Best French Literature - theory and examples
Explore the best French literature with expert theory and classic examples. Discover must-read books and key concepts that define France's rich literary heritage.
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Penguin Island
by Anatole France
Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault; 1844-1924. Member of the Académie Française. Awarded the Nobel Price for Literature in 1921. Penguin Island (1908) has been called "the best social satire ever written" (Toni Ungerer). The story takes place in Antarctica, where a fictional penguin population mirrors the foibles of human beings. With the devil's help, a missionary arrives in Antartica and baptizes the local penguins. With God's help, he then turns them into human beings. As a result, the penguins must now try to figure out how to live together and create a civilization. They experience their own barbaric Ancient Times and Middle Ages, and in their efforts to create a modern age, they undergo social conflicts and devastating wars. Written in the spirit of rationalism and enlightenment,Penguin Island is a wickedly funny, incisive portrait of religious fanatacism.
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The Fat and the Thin
by Emile Zola
Zola presents a study of the teeming life which surrounds the great central markets of Paris. The heroine is Lisa Quenu, a daughter of Antoine Macquart, who has become prosperous and increasingly selfish. The book contains vivid pictures of the markets, bursting with the food of a great city, and of the vast population which lives by handling and distributing it.
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The Man Who Laughs
by Victor Hugo
VICTOR HUGO'S long and chequered life (1802-85) was filled with experiences of the most diverse character - literature and politics, the court and the street, parliament and the theatre, labour, struggles, disappointments, exile and triumphs. --- In 1855 he began a 15-year-long exile on the island of Guernsey, where he completed, among others, his longest and most famous work, Les Misérables (1862), and also The Man Who Laughs (L'Homme qui rit; 1869), also known as "By Order of the King", a historic novel with fictional characters, set in England 1688-1705. --- .it will be seen that, here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing could be more happily imagined. than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression; and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" ---Robert Louis Stevenson
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The Fortune of the Rougons
by Emile Zola
This is the initial volume of the Rougon-Macquart series. Though it was by no means Zola's first essay in fiction, it was undoubtedly his first great bid for genuine literary fame, and the foundation of what must necessarily be regarded as his life-work.
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A Love Episode
by Émile Zola
Rougon-Macquart, volume 8: There can be no doubt in the mind of the judicial critic that in the pages of "A Love Episode" ("Une page d'amour") the reader finds more of the poetical, more of the delicately artistic, more of the subtle emanation of creative and analytical genius, than in any other of Zola's works... In all literature there is nothing like the portrayal of the punishment of Helene Grandjean. Helene and little Jeanne are reversions of type. The old "neurosis," seen in earlier bran-ches of the family, reappears in these characters. Readers of the series will know where it began. Poor little Jeanne, most pathetic of creations, is a study in abnormal jealousy, a jealousy which seems to be clairvoyant, full of supernatural intuitions, turning everything to suspicion, a jealousy which blights and kills. Could the memory of those weeks of anguish fade from Helene's soul? This dying of a broken heart is not merely the figment of a poet's fancy. It has happened in real life. The coming of death, save in the case of the very aged, seems, nearly always, brutally cruel, at least to those friends who survive. (C. C. Starkweather)
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Abbé Mouret's Transgression
by Emile Zola
Serge Mouret, the younger son of Francois Mouret (see La Conquete de Plassans), was ordained to the priesthood and appointed Cure of Les Artaud, a squalid village in Provence, to whose degenerate inhabitants he ministered with small encouragement. He had inherited the family taint of the Rougon-Macquarts, which in him took the same form as in the case of his mother-a morbid religious enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. Brain fever followed, and bodily recovery left the priest without a mental past. Dr. Pascal Rougon, his uncle, hoping to save his reason, removed him from his accustomed surroundings and left him at the Paradou, the neglected demesne of a ruined mansion-house near Les Artaud, where he was nursed by Albine, niece of the caretaker. The Abb fell in love with Albine, and, oblivious of his vows, broke them... (J. G. Patterson)
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The Dream
by Émile Zola
Set against the background of a town in Northern France, this novel tells the story of a love idyll between a poor embroideress and the son of a wealthy aristocratic family.
