The context and nature of French medieval literature

Whatever Classical literature survived the upheavals of the early Middle Ages was preserved, along
with pious Latin works, in monastic libraries. By encouraging scholars and writers, Charlemagne had
increased the Latin heritage available to educated vernacular authors of later centuries. He also left
his image as a great warrior-emperor to stimulate the legend-making process that generated the Old
French epic. There one finds exemplified the feudal ideal, evolved by the Franks, that was the means
of establishing a hierarchy of dependency and, thereby, a cohesiveness that would lead to a national
identity. The warrior’s code of morality, founded on loyalty to the monarch and on the bond between
brother knights, bolstered the entire political system. As stability increased under the Capetians,
windows opened onto other cultures and elements: that of the Arabs in Spain and, with the Crusades,
the East; the advanced Occitan civilization; and the legends of Celtic Britain. The Roman Catholic
church grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century its schools were flourishing, training
generations of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became less embattled, and the nobility became
more leisured and sophisticated. The machismo of the epics was tempered by the social graces of
courtoisie: generosity, modesty, and consideration for others, especially the weak and distressed, and
by a concept of love that did not view it as a weakness in a knight but as an inspiration consistent with
chivalry.

By the 13th century an additional source of patronage for writers and performers was the bourgeoisie
of the developing towns. New genres emerged, and, as literacy increased, prose found favour
alongside verse. Much of the literature of the time is enlivened by a rather irreverent spirit and a
sometimes cynical realism, yet it also possesses a countercurrent of deep spirituality. In the 14th and
15th centuries France was ravaged by war, plague, and famine. Along with a preoccupation in
literature with death and damnation, there appeared a contrasting refinement of expression and
sentiment bred of nostalgia for the courtly, chivalric ideal. At the same time a new humanistic
learning anticipated the coming Renaissance.

Before 1200 almost all French “literature” had been composed as verse and had been communicated
orally to its public. The jongleurs, professional minstrels, traveled and performed their extensive
repertoires, which ranged from epics to the lives of saints (the lengthy romances were not designed
for memorization), sometimes using mime and musical accompaniment. Seeking an immediate
impact, most poets made their poems strikingly visual in character, more dramatic than reflective,
and revealed psychology and motives through action and gesture. Verbal formulas and clichés were
used by the better poets as an effective narrative shorthand, especially in the epic. Such oral
techniques left their mark throughout the period.

Lyric poetry to the 13th century

The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as amour courtois,
or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents were the Occitan
troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval Occitan, of whom
some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and female nobles. The
troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men. On the contrary, the
enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all, only after the suitor had
served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service to his lord and where
spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic, unsatisfied love. This is the
main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been sought in Arabic poetry, the writings
of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five
or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used
various other forms, from dawn songs to satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted.
Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine (see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed
obscenity with his courtly sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de
Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel, who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and
poet Bertran de Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.

The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours exerted by the
mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s
granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of Henry II). The troubadours’
verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de Troyes (two of whose songs are
extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of
Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).

More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a group from
Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from Champagne and is often
compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even autobiographical mode
(though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of subjects: his own pitiful
circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the religious orders, the need to
support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at clerical corruption.

Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart

Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of the
world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among lawyers,
doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic literature and,
as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as particular, corrective
satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the fabliaux. These fairly short verse
tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—most of which are anonymous,
though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from situations extending from the obscene to
the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and
counterdeceptions. They are played out in all classes of society but predominantly among the
bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals, inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic
in tone, they paint instructive pictures of everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in
importance to the farces, bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer
and Giovanni Boccaccio.

Inspired partly by the popular animal fable, partly by the Latin satire of monastic life Ysengrimus
(1152; Eng. trans. Ysengrimus), the collection of ribald comic tales known as the Roman de Renart
(Renard the Fox) began to circulate in the late 12th century, chronicling the rivalry of Renart the Fox
and the wolf Isengrin, and the lively and largely scandalous goings-on in the animal kingdom ruled by
Noble the Lion. By the 14th century about 30 branches existed, forming a veritable beast epic. Full of
close social observation, they exude the earthy humour of the fabliaux; but, particularly in some of
the later branches, this is sharpened into true satire directed against abuses in church and state, with
the friars and rapacious nobility as prime targets.

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.

Famous pieces of French Literature

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France.
A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers
is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean—a man unjustly
imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously
malevolent police detective Javert—Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows
a work of art to transcend its genre.

Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Victor Hugo

This extraordinary historical novel, set in Medieval Paris under the twin towers of its greatest
structure and supreme symbol, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, is the haunting drama of Quasimodo,
the hunchback; Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the specter of
his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work that gives full play to
Victor Hugo’s brilliant historical imagination and his remarkable powers of description.

Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the
French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his
own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behaviour through a series of
extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth and further
adventures.

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas’s most famous tale— and possibly the most famous historical novel of all
time— in a handsome hardcover volume. This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do,
set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings,
queens, cavaliers, and criminals in a whirl of adventure, espionage, conspiracy, murder, vengeance,
love, scandal, and suspense. Dumas transforms minor historical figures into larger- than-life
characters: the Comte d’Artagnan, an impetuous young man in pursuit of glory; the beguilingly evil
seductress “Milady”; the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu; the weak King Louis XIII and his
unhappy queen—and, of course, the three musketeers themselves, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis,
whose motto “all for one, one for all” has come to epitomize devoted friendship. With a plot that
delivers stolen diamonds, masked balls, purloined letters, and, of course, great bouts of swordplay,
The Three Musketeers is eternally entertaining.