe absolutely in what they saw, an achievement made possible, according to the Academy, by invoking Aristotle's three dramatic unities. What was represented must be simple (the unity of action), must take place in one location (the unity of place), and must take place in a brief period of time (the unity of time). These rules were rational, the Academy believed, and led to a rationally desirable end: the purgation of passion. The ideal human being, by analogy, was someone capable of controlling passion through the use of reason.
In 1638 the Academy published Sentiments de l'Académie sur le Cid (Judgments of the Academy on the Cid), a critique of a play by Pierre Corneille. Members of the Academy criticized points of grammar and style, as well as breaches of the rules for drama derived from Aristotle. The Parisian public loved the play as it was and quarreled with the critics. The ensuing controversy was termed the Querelle du Cid (The Quarrel of the Cid). Corneille was so offended by the Academy's criticism that he ceased to write for theater for four years. In 1640, however, he produced two plays (Horace and Cinna) that faithfully observed the rules invoked by the Academy. Just as Richelieu had prevailed in his vision of political order imposed by absolute monarchy, the Academy's new classicism triumphed when Corneille adjusted his writing style to conform to the Academy's rules.
The philosopher René Descartes was developing his ideas at this time, and they followed much the same form as classicism. Descartes proposed a philosophy based on reason and advocated the use of scientific principles to discover truth. In his Traité des passions (1649; Treatise on Passion) Descartes describes the struggle involved in using reason to control the passions, an experience dramatized by Corneille in Le Cid and most of his subsequent plays. Descartes and Corneille were optimistic about the outcome of the struggle and believed that human beings could influence their own destinies. Two other writers were not so optimistic about the ability to control human fate. Blaise Pascal reflected the pessimism of the Jansenists, his teachers at the religious monastery of Port Royal, in his Lettres provinciales (1656-1657; The Provincial Letters) and Les pensées (1670; The Thoughts of Pascal) (see Jansenism). The Jansenists believed that humans need grace from God to save them from the sinful nature of their passions. The playwright Jean Baptiste Racine was also a student of the Jansenists. The influence of the Port Royal school shows clearly in his masterpieces Andromaque (1667; Andromache), Iphigénie (1674; Iphigénia), and Phèdre (1677; Phaedra), which are weighted with the concept that humans cannot escape their fate through their own actions.
The third great playwright of this period (along with Corneille and Racine) was the master of comedy, Molière. He too was interested in the workings of the human heart, the ideal member of society, and the relationship between reason and the passions. Molière's characters are motivated by hypocrisy, immoderation, vanity, tyranny, and greed, although in his plays, the qualities that win out in the end are authenticity, moderation, and respect for what follows nature's plan or advances human freedom. In Molière's masterpiece Le misanthrope (1666; The Misanthrope), the central character, Alceste, who believes in absolute truth and total sincerity, loves Célimène, a liar and cheat. Other characters in the play represent points along a continuum between these two extremes, and the work explores the degree of moderation people should strive to achieve.
The drift toward pessimism evident in the works of Pascal and Racine was echoed in two other works from the 1670s. In his Maximes (1665-1678), François de La Rochefoucauld asserts in brief, often single-sentence observations that self-love motivates most human behavior, even in those instances when virtue seems to be present. "The love of justice," suggests La Rochefoucauld, "in most men is merely the fear of suffering injustice." Another pessimist, Marie de La Fayette, wrote what most scholars consider the first modern psychological novel, La princesse de Clèves (1678; The Princess of Cleves). The book's realism in its character portrayal sets it apart from other novels of its time. It describes the long struggle of Madame de Clèves against her inclination for Monsieur de Nemours, a struggle conducted in the apparently justifiable belief that love does not last, and so is not worth having in the first place.
This growing pessimism about human nature and human destiny is related to a current of skepticism that arose in the 17th century among libertins (free-thinkers, or libertines). A representative of this skepticism was Théophile de Viau, who was banished from Paris twice for atheism and dissipated living. Poems attributed to him in Le Parnasse satyrique (1622; The Satirical Parnassus) disregard moral and sexual codes, and many of his poems, like those of his fellow libertine Marc-Antoine de Gérard Saint-Amant, went against religious doctrine and society's moral conventions. The libertines prepared the way for the critical and questioning spirit of Voltaire and the encyclopédistes of the next century by transmitting the critical spirit and reliance on logical reasoning of the Renaissance.
