Why French Literature?
French Literature
Course 1 · Chapter 1 · Why French Literature? Scope & Sources
There is a famous line attributed to the French queen Marie Antoinette: when told that the people had no bread, she is supposed to have replied, "Let them eat cake." It is quoted constantly, and almost certainly she never said it. The sentence appears in a book written by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, about a "great princess" he does not name, at a time when Marie Antoinette was a child (check the details). That makes it a good place to begin a course on French literature: a country whose writers invent, preserve and sometimes ruin its own history. This opening chapter explains why the subject deserves a course, sets out what the course covers, and shows how to read the sources. A great deal of literary history is half legend, so the chapter marks what is firm and what is not.
Why French Literature?
Literature holds an unusual place in French public life. Novelists and poets are treated as public figures whose opinions matter. A national literary prize season each autumn, the rentrée littéraire, is covered in the news like a sporting event (check the details). Students at secondary school study set texts and write formal essays about them, and quotations from authors are part of the shared language of educated French people. A series of French writers also took part directly in public arguments: Voltaire in the eighteenth century, Hugo in the nineteenth, Zola in the Dreyfus affair, Sartre and Camus after the Second World War (Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 9).
The Académie Française and the Language
The Académie française was founded in 1635 under Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis XIII, to regulate the French language (check the date and the circumstances). It has forty members, often called the "immortals", chosen by the existing members, and it has published a dictionary of the language over several editions. It is still active today, and still argues about which words and spellings are acceptable. Its authority is advisory and not legal, and it is frequently criticised as conservative, but it shows how seriously the French state has taken the language. That attitude connects directly to the policies discussed at the end of another course, French Music 10.
A One-Paragraph Version
French literature begins in the Middle Ages with epic poems such as the Chanson de Roland and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, alongside the songs of the troubadours (see French Music 2). The Renaissance brought Rabelais, Montaigne and the poets of the Pléiade. In the seventeenth century, under Louis XIV, classical theatre flourished with Corneille, Racine and Molière. The eighteenth century belonged to the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The nineteenth saw Romanticism, then Realism and Naturalism, and a series of great novels; late in that century poetry was transformed by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and their successors. The twentieth century brought Proust, existentialism and the experimental Nouveau Roman, and today French-language writing is as international as it is national. Each of these is developed in a later chapter.
What the Course Covers
| Chapters | Theme |
|---|---|
| 2–3 | Medieval voices; the Renaissance |
| 4–5 | Classical theatre; the Enlightenment |
| 6–7 | Romanticism and the great novel; Realism and Naturalism |
| 8–9 | Poetry from Baudelaire to Surrealism; Proust, existentialism and after |
| 10 | The writer as public conscience |
Scope: France at the Centre
The course is built around France. French-language literature is bigger than France: Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, the Caribbean and many African countries have literatures of their own, and many writers worked across borders. Francophone authors from outside France appear mainly in Chapter 10, where they are named and placed. A full study of Francophone literature would be a separate course.
Record, Legend and Memory
The cake story shows why this distinction matters. Three kinds of claim need different handling.
Record
Dates of publication, trials, prizes and appointments, found in first editions, archives and reliable reference works.
Legend
Quotations and anecdotes repeated so often that they feel like facts: the cake line, the writer who died in poverty, a famous sentence "he said". Another example is a line often attributed to Voltaire about defending to the death someone's right to speak, which was written by a later biographer as a summary of his views (check the details).
Memory
What readers recall of a book from school. Good for mood, unreliable for the plot, the date or even the author.
Which Translations to Read
- Read in translation first. You do not need French to follow this course, and every major work discussed is available in English.
- Choose a recent translation of a novel. Translations age, and a more recent one is often smoother and more accurate, though some older ones are classics in their own right (check the editions available).
- Look for a dual-language edition of poetry. Poetry loses most in translation, so editions with the French and English on facing pages are the best choice.
- Use series with notes. Well-known paperback series offer introductions, notes and chronologies, which help a first-time reader.
- Compare two translations of a passage. It is the quickest way to see how much a translator decides.
Where to Read and Look
- The national library. The Bibliothèque nationale de France offers a large digital library called Gallica, with scanned books and manuscripts (check what is available).
- Free texts. Many older French works exist in free online editions, in the original and in older translations.
- Libraries and bookshops. Local libraries usually hold the main translations.
- Literary museums and houses. Several authors' homes are open to visitors in France, such as the house of Victor Hugo in Paris (check the details).
Exercises
In three sentences, explain why French literature can count as a window on French culture. Use at least two points from this chapter.
Sort these into record, legend or memory: (a) the Académie française was founded in 1635; (b) Marie Antoinette told the poor to eat cake; (c) your recollection of a French book you read at school.
Choose a famous quotation you believe comes from a French writer. Write down who said it, when and in which work, then check each against a reliable source and note any corrections.
Quick Reference
- Why it matters: writers as public figures; a literary prize season; the study of set texts
- Académie française: founded in 1635; forty members; a dictionary; advisory authority
- Course shape: medieval to the Enlightenment, the nineteenth-century novel, poetry, the twentieth century, and a capstone
- Scope: France-centred; Francophone voices mainly in Chapter 10
- The cake line: a legend; the sentence is older than Marie Antoinette's time in France
- Handling sources: separate record, legend and memory
- Translations: recent for novels, dual-language for poetry
Next chapter: Medieval Voices, which looks at the Chanson de Roland, courtly love and the first French poets.