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Fruitfulness
by Emile Zola
This volume is the first of a series of four works in which Emile Zola proposed to embody what he considered to be the four cardinal principles of human life. "Work, Truth," and "Justice" were to follow, but he died before completing the final title.(Classic Literature)
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Maitre Cornelius
by Honore de Balzac
Balzac's famous medieval love story, in which he turns King Louis XI of France into a detective.
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History of a Crime (the Testimony of an Eye-Witness)
by Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo's documentary historical novel History of a Crime is an impassioned recording of the December 1852 coup d' tat that brought the usurper he called "Napol on le petit" to power, and sent Hugo into an eighteen year exile. The work was written in the few months following Hugo's flight, but only published in 1877, when Hugo feared a similar takeover by Mar chal Mac-Mahon, who had threatened the dissolution of the republican-dominated Chambre des d put s. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873) was elected President (December 20, 1848- December 2, 1852) of the Second Republic of France and subsequently accepted the title of the Emperor (December 2, 1852- September 4, 1870), reigning as Napol on III.
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Mobile
by Michel Butor
Considered by many to be his greatest book, Michel Butor's "Mobile" is the result of the six months the author spent traveling across America. The text is composed from a wide range of materials, including city names, road signs, advertising slogans, catalog listings, newspaper accounts of the 1893 World's Fair, Native American writings, and the history of the Freedomland theme park. Butor weaves bits and pieces from these diverse sources into a collage resembling an abstract painting (the book is dedicated to Jackson Pollock) or a patchwork quilt that by turns is both humorous and quite disturbing. This travelogue captures--in both a textual and visual way--the energy and contradictions of American life and history.
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Le petit prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Eventyrfortælling om forfatterens møde med den lille prins fra en fjern planet
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Louise de la Vallière
by Alexandre Dumas
"It is early summer, 1661, and the royal court of France is in turmoil. Can it be true that the King is in love with the Duchess d'Orleans? Or has his eye been caught by the sweet and gentle Louise de la Valliere? No one is more anxious to know the answer than Raoul, son of Athos, who loves Louise more than life itself. Behind the scenes, dark intrigues are afoot. Louis XIV is intent on making himself absolute master of France. Imminent crisis shakes the now aging Musketeers and d'Artagnan out of their complacent retirement, but is the cause just?"--Publisher description
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The Mysteries of Marseille
by Émile Zola
Published in 1867, "The Mysteries of Marseille" recounts the love of Philippe Cayol, a poor, untitled republican, and of young Blanche de Cazalis, the niece of De Cazalis. Philippe's brother devotes himself to protecting the two lovers and the child Blanche gives birth to before entering a convent.
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Ninety-Three
by Victor Hugo
Ninety-Three is a historical novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at that date (1793) laid before revolutionary France: "Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill the sheep?" This question meets with one answer after another during the course of the book. --- The interest of the novel centres about revolutionary France; just as the plot is an abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force. And this has been done, not as it would have been before, by the cold and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealing with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men and maidens of customary romance. --- Ninety-Three is full of pregnant and splendid sayings. It is equal to anything that Victor Hugo has ever written. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
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Bug-Jargal (French Classics)
by Victor Hugo
"Bug-Jargal" (1826; first published as a short story in 1819) is an early novel by French writer Victor Hugo (1802-1885). It describes the friendship between the enslaved African prince Bug-Jargal and Leopold D'Auverney, a French military officer, during the slave revolt in Santo Domingo of August, 1791, that would eventually lead to the creation of the republic of Haiti in 1804. --- Bug-Jargal, black slave and son of a king, is a man "of the noblest moral and intellectual character, passionately in love with a white woman, yet tempering the wildest passion with the deepest respect... There is no reader of the tale, who can forget the entrancing interest of the scenes in the camp of the insurgent chief Biassou, or the death-struggle between Habibrah and D'Auverney, upon the brink of the cataract. The latter, in particular, is drawn with such intense force, that the reader seems almost to be a witness of the changing fortunes of the fight, and can hardly breathe freely till he comes to the close." (The Edinburgh Review)
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The Gods are Athirst (French Classics)
by Anatole France
Anatole France's novel The Gods are Athirst (Les Dieux ont soif, 1912) tells the story of the painter Evariste Gamelin, who developed into a fanatical Jacobin during the French Revolution at the beginning of the 90's in the 18th century. Filled with a sense of fairness and justice as a young man, he soon became a bloodthirsty judge, sending hundreds of people, including many innocent ones and even close friends, to the guillotine, until he himself became a victim of the historical developments.