It was perhaps the elegant skepticism of Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon, who spent his life at the court of Versailles, that best bore witness to the pessimism of the late 1600s. His Mémoires (published 1829; Memoirs) presents a vivid image of the hypocrisy, cruelty, and corruption that were the sordid reality beneath the lovely illusions of the last years of le grand siècle.
Toward the end of the 17th century, the Querelle des anciens et des modernes (The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns) divided writers into two camps according to whom they thought superior: Greek and Roman authors or contemporary writers. The “moderns,” such as Charles Perrault and Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, held that writers of their own time represented the maturity of human intellect. They believed that human thought and culture had progressed and that contemporary intellectuals had surpassed the Greeks and Romans. The ancients held that Greek and Roman culture remained superior and provided a goal toward which contemporary writers and artists ought to strive.
V THE 18TH CENTURY (AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT)
The 18th century in Europe saw the flowering of the Age of Enlightenment. This period of intellectual curiosity and experimentation was based on an abiding faith in the power of human reason to unlock the mysteries of nature and society. One manifestation was a confident belief in the steady advance of civilization through scientific progress. The desire for improvement of the general human condition through tolerance, freedom, and equality was expressed by French writers and thinkers who came to be known as les philosophes (the philosophers). They devoted their attention more to useful thought than to abstract thought and speculation. The most ambitious project of the century was also the most representative of this new way of thinking. This was the publication of the 35-volume Encyclopédie (1751-1772, with supplements in 1776 and 1777, and an index in 1780; The Encyclopedia), a project headed by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. Specifically designed to be practical and useful, the Encyclopédie brought together advanced opinions of the time on philosophy, politics, religion, and other subjects. It also examined less exalted topics in articles on things such as fairs and watch-making as well as on the practical matters of political economy and civil law.
One result of the newfound intellectual energy in France was a questioning of authority of all sorts, including the absolute monarchy. In the last years of the reign of Louis XIV, who died in 1715, up until Louis XV took the throne in 1723, France went through a period of crisis. This period was marked by conflict between the French king and the pope; the prohibition of the Jansenist sect at Port Royal; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, resulting in renewed persecution of Protestants; and the increased suffering of the lower classes. The political turmoil and consequent weakening of royal power made possible stronger expressions of dissent and of doubts about the established culture and government. The culmination of this dissent was the French Revolution at the close of the 18th century.
Changes in French society were reflected in changing literary preferences. Just as society was influenced by an ever-growing and increasingly prosperous middle class (the bourgeoisie), so the traditional hierarchy of literary genres was altered by newly elevated forms. The lowly prose novel and short story, favored by this emerging bourgeoisie, became significant genres. The most important philosophes—Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot—all wrote fiction as well as nonfiction essays on a variety of topics. They shared an unshakable belief in the use of reason and scientific method to draw conclusions from observations, a process that leads the observer from particular facts to general laws. These thinkers also believed in the popularization of ideas among the people in order to promote progress and improve society and individual lives. In support of these beliefs, the philosophes were hostile to thought based on authority (medieval scholasticism and excessive reverence for the ancients), prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and the assumption that one principle can explain all.
Montesquieu is perhaps best known for De l'esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws), the first great work of political sociology. In this work he examines the three main types of government (republic, monarchy, and despotism) and states that a relationship exists between an area's climate, geography, and general circumstances and the form of government that evolves there. His literary masterpiece is Les lettres persanes (1721; The Persian Letters), fictional letters exchanged between two Persians visiting Paris and their correspondents in Persia. Montesquieu used this device to satirize contemporary French society and its institutions, including the king himself. The themes of visitors from other lands, European visitors in foreign lands, and even visitors from outer space were popular throughout the 18th century and expressed the interest of the time in differences between cultures.
