A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  But if France has exported French taste and values to the world, so French cultural ambitions have been both challenged and enriched by foreign influences. The example of Italy in the sixteenth century, Spain in the seventeenth, and Britain in the eighteenth enthused French minds. After 1789, the reaction against ancien régime values led to a relaxation of classical strictness. Yet the democratic forces released by nineteenth-century Romanticism and positivism never completely overlaid French formalism, which still remains the default position of French public life and culture. Further contact with foreign influences—English, German, and, in the twentieth century, the United States—has diluted but not overlaid the ideals of clear thinking and clear expression, though the impact of commercialism and the information culture have in recent times provided a serious challenge to old ways.

  The second requirement for a national literature was a national language. In 1500, many dialects, patois, and distinct languages like Breton or Occitan were spoken in France. But linguistic unification was implicit in the process of centralization: to be fully “France,” the nation needed to speak a common language, which was to be le français de Paris. The policy was officially confirmed in 1539 by François I in the Ordonnances de Villers-Cotterêts, which decreed that henceforth all court proceedings throughout the kingdom would be recorded “en langage maternel François et non autrement.” In 1549, Joachim du Bellay published La défense et illustration de la langue française, which made the case for French, then regarded by scholars as an inferior mode of expression, to be recognized as a proper vehicle for poetry. Enriched by modern technical terms and a vocabulary renewed by interpenetration with Greek and Latin, French could compete with the languages of the ancient world and modern Italy. Though in the 1580s, Montaigne considered French to be still a fragile tongue, literary French was accepted by the court, the ultimate source of preferment and honors. In 1635, the newly founded French Academy was charged with producing a dictionary that would fix the meaning of words for all to understand. Boileau endorsed the new linguistic rules, which made written and spoken expression precise, orderly, and elegant. By the 1780s, Rivarol could proclaim the victory of la clarté française.

  The claim was both partial and premature. The vast majority of the king’s subjects—and in due course the children of the French Revolution—were illiterate and strangers to books. In 1794, the Abbé Grégoire put the number of citizens who spoke no French at six million, about a quarter of the population. Parisians traveling through the provinces continued to encounter communication problems. In the nineteenth century, railways, cheap newspapers, and the introduction of universal primary education after 1880 accelerated the spread of French. Yet as late as 1900, interpreters were still available in Norman law courts to defendants with little or no French. By then, the Third Republic’s elementary schools were actively discouraging the use of local “jargons” that prevented citizens from participating fully in the life of the republic and impeded progress. This policy was resisted by regionalists at the time (the defense of Provençal had already been undertaken by the poet Mistral) and subsequently criticized as cultural vandalism. Its objective was achieved, however, and literacy rates rose. In 1827, Victor Hugo had sworn, as he later expressed it, to jam “a red bonnet on the old dictionary.” But the spread of primary education would prove, in due course, a more effective means of making French accessible to all.

  In practice, however, la clarté remained the preserve of the educated elite. Le beau parler is still valued, but the percentage of nonstandard French remains high among the general population, and France continues to possess a richer tilth of argot than most European languages. The old exclusiveness has long since been weakened by the rise of democracy, a process that quickened in the twentieth century, and particularly after 1945. The authority of Academy-authorized French has been challenged by the adoption by both popular and serious writers of words, coinages, expressions, and relaxed grammar drawn from regional, American, popular, youth, and immigrant cultures. Du Bellay would have been pleased, but not Boileau.

  The spread of literacy and the liberalization of culture have undermined the status of “official” French for writers inside France and in francophone countries as well. For them, French has a particular status not only as an official language of international organizations but also as the language of revolution, the rights of man, freedom, and equality. As such it is now used as the medium of communication between francophone nations in international negotiations, even those in which France has no interest and at which no French officials are present. On the other hand, the growing confidence of some francophone cultures has led writers to hesitate about whether to continue using French or revert to vernacular languages. Some, notably in Quebec, would reject the French Academy’s prescriptive authority and adopt a freer, less metropolitan vehicle for their work. The formality of French at home and abroad has thus been undermined, and new linguistic registers have become available. It is also the case that different categories of writing call for different modes of expression, so that authors’ choices are often made for them.

  For authors are both individuals and members of a society that shapes their outlook according to their place in it. They are products of religion, education, language, economic system, and political regime and, within their individualism, share common traits. In France, few escape the distinctive respect for reason, abstraction and generalization; elegance of style and form; and, not least, the judgments of Paris. Aspiring authors everywhere gravitate toward capital cities in search of fame and fortune. But la montée à Paris means aiming at the literary center, being caught up in movements, coteries, and cénacles that have leaders, followers, and, inevitably, breakaway renegades. French authors pride themselves on their independence, yet they also treasure collective programs that are cultural extensions of the centralizing principle. They issue arts poétiques and manifestoes and expel dissidents.

  There were no authors as such in the Middle Ages. Writings were almost invariably the product of many hands, not least of copyists and performers. Names attached to a work designated personas (Marie de France, for example) rather than persons. Later in the period authors were sometimes named, but they remain shadowy figures for the most part. Relatively little is known about even the most celebrated of them, François Villon.

