Literature

French literature has a long and rich history. Traditionally it is held to have begun in 842 with the Oath of Strasbourg, a political pact between Louis the German and Charles the Bald, the text of which survives in Old French. The Middle Ages are noted in particular for epic poems such as La Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland), the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and lyric poetry expressing romantic love. In the 16th century the Renaissance flourished, and figures such as the poet Pierre de Ronsard, the satirist and humorist François Rabelais, and the quintessential essayist Michel de Montaigne, were to become internationally acknowledged. French Neoclassical drama reached its apotheosis during the next hundred years in the tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. During the same period, Molière displayed his vast and varied talents in the theatre, particularly as a writer of comedies; Jean de La Fontaine produced moralistic verse in his Fables; and Madame de La Fayette created the classic La Princesse de Clèves (1678), generally considered the first French psychological novel.

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Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau dominated the 18th century, especially with their philosophical writings, though they made major contributions to all genres, and Voltaire’s novel Candide (1759) is notable for its literary quality and distillation of Enlightenment ideals. Other authors of the period include playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, best known for works such as Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro), and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, remembered for his epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances). The 19th century witnessed the emergence of a series of writers who substantially influenced the development of literature worldwide, including the novelists Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola along with the poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud. Added to these was the Romantic writer Victor Hugo, whose creative energy expressed itself in all literary forms, as well as in painting.

French literature in the 20th century both carried on the earlier traditions and transformed them, and French authors have won a number of Nobel Prizes for Literature. While the complexity of French poetry continued in the work of Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel (also a major dramatist), Saint-John Perse, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, René Char, and Yves Bonnefoy, the art of the novel was given new direction by Marcel Proust, in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past). The first half of the century also produced such notable writers as André Gide, François Mauriac, André Malraux, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the last arguably the chief exponent of existentialist philosophy. Their work was followed in the 1950s by the nouveau roman (“new novel”) and by the emergence of writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Mauriac, Marguerite Duras, and Claude Simon, whose works have entered the canon of literature. Since the 1970s Michel Tournier, Patrick Modiano, Erik Orsenna, and Georges Perec have become leading novelists; feminist writers, including Hélène Cixous, Annie Leclerc, Jeanne Champion, and Marie Cardinal, have also made significant contributions.

The literature of the 20th century was notable for its openness to nonnative writers: the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, for instance, the Czech expatriate Milan Kundera, the Russian emigrant Andreï Makine, and Chinese exile Gao Xingjian have all produced major works in French. Georges Simenon and Marguerite Yourcenar, both born in Belgium in 1903, were considered French writers, though they often lived outside France. The postcolonial literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries offered insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean.

The works of French playwrights have enjoyed international acclaim for centuries, from the 17th-century comic theatre of Molière to the 19th-century cabaret productions known as Grand Guignol. In theatre in the 20th and 21st centuries three important currents can be discerned. Traditional playwriting was carried on largely by Jean Anouilh, Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Henry de Montherlant, and Camus, but experimentation with both form and content also developed. Before World War II, Jean Cocteau in particular made his mark (as did to a lesser degree Claudel), but innovation came with Fernando Arrabal, Arthur Adamov, Beckett, Jean Genet, and the Romanian exile Eugène Ionesco. Since the 1950s producers have also made an important contribution to theatre; Roger Planchon, Jean-Louis Barrault, Peter Brook, Marcel Maréchal, and Ariane Mnouchkine in particular have shared in both creating new works and revitalizing traditional ones.

Philosophy and criticism have always played a central part in French intellectual and cultural life. The Surrealist movement, led by André Breton, among others, flourished in the 1920s and ’30s. Existentialism in both Christian and atheist forms was a powerful force in the mid-20th century and was championed by Sartre, Étienne Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, and Camus (though he rejected the label). More broadly, Roman Catholicism and Marxism in orthodox or revised forms have influenced a large number of creative writers, including the Roman Catholic Georges Bernanos and Sartre, who was a Marxist of a sort. Since the 1950s, new criticism, which began with structuralism—itself largely inspired by the anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Mythologiques, 4 vol. (1964–71), and Tristes Tropiques (1955)—has challenged the monopoly of the historical approach to works of art and especially literature. Not limited to literary criticism, structuralism was an important component of philosophy among proponents such as Louis Althusser. The most popular expression of this approach was perhaps the work of Roland Barthes, including Mythologies (1957), but his work fragmented into various branches—linguistic, genetic, psychobiographical, sociocultural—each with its exponents and disciples increasingly embroiled in academic, and often abstruse, debate. Following on the heels of structuralism, poststructuralism was associated with such figures as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Giles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Jean-François Lyotard. Other philosophers of recent note include André Glucksmann, Bernard Henri-Lévy, and Michel Serres. (For further discussion, see French literature.)