The cultural climate of the later 19th century in France, as in the Atlantic world generally, was strongly marked by the current called positivism. The post-1848 generation looked with contempt on what it considered the excesses and the bad taste of the preceding Romantic era. A new interest in science and a new vogue of realism in literature and the arts prevailed during the Second Empire; it was best embodied in the novels of Gustave Flaubert and the paintings of Gustave Courbet. By the 1870s this mood had formed into what its advocates regarded as a coherent philosophical system, the content and label of which they borrowed from the French thinker Auguste Comte. These self-styled positivists placed their faith in science and reason as the path to inevitable progress, with only the remnants of superstition (surviving mainly in the church) still blocking the hopeful future. The positivist temper is manifest in the novels of Émile Zola and the paintings of Impressionists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The French also showed great creativity in pure science and made major discoveries in a wide variety of fields. Among the most notable figures were Louis Pasteur in medicine, Pierre and Marie Curie in physics, Marcelin Berthelot in chemistry, Henri Poincaré in mathematics, and Jean-Martin Charcot in psychopathology. In the social sciences the work of Gustave Le Bon and Émile Durkheim had a broad and enduring impact.

Although the positivist mood prevailed at least until World War I, it was contested by a rival current of thought that from the 1890s onward began to assert itself. To some sensitive people of artistic temperament, the positivist outlook seemed arid and narrow, neglecting the emotional side of man. This was the view of the school of poets, including Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, who called themselves Symbolists. A remarkable group of composers carried the upstart Neoromantic mood into music: mainstream works by composers such as Jules Massenet, Georges Bizet, and Camille Saint-Saëns were followed by the more experimental compositions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

Of equal significance was the growing influence after 1890 of such writers and thinkers as Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, and Henri Bergson. Bourget’s novels challenged what he called “brutal positivism” and asserted such traditional values as authority, the family, and the established order. Barrès preached what Charles Maurras had defined as “integral nationalism”; Barrès called for a return to “the sources of national energy,” which he found in historic institutions, the soil of the fatherland, and the solidarity between the living and the dead. The philosopher Bergson attacked scientific dogmatism and exalted humankind’s nonrational drives—notably a creative force that he called élan vital, which he held distinguishes heroic individuals and nations from the plodding herd.

This new spirit had its parallel in political thought and action as well: in the syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel, in the activism of a minority in the labour movement, and in the resurgent nationalism that strongly affected many French young people in the years just before 1914. It also brought a return to the church and to an emotional patriotism. In the fine arts a new generation of painters abandoned both realism and Impressionism. These so-called Post-Impressionists were moved by an intense subjectivism, an urge to express in various ways the artist’s inner vision and deeper emotions. The changed mood was best-embodied in the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and the Dutch immigrant Vincent van Gogh.

The terrible strain and disillusionment of World War I weighed heavily on French cultural life during the interwar era, leading to the development of the literary and artistic movement called Dadaism. Its program of calculated nonsense was inspired by a deep revulsion against the insanity of war and the positivist view that the world had sense and meaning. Dadaism soon gave way, though, to the more durable Surrealist movement, whose principal theorist and founder was the poet André Breton. The declared goal of Surrealist writers and artists was to free man’s unconscious impulses from the distorting controls of rational reflection; creativity, they said, came from deep nonrational drives.

A number of France’s most notable writers, however, remained within the older humanistic tradition; yet they likewise reflected the doubts and neuroses of an age of crisis. Marcel Proust, whose massive multivolume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) began to appear in 1913, used the stream-of-consciousness technique to probe, in minutely introspective fashion, into the recesses of his own mind and memory. André Gide, in similarly sensitive and introspective fashion, wrestled with the psychological difficulties arising from the conflict between a bourgeois society’s values and the individual’s instinctive drives.

As the mood of crisis deepened in the 1930s, so did the intensity of the challenge to old values, bringing forth men of frankly fascist temper, such as Robert Brasillach, and brutally nihilistic literary experimenters, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Other writers continued to create works in the older tradition, including the supple, sensual explorations of (Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette; the social commentary of Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, and François Mauriac; the Neoromantic novels of André Malraux, preaching a modern gospel of heroic activism; the first writings of Jean-Paul Sartre; and the essays of Emmanuel Mounier, who was to inspire the new Catholic left after World War II.