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Germinie Lacerteux (French Classics)
by Edmond De Goncourt
In his will, Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896) left a bequest in honor of his brother Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870) to establish and support a French literary salon, the Academie Goncourt, and later the famous Prix Goncourt, an award that to this day remains France's most significant literary prize. --- The Goncourt brothers, who co-authored a series of novels on social themes, were among the founders of literary "Naturalism" in France. Emile Zola would emerge as this movement's most important representative in his cycle of novels "Les Rougon- Macquart". --- Among the novels co-written by the Goncourt brothers, "Germinie Lacerteux" (1865) is especially noteworthy. The double-live of the novel's Parisian domestic servant, who is ground down and destroyed by the conditions she lives in, but who for decades keeps these conditions hidden from her employer, continues to captivate book-lovers in France and the rest of the world to this day.
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The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
by Anatole France
Sylvestre Bonnard, an elderly and highly esteemed scholar, encounters unexpected problems when he embarks upon a search for an ancient ecclesiastical literary document that takes him from Paris to Sicily and then into his own life history. For the sake of justice and love, he ends up committing acts that at best are of doubtful legality. --- With "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard," Anatole France (1844-1924) wrote a novel that is both clever and wise and in the manner of the great masters of literary style - a book that is full of suspense from beginning to end.
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Strait is the Gate
by André Gide
"Strait is the Gate", first published in 1909 in France as "La Porte etroite", is a novel about the failure of love in the face of the narrowness of the moral philosophy of Protestantism. --- André Gide (1869 - 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career spanned from the symbolist movement to the advent of anticolonialism in between the two World Wars. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, without at the same time betraying one's values... --- "For Gide was very different from the picture most people had of him. He was the very reverse of an aesthete, and, as a writer, had nothing in common with the doctrine of art for art's sake. He was a man deeply involved in a specific struggle, a specific fight, who never wrote a line which he did not think was of service to the cause he had at heart." (Francois Mauriac)
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Prometheus Illbound
by André Gide
The book "Prometheus Illbound" is one of the most characteristic books of Andre Gide: a work of pure intelectual fantasy, where the subtle brain of the author has full play. It is the expression of the humorous side of a mind which must be ranked among the greatest of the world's literature. "The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea," says Gide in the epilogue of "Prometheus Illbound". This is really the explanation of the whole book and of many other books of Gide. --- Andre Paul Guillaume Gide (1869-1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. His other works include: "Les Caves du Vatican" ("Lafcadio's Adventures"), "Les Nourritures Terrestres" ("Fruits of the Earth"), "La Porte Etroite" ("Strait is the Gate"), "L'Immoraliste" ("The Immoralist") and many others.
