French Literature

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.

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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.

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