  Since there was no significant market for manuscripts, authors depended for their living on employment in Church or royal and ducal courts. After 1500, the printing revolution was too modest in scope to pay a living wage, and writing was almost exclusively an occupation for persons of leisure and, increasingly, of both sexes. Marguerite de Navarre, who was sister to François I, and Rabelais, a doctor of medicine, did not depend on their sales. Montaigne, in his château, was keen not to be mistaken for an author who wrote for money.

  After 1600, the theater began offering playwrights modest returns that eventually enabled a few, like Corneille or Molière, to pay their way. But the number of theatergoers was small and book-buyers too few to make writing a viable profession. Moreover, authors’ copyrights were unprotected by law, a situation from which only publishers benefited. Authors continued to look to the court and Church for sinecures and sought the private patronage of royal and aristocratic personages. In this they were supported by the crown, which saw the advantage to national prestige of a thriving literary culture. By the 1630s, writers were appearing in a more favorable light, and rewards were given to those who served the right causes. A generation later, Louis XIV regarded the artist as a jewel in his crown and was suitably generous to those who blew his trumpet for him. Aristocrats and a new breed of financiers anxious to vivre noblement followed the royal example, and the literary salons turned approved authors into celebrities. The award of royal pensions and gratifications was institutionalized in 1663 and, together with an increase in court appointments (as secretary, royal historiographer, and so on), they supplemented earnings from authorship but also enhanced authorship itself. E
ven so, the distinction between the rich man who wrote for his own amusement and the author who did it for a living was strictly maintained. Racine was ennobled, but he remained a superior kind of domestic servant. Boileau, the voice of classicism, was thrashed by footpads hired by his betters, whom he had displeased.

  But patronage ran the risk of creating a literature written to order, designed to please—and not offend—a paymaster. Royal patronage posed an even greater threat, that of making literature an arm of government. Soon, strengthening its grip on pens, the state set in place an administrative machinery that vetted manuscripts, limited the number of authorized printers, and practiced strict censorship. After 1718, a license to print was required, unlicensed books were burned, and authors and publishers faced stiff penalties. In the event, few were seriously inconvenienced, though Voltaire and Rousseau fled the country to avoid arrest and Diderot was briefly jailed. But the threat of retribution made many uneasy, so that self-censorship was added to that practiced by official censors, whose numbers grew as the publishing industry expanded. With the rise of a middle class eager for information, culture, and entertainment, there were new opportunities for writers who became journalists and produced dictionaries, encyclopedias, and compilations of many sorts. Some also looked to the theater, where a run of fifteen performances could bring a round sum. But no one before 1750, and few after that date, lived by his or her pen. Even Voltaire’s fortune came from shrewd investments, not from his writings.

  Yet by the 1770s, writers were finding a new outlet for their wares: the book-buying public. The old dependency on patronage was replaced by the money to be earned from the prospering book trade, which could sustain the first professional authors. Nevertheless, authors were still vulnerable to the sharp practice of publishers and exposed to the depredations of pirates at home and abroad. The rights of authors were asserted by the Revolution in 1793 and were restated at intervals over the next century. But a fair system of royalty payments had to wait until the 1880s, and not until 1886 did the Berne copyright convention protect French authors against international piracy.

  But by then, the day of the professional writer had arrived. At the start of the nineteenth century, more than two thousand copies were rarely printed of works of fiction, though popular novelists like Pigault-Lebrun and dramatists like Pixéricourt were made rich by their overactive pens. By the 1840s, technological advances in the printing trades and the growth of the reading public hiked print runs for reasonably successful novels to five thousand, and sales of poetry and theater tickets were more than healthy. But the largest rewards went to the roman feuilleton of Eugène Sue or Dumas père when the new age of cheap newspapers earned brand-loyalty for their titles by publishing sensational serials. The audience for mainstream boulevard theater grew rapidly after the 1860s, and in 1897, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac ran for eighteen months at the Porte-Saint Martin. Fiction was now routinely first published in newspapers before being reissued in volume form, the most popular titles in editions of thirty thousand copies. Cheap collections, vigorously promoted, gave financial independence to the growing number of professional authors who set out to please literature’s new master: the paying public.

  Serious writers fared less well—Balzac was famously short of money—and many looked first to court patronage, revived by Napoleon, and later to government ministries that offered small pensions, minor posts, and even sinecures to suitable candidates. Others in the second half of the century supplemented their incomes with journalism. The rise of the popular press gave them opportunities to sell stories, poems, and articles and make their names. Both Zola and Maupassant graduated to literature through journalism.

  There were, however, other rewards in the form of status. In the seventeenth century, authors pleased but also instructed according to classical precept. They provided lessons in private and public virtues and were leaders of taste and ideas. During the Enlightenment, their stock rose. Reason gave them a new authority to advise monarchs, devise constitutions, and direct society; they were visionaries with a crusading zeal to shape the future of civilization. Romantics like Musset, who accused the Enlightenment of depriving humankind of its certainties without replacing them with new values, denounced reason and set about teaching people