Voltaire experienced cultural differences firsthand as a young man when he was exiled to England for three years after a quarrel with an illustrious French family. He was impressed with the English constitutional monarchy and with English liberalism and tolerance. In his Lettres philosophiques (1734; The Philosophical Letters), Voltaire admired English customs and institutions while attacking their French counterparts. Voltaire is also known for his attacks on religion and is usually called a deist (someone who believes that God created the world and its natural laws but takes no part in its further functioning). This belief is reflected in his masterpiece, the philosophical tale Candide (1759), which depicts the woes heaped upon the world in the name of religion.
Voltaire created a new genre in writing his philosophical tales, and his contemporary Denis Diderot also experimented with literary forms. The most subtle thinker of the philosophes, Diderot wrote an epistolary novel (a novel written in the form of a series of letters) called La religieuse (written 1760, published 1796; The Nun). This work vividly represents and criticizes life in a convent. Diderot's Neveu de rameau (written 1761-1774, published 1805; Rameau's Nephew) follows the uncommon form of a dialogue. The two speakers, moi (me) and lui (him), represent Diderot and the nephew of French composer Jean Philippe Rameau. The book captures the discontinuity, unpredictability, and fragmentation of life and thought. Jacques le fataliste (1796; Jacques the Fatalist) is a novel in the form of a series of dialogues between an author-narrator and the reader, and, within the story, between Jacques and his master. The book illustrates the problems of freedom, fatalism, and the relationship between the two. In his works Diderot alternates between the fear that emotions might take over human action entirely and the certainty that pure reason by itself is blind and arid. The nature and relationship of the human head and heart preoccupied many thinkers of the time.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also concerned with human sentiment and human intellect, but he generally opposed the critical and atheistic outlook of the philosophes and their belief in material progress. Rousseau believed in God, thought that human nature was inherently good but that society corrupted it, and preached a return to nature and to the simple rustic life. His treatise Le contrat social (1762; The Social Contract) helped provide a philosophical basis for the French Revolution. In this work he asserted the rights of equality and of individual liberty for all people and proposed a democratic means of government in which power would rest with the governed.
Like the philosophes, Rousseau also wrote novels. His La nouvelle Héloïse (1761; The New Heloise), a lengthy epistolary novel, dramatizes the struggle of the characters Saint-Preux and Julie, who live under the same roof as Julie's husband, to transform their passionate love into a platonic friendship. The novel was enormously successful, especially among the French upper classes, who were moved by the frustrated passions and tearful sensibilities of the characters. In his autobiographical Confessions (1781, 1788; The Confessions), Rousseau describes his battle with his own emotions and his lifelong struggle to protect, nurture, and express his individual genius. Rousseau's writings had an enormous influence on the romantic movement in the early 19th century.
Works by Alain-René Lesage, Pierre Marivaux, and Abbé Prévost revealed other possibilities for the novel. Lesage's Gil Blas (1715-1735), which recounts the adventures of a Spanish rogue, was an early and influential realistic novel. Other realistic fiction of the 18th century includes Marivaux's La vie de Marianne (1731-1741; The Life of Marianne) and Prévost's Manon Lescaut (1731). The 19th-century novel owed much to these 18th-century precedents.
Toward the end of the century, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Liaisons) appeared. It is a witty, scandalous story of intrigue that depicts a corrupt aristocracy ripe for a fall. Pierre Beaumarchais presented much the same idea in his play Le mariage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro), which features a servant more intelligent than his master, symbolizing the decline of the old regime. The greatest lyric poet of the 18th century was André Chénier, whose fate dramatized the difficult position of writers during the French Revolution. Chénier sung the praises of the early Revolution, but after he criticized its later violence, he was put to death by guillotine.
VI THE 19TH CENTURY
The history of 19th-century France is that of a country struggling to deal with the aftermath of the Revolution. Two republics, several revolutions and coups d'état, the empires of Napoleon I and Napoleon III, and the restoration of the monarchy followed one another in a topsy-turvy succession of regimes, ideologies, and political philosophies. Similarly, the literary history of the 19th century is of a series of efforts to replace the classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries and its emphasis on order, reason, and clarity. Romanticism, realism, naturalism, Parnassianism, and symbolism were the concepts, movements, and schools that dominated the 19th century. The novel continued to prosper in the 19th century and provided some of the masterpieces of French literature. It was the preeminent democratic genre, documenting detail and fact rather than the universal and general principles that the 18th-century philosophes pursued. Liberated from the hierarchy of the old regime, the 19th-century novel could express the distinctiveness of the individual. Writers increasingly portrayed protagonists from different levels of society, even the very lowest.