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Ursula (Ursule Mirouet)
by Honoré de Balzac
"Ursula" (original French title "Ursule Mirouet," 1842) forms one part of "Scenes from Provincial Life," a series of novels-whose other major work is "Eugenie Grandet"-examining manners and morals in the French provinces. --- Among all the novels of Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), none depicts so penetratingly the small-mindedness, avarice, and envy of the provincial lower middle classes. In "Ursula", no limitations based on morality or decency will hold these people back in their effort to acquire wealth and influence. --- Along with Stendhal, Balzac is the most important French novelist of the first half of the nineteenth century, and a founder of the realistic novel in Europe. His principal work is the unfinished cycle "The Human Comedy" (French: "La Comedie Humaine," which includes "Scenes from Provincial Life"), in which he attempted, in more than 80 volumes, to depict the society of his time in its entirety.
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Salammbo (Salambo. French Classics)
by Gustave Flaubert
The novel Salammbo (published in 1862) interweaves historical and fictional characters. The action takes place before and during the Mercenary Revolt, an uprising of mercenaries in the employ of Carthage in the 3rd century BC. --- An unfinished opera by Modest Mussorgsky, a silent film by Pierre Marodon and a play by Charles Ludlam are among the many adaptations of Flaubert's novel. --- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), famous French novelist, known for his endless search for "le mot juste" (the precise word); author of Madame Bovary (1857). In 1858, in order to gather material for Salammbo, Flaubert paid a visit to Carthage.
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Recollections of Oscar Wilde
by André Gide
Three men of literature - Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide, the French Ernest La Jeunesse and the German Franz Blei - present their "Recollections" of the last years of Oscar Wilde. this present little volume disclose some few facts from the man's life after leaving prison. The author of "De Profundis," after all the resolutions and conclusions in that document, reverted to his baser self, and died with his life fallen far below the altitude marked in the prison letters. That knowledge of a few is set forth in concrete, intimate manner in the pages of this book.
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Death
by Émile Zola
In the five stories in this volume, Zola describes the circumstances surrounding the deaths of five people from very different social contexts. The work is a literary study of the social differences and the value of life in France at the end of the 19th century.
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The Downfall (La Debacle. The Rougon-Macquart)
by Emile Zola
In "The Downfall" Zola tells the story of a terrific land-slide which overwhelmed the French Second Empire: It is a story of war, grim and terrible; of a struggle to the death between two great nations. In it the author has put much of his finest work, and the result is one of the masterpieces of literature. The hero is Jean Macquart, son of Antoine Macquart and brother of Gervaise. After the terrible death of his wife, as told in "La Terre" ("The Soil"), Jean enlisted for the second time in the army, and went through the campaign up to the battle of Sedan. After the capitulation he was made prisoner, and in escaping was wounded. When he returned to active service he took part in crushing the excesses of the Commune in Paris... The Downfall has been described as "a prose epic of modern war," and vast though the subject be, it is treated in a manner that is powerful, painful, and pathetic.
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The Fete at Coqueville (The Coqueville Spree)
by Emile Zola
Zola has rarely displayed the quality of humour, but it is present in the story called "The Fete at Coqueville" ("La Fete a Coqueville"). Coqueville is the name given to a very remote Norman fishing-village, set in a gorge of rocks, and almost inaccessible except from the sea. Here a sturdy population of some hundred and eighty souls, all sprung from two rival families, live in the condition of a tiny Verona, torn between contending interests. A ship laden with liqueurs is wrecked on the rocks outside, and one precious cask after another comes riding into Coqueville over the breakers. The villagers spend a glorious week of perfumed inebriety... A very amusingly and very picturesquely told story. With an essay by Edmund Gosse about "The Short Stories of Zola."
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The Flood (French Classics)
by Émile Zola
From the perspective of the family's patriarch, 70-year-old Louis Roubien, Zola provides the reader with emotionally charged and detailed descriptions of a large family's desperate struggle against the rising flood waters and of the destruction of their farm.