A Romanticism
Romanticism, the first of the 19th-century literary movements, echoed the demand for freedom in the political sphere. Romanticism emphasized the role of the imagination and a subjective approach in creativity, along with freedom of thought and expression. In their prefaces, manifestos, and articles, the romantics called for the abolition of the rules created in the 17th century by the French Academy. They opposed any limitations placed upon the individual artist by cultural or political powers.
French romanticism began with De la littérature (1800; On Literature) by Madame de Staël. This volume of criticism acquainted French readers with the development of romanticism in other European countries, especially England and Germany. Madame de Staël defined romanticism as the rejection of classicism, and suggested that lyricism—the poetic and emotional expression of enthusiasm—was romanticism's chief characteristic.
François-René de Chateaubriand was, according to some, the first true French writer of romanticism. His novellas (short novels) Atala (1801) and René (1802) describe the wanderings of a restless young nobleman. René's vague melancholy, longing, and discontent typified a general attitude in France in the years after the Revolution, when the younger generation found itself without purpose or direction. In René, the main character finds his own moods, passions, and restlessness reflected in nature. The use of nature as a mirror of human emotions became a hallmark of romanticism.
A group known as the romantic school got its start in 1823 in the literary salon of Charles Nodier, which was frequented by the four great romantic poets of France—Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, and Alphonse de Lamartine. All these writers expressed intensely personal feelings and a concern with humankind's relation to nature and the universe. In the poem “Le Lac” (1820), for example, Lamartine pleads with Lake Bourget to retain the memory and feelings of his earlier love affair there. This projection of human feeling onto inanimate nature is known as the romantic pathetic fallacy.
The theater, however, marked the major battlefront in the struggle to establish romanticism. Victor Hugo was a leader of the authors who rejected many of the rules that had governed French drama in the classical age. The preface to Hugo's play Cromwell (1827) explained and defended the new spirit in art, pleading for “the freedom of art against the despotism of systems of rules and codes.” The premiere of Hugo's play Hernani (1830) is often called la bataille d'Hernani (the battle of Hernani) because the rivalry between the play's supporters and its critics among the classicists verged on violence. Other major romantic dramas are Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825; Racine and Shakespeare) by Stendhal; Henri III et sa cour (1829; Henry III and His Court) by Alexandre Dumas père; and an adaptation of Othello (1829) by de Vigny.
The historical novel dealing with French history was especially popular during the romantic era. The term couleur locale (local color) referred to the use of distinctive detail in plots, characters, and especially to descriptions of customs, people, places, and objects intended to ensure historical accuracy. Outstanding historical novels included Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame), which sought to recreate the French Middle Ages, and Les misérables (1862), which deals with French society of his own time. Dumas père's Les trois mousquetaires (1844; The Three Musketeers) and de Vigny's Cinq-Mars (1826) are both situated in the early 17th century.
B Realism
The concern for accurate, detailed description became the outstanding feature of realism, the movement that followed romanticism in French literature. The pursuit of scientific accuracy, which began among romantic writers, reflected a desire to keep pace with the scientific methods and discoveries of the period. This pursuit can be seen by the 1830s in Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir (1831; The Red and the Black), as well as in Eugénie Grandet (1833) and Le Père Goriot (1834; Father Goriot) by Honoré de Balzac. Balzac claimed a sociological value for his work in the preface to his masterpiece, La comédie humaine (published 1842-1848; The Human Comedy). La comédie humaine is a collection of about 90 novels and stories that present a varied and faithful picture of French society in the first half of the 19th century. Balzac was the first major novelist to document in minute detail the lives and environments of fictional characters.
By the mid-19th century, realism dominated French literature. The essay collection Le réalisme (1857; Realism) by Champfleury was the manifesto of the new trend, but Gustave Flaubert was considered the father of realism by a large group of followers. His meticulous approach to fiction is best exemplified by Madame Bovary (1857), which examines the tragic life of a woman whose drab everyday existence brutally conflicts with her romantic dreams. Flaubert's stated goal was to hide all traces of the author, much as he considered God to be absent from nature. The reader encounters characters of remarkable mediocrity and stupidity, but no narrator judges them or tells the reader how they should be judged. Flaubert's reliance on an objective and articulate narrator to report a character's exact thoughts revolutionized modern fiction. Flaubert himself used this technique to depict and critique the inability of the romantic temperament to live in the real world.
C Naturalism
The same year that Madame Bovary appeared, Hippolyte Taine published Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siècle en France (Classic French Philosophers of the 19th Century). In this work, he set forth a plan for the application of scientific methods to the study of human nature and history. Taine asserted the importance of such formative influences as "la race, le milieu, et le moment" ("race [heredity], environment, and historical moment") for human character and society. Among his admirers were the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who formed a bridge between realism and an extreme form of realism, called naturalism, that followed it. Naturalist writers also aimed at an objective depiction of life. They believed human behavior was determined by hereditary instincts and emotions and by the social and economic environment, rather than by free human choice. The Goncourt brothers said that the novel should represent "history as it might have happened" and stated that fiction should be documented as carefully as history, and that it should have the same truth value. Their novel Germinie Lacerteux (1864) was a precursor of naturalism.
Emile Zola emerged as the leader of the naturalist school. His Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893; The Rougon-Macquarts), a cycle of 20 novels, contains the masterpieces of naturalism L'assomoir (1877; The Dram Shop) and Germinal (1885). In his books, Zola applies the scientific method to his investigations of alcoholism, prostitution, incest, and the miseries of poverty. To write his books and create his characters, Zola visited the locations where the stories took place, observed closely, and took copious notes. Other major naturalist novelists were Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Joris Karl Huysmans, and Henry Céard. Les corbeaux (1882; The Crows) by Henri Becque is considered the best of the naturalist plays.
D Parnassians
The disenchantment with romanticism that resulted in the realist and naturalist novels also produced the Parnassian school of poetry. The Parnassian school's name is taken from Parnassus, the legendary Greek mountain where Apollo and the Muses dwelled. Théophile Gautier and Leconte de Lisle were major influences on the movement. Gautier's theory of art for art's sake and de Lisle's notion of pure art anticipate the Parnassians' revolt against the emotionalism of romanticism in favor of technical perfection and an impersonal attitude. The Parnassian poets announced their presence in 1866 with the publication of the journal Le Parnasse contemporain (The Contemporary Parnassus). Their poems are characterized by impeccable form, technical brilliance, and pictorial and sculptural images that often evoke a Greco-Roman historical or archaeological past. The Parnassians include Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, and José Mar?a Heredia.
E Symbolist Movement
The Parnassians were succeeded by the symbolists. The symbolist movement began with Romances sans paroles (1874; Romances Without Words) by Paul Verlaine and L'après-midi d'un faune (1876; The Afternoon of a Faun) by Stéphane Mallarmé. The symbolists wanted to evoke rather than describe. To do so, they used fluid and musical versification, impressions, intuitions, and sensations. A symbol was not meant to symbolize a specific idea, thing, person, or place, but rather to provoke and evoke different associations in different readers. Perhaps the greatest symbolist poet was Arthur Rimbaud, who wrote most of his poems before he was 19 years old. “Le bateau ivre” (1871, The Drunken Boat), written when he was 16, suggests the chaotic state of the human spirit in terms of a storm-tossed boat abandoned on the high seas. Rimbaud's use of bizarre imagery and his bold experimentation with language profoundly influenced many later French poets, especially the surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s. Other symbolist writers were Jules Laforgue, Henri de Régnier, Jean Moréas, Tristan Corbière, and Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. The Belgian poets Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck were also important symbolists, as were two American expatriates living in France, Francis Viélé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill.