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His Excellency
by Émile Zola
His Excellency (French: Son Excellence Eugene Rougon) - From Zola's Rougon-Macquart Series. "Son Excellence Eugene Rougon is the one existing French novel which gives the reader a fair general idea of what occurred in political spheres at an important period of the Empire. It is a book for foreigners and particularly Englishmen to read with profit, for there are yet many among them who cherish the delusion that Napoléon III. was not only a good and true friend of England, but also a wise and beneficent ruler of France; and this, although his reign began with bloodshed and trickery, was prolonged by means of innume-rable subterfuges, and ended in woe, horror, and disgrace... There is, of course, some fiction in the book; but, again and again, page after page, I have found a simple record of fact, just deftly adapted to suit the requirements of the narrative. The history of the Second Empire is probably as familiar to me as it is to M. Zola himself-for, like him, I grew to manhood in its midst, with better opportunities, too, than he had of observing certain of its distinguishing features - and thus I have been able to identify innumerable incidents and allusions, and trace to their very source some of the most curious passages in the book. And it is for this reason, and by virtue of my own knowledge and experience, that I claim for His Excellency the merit of reflecting things as they really were in the earlier years of the Imperial régime." (Ernest Alfred Vizetelly)
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Little What's-His-Name (Le Petit Chose. French Classics)
by Alphonse Daudet
Little What's-His-Name (Le Petit Chose) - Alphonse Daudet's (1840-1897) first published, though not his first written, novel - appeared in 1868. The first part was composed in that Southern France it describes so charmingly; its first chapters form one of the most touching of autobiographies. In the second part Daudet has to tell of the struggles of an idealistic young poet in the selfish, devouring whirlpool of Paris. The whole book seems to bear the impress of the circumstances under which it was written. It is full of the milk of human kindness. --- When Daudet wrote Le Petit Chose in his early manhood, he succeeded in producing one of the most delightfully idyllic of his works, one that will probably continue to be read as long as any of the more powerful novels of his prime. It is one of the most perfect representations in literature of childhood's hopes and fears and of youth's aspirations and defeats. It is perfect because it is real. --- Enjoy to the full one of the purest and most exquisite stories of youthful experience to be found in French or in any other literature. (W. P. Trent)
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The Soil
by Émile Zola
Two of Zola's best known works "The Soil," also known as "The Earth," and "The Rougon-Macquart" are packaged together in this volume. This English translation of "The Soil" in 1888 aroused such an outcry that a prosecution followed, and the translator and publisher, Henry Vizetelly, was sentenced to three months' imprisonment.
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The Princess of Babylon (French Classics)
by Voltaire
"The Princess of Babylon" is a rarely published philosophical tale that Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) wrote in 1768. --- The story focuses on Amazan, a handsome, unknown shepherd, and Formosanta, the Princess of Babylon, whose love and jealousy drive them to travel the world. During their travels, Voltaire, by using metaphors and adventurous scenes, confronts the protagonists and the reader with basic Enlightenment values.
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The Joy of Life
by Émile Zola
Pauline Quenu, the daughter of shopkeepers in the Parisian business district Les Halles, is taken in by relatives on the coast of Normandy following the death of her parents. There, she is confronted with a gout-plagued host, his avaricious wife, and their lazy son, a morbid hypochondriac, whom she is expected to marry.
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An Antarctic Mystery (The Sphinx of the Ice Fields)
by Jules Verne
In the year 1839, Mr. Jeorling, whose geological and mineralogical research have led him to the Kerguelen sub-Antarctic archipelago in the Indian Ocean, sets sail on the "Halbrane", whose captain Len Guy is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe's novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". --- In that narrative, Poe recounts the adventures of Len Guy's brother William Guy who as captain of the "Jane" was persuaded by Arthur Gordon Pym to direct an expedition to the Antarctic. The "Jane" vanished on this voyage, though Pym was still able to pass along his diary to Edgar Allen Poe. --- Increasingly persuaded of the truthfulness of the tale, Mr. Jeorling encourages Captain Len Guy to pursue his brother - whom they believe may still be alive - into the Antarctic. --- Aside from the natural perils of the ocean, they must also face down a mutiny of the sailors on the "Halbrane".