Although Charles Baudelaire is considered a leader of the symbolist movement, his volume of poetry Les fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil) defies classification. The mystery of the natural world, the yearning for a beyond, the theme of ennui (anguish due to meaninglessness), and the great passion in this work all recall the romantics. Baudelaire's impeccable form, classical versification, and brilliant pictorial imagery are worthy of the Parnassians. He deeply influenced the symbolists through his concept and use of les correspondances (the correspondences) between the colors, scents, and sounds of this world, and their correspondences with another world. He was also noted for his emphasis on the musicality of poetry.
Despite the many innovations of the late 19th century, a segment of the population looked back to earlier eras. In his novel Les déracinés (1897; The Uprooted), Maurice Barrès proposed that the solution to the meaninglessness felt by many French youths was a return to their native regions, where they could immerse themselves in the regional customs, traditions, and history. In A rebours (1884; Against the Grain) by Joris Karl Huysmans, the hero, Des Esseintes, is a survivor of an exhausted noble line. He fights his debilitating boredom by leading a life systematically opposed to that of the modern democratic herd. As these two examples make clear, France at the end of the 19th century was still haunted by the Old Regime.
VII THE 20TH CENTURY
Whereas 19th-century French literature chronicled the country's struggle to come to terms with the French Revolution, 20th-century French literature had to contend with the impact of two cataclysms: World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945). The devastation of these wars and the unspeakable horrors that accompanied them have tested humanity's belief in the existence of a God and the belief in the goodness of human nature. Confronted with these calamitous wars, the Cold War that followed them, and wars of independence fought in French colonies, French intellectuals were forced to acknowledge that previously held beliefs had failed to create a more humane world. Among the beliefs that came into question were the faith in human nature inherited from the Renaissance, the faith in material progress bequeathed by the Enlightenment, and, especially, the worship of technology passed on by the Industrial Revolution. French writers living in a new world of nuclear energy, computerization, and increased media influence sought to redefine their role in society and their concepts of literature.
A Belle Epoque
Before the pessimism of the 1920s set in, a brief period of optimism reigned in France. The early years of the 20th century, before World War I, are called the belle epoque (beautiful epoch) in France because they constituted an exhilarating period of economic prosperity and progress. Such inventions as the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, and the cinema had speeded up and enlivened modern life. The poems of Guillaume Apollinaire reflect the giddy times. He expressed society's distaste for outmoded styles, such as naturalism, and its enthusiasm for the new and exciting—the Eiffel Tower, cubism, and the joyful life of cabarets and music halls. Apollinaire himself made bold experiments in form and style, eliminating punctuation and juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images.
Some writers did maintain continuity with 19th-century forms, especially playwrights Edmond Rostand and Jules Renard, but many others followed Apollinaire's lead and created new forms. The extravagant farce of Ubu roi (1896; Ubu King, 1951) by Alfred Jarry and the highly poetic and densely packed dramas of Paul Claudel challenged conventions in drama. The novel Le grand meaulnes (1913; The Wanderer, 1928) by Alain-Fournier is a poetic and mysterious denial of the limitations the realists and naturalists placed on the human imagination. Similarly, philosopher Henri Bergson rejected the naturalist view that human destiny is shaped by predetermined factors and suggested that people have free will and limitless creative energy.
B Dada and Surrealism
After the outbreak of World War I, many French writers and artists fled to neutral Switzerland. In Zürich, they formed the dada movement, led by Tristan Tzara. In 1920, after the most destructive war yet seen, the dadaists made Paris their center. Although dada is a child's word for hobbyhorse, Tzara had selected it at random from a dictionary as a name for the new movement. To the dadaists, the meaninglessness of the name represented the assault they launched on reason. Their slogan, "Plus rien, rien, RIEN, RIEN, RIEN" (Nothing more, nothing, nothing, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING), reflected their nihilism, or lack of belief in anything. This viewpoint was born from the senseless slaughter of the war.
Dada led to surrealism, a movement that dates from the mid-1920s. Surrealism was headed in the beginning by André Breton, and included such poets as Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. The surrealists believed that another reality lies beyond this one, and they sought to express this irrational sur-reality in their writing through such means as automatic writing, in which they wrote down whatever words came into their minds. Deeply influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, they attempted to tap the subconscious mind through the images of dreams and the free flow of conscious thought. They differed greatly from the “engaged” writers of the time who used their writing to display their commitment to causes. These authors included Maurice Barrès, who publicized his views on many political issues; Charles Péguy, who was dedicated to the cause of social justice; André Gide, who became interested in Communism; and Colette, who expressed feminist views in such novels as La vagabonde (1910; The Vagabond, 1912) and Chéri (1920; translated 1929). By 1938 the surrealist movement had split. One faction was led by André Breton, who had become a Communist, and the other was led by Philippe Soupault, who believed in no cause but art.
C Between the World Wars
Between the two World Wars, the novel remained the dominant literary genre. Colette, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, François Mauriac, and others wrote novels reminiscent of the traditional psychological novel of Marie de La Fayette. However, considerable experimentation occurred as well, prompted in part by the growing presence of cinema. The four great novels of the period were radical experiments. André Gide's Les faux-monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters, 1928) contests the very possibility of using an omniscient narrator or of writing a traditional novel in complex modern times. Gide's book had significant influence on the nouveau roman (new novel) that developed in the 1950s. The second novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, is based on Céline's own experiences as a soldier in World War I, as a doctor in the slums of Paris, and as a traveler to the United States and Africa. The narrative voice uses violent but everyday language to condemn the injustices and suffering of the common people of the world. La condition humaine (1933; Man's Fate, 1934) by André Malraux is the third of the great French novels from between the wars. It takes place during an uprising in China in the late 1920s and creates a new type of hero, the revolutionary adventurer engaged in the plight of the oppressed. Fascinated by film, Malraux adapted his novel L'espoir (1937; Man's Hope, 1938), based on his own experiences of the Spanish Civil War, to the screen. Both books by Malraux deal with individuals struggling to triumph over destiny.
The greatest of all the novels, and perhaps of French literature itself, is A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931) by Marcel Proust. In the seven parts of this masterpiece, Proust explored the depths of the human psyche, subconscious motivations, and the irrationality of human behavior, particularly in relation to love. The work's historical and sociological interest stems from its vivid portrayal of France before and after World War I, documenting the twilight of traditional French society. The work's artistic interest lies in Proust's claim to conquer time and mortality through memories that surface involuntarily and through art. Time is perceived in terms similar to the theories of Henri Bergson: in constant flux, with moments of the past and the present having equal reality.
Theater between the World Wars was characterized by a return to the themes of ancient myth, as playwrights sought universal and timeless values and truths to counteract the nihilism of their own times. The most successful examples of this mythic revival were the version of the Oedipus story that Jean Cocteau presented in La machine infernale (1934; The Infernal Machine, 1936), and La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935; Tiger at the Gates, 1955) by Jean Giraudoux. This trend continued after World War II, with a group of playwrights Jean-Paul Sartre called “the forgers of myth.” These writers included Jean Anouilh, Albert Camus, and Sartre himself.
D Existentialism
Much literature after World War II was in reaction to the German occupation of France during the war. The works of authors who cooperated with the Germans or sympathized with fascist beliefs—including Céline, Drieu La Rochelle, and Robert Brasillach—were ignored after the conflict. But many writers who took part in the resistance movement were considered heroes after the liberation of France. They included Sartre, Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, René Char, and especially Camus. For these writers, the experience of the occupation reinforced a belief in the absurdity of human existence. At the same time, resistance and collaboration, and the trials of collaborators held after the liberation, emphasized the idea of personal responsibility for one's acts. This difficult position in which people found themselves during and after the war—responsible for their actions in a world beyond their comprehension—was explored in the philosophy of existentialism. Among works of existentialist fiction written during the war were Camus's novel L'étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946), Sartre's play Les mouches (1943; The Flies, 1946), and Beauvoir's novel L'invitée (1943; She Came to Stay, 1949). Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir continued to dominate the novel and theater after the war.
E Other Postwar Developments
Many poets of the postwar period came out of the surrealist movement or were deeply influenced by it. They included Eluard, Char, Henri Michaux, Raymond Queneau, and Francis Ponge. Each of these poets is distinctive, and they share only the concept of poetry as a means to explore the mysteries of the world and the self. In the mid- and late 20th century, modern poetry in France (as in other countries) became increasingly personal, obscure, and hard to understand. One consequence has been a steady diminishing of the reading public for poetry.
The most important postwar development in the theater came in the 1950s with the théâtre de l'absurde (theater of the absurd). Absurdist plays point out the inadequacy of language for communication and the absence of meaning in everyday life. To this end they use inconsistent and even interchangeable characters, illogical or nonexistent plot development, and parody of the conventions of theatre. La cantatrice chauve (1950; The Bald Soprano, 1956) by Eugène Ionesco and En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954) by Samuel Beckett are the masterpieces of the theater of the absurd. Other authors of the movement were Arthur Adamov, Jacques Audiberti, Jean Genet, and Jean Tardieu.
The term nouveau roman (new novel) refers to a group of novels written in the 1950s. Common characteristics include the fragmentation of plot, chronology, and characters; the use of innovative narrative techniques; the blurring of boundaries between poetry, drama, and the novel; and the theme of the incommunicability of language. Among the best of the new novels are Molloy (1951; translated 1955) by Beckett, Moderato cantibile (1958; translated 1960) by Marguerite Duras, Le planétarium (1959; The Planetarium, 1960) by Nathalie Sarraute, La jalousie (1957; Jealousy, 1959) by Alain Robbe-Grillet, La modification (1957; A Change of Heart, 1959) by Michel Butor, and La route des Flandres (1960; The Flanders Road, 1961) by Claude Simon.
Much of modern French poetry, theater of the absurd, and the new novel have in common a deep skepticism and even pessimism about the possibility of knowing “reality,” especially through the use of language. In many ways, therefore, 20th-century literature moved toward silence. Poetry lost much of its audience. The theater of the absurd, in contesting traditional dramatic forms and emphasizing the inadequacy of language, left few alternatives for the future, while the new novel proposed to put an end to the novel as a method of storytelling. Raymond Queneau led a movement in reaction to this impasse, called Oulipo (for OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle; in English, Workshop for Literary Potentiality). Oulipo suggested that strict form and rules (often mathematical) be applied to literature, all inspiration be sacrificed to calculation, and literature become a sort of intellectual game.
F Literary Criticism
The crisis in literature, which had become evident by the 1960s, resulted in a crisis for those who study it. The first battles of la nouvelle critique (New Criticism) began with the confrontation between academic or university criticism, best represented by Raymond Picard, and the New Criticism, led at first by Roland Barthes. In understanding and interpreting texts, university criticism gave importance to biographical, historical, cultural, and literary historical information. The New Critics, on the other hand, used methods and conceptual schemes from linguistics and the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology) to study texts. Literary criticism then moved through a series of schools of thought in an effort to use literature to examine the world in new ways. These schools include structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, feminist theory, and so-called queer theory. In some ways the leading exponents of these movements—Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva—have replaced the creative writers of previous centuries as the prominent literary figures of France.
G Contemporary Fiction
Despite the tumultuous and pessimistic view of literature found in the intellectual community, the general reading public in France still likes a good novel, ensuring the continued vitality of French literature. Stendhal has never been more popular. Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984; The Lover, 1985) sold more than 1.5 million copies in 18 months and has been translated into about 20 languages. Michel Tournier's Le roi des aulnes (1970; The Ogre, 1972) is recognized as a modern masterpiece, and an admiring public eagerly embraced Diego et Frieda (Diego and Frida, 1993) and other novels of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, as well as Vestiaire de l'enfance (The Cloakroom of Childhood, 1989) by Patrick Modiano. The novels of the late 20th century are characterized by a return to traditional narration, allusions to other literary works, a focus on the problem of identity in the postmodern world, and the themes of multiculturalism and ecology. Thus, they incorporate new elements and new concerns while continuing to provide what the French have appreciated since 865: an interesting and meaningful story.
Contributed By:D. Dale Cosper
Victor HugoVictor Hugo is considered one of the greatest French writers. In the 19th century he was the leader of the French romantic movement, which sought freedom from the conservative restrictions of classical style. Hugo's works express his indignation at social injustices and human suffering.
Culver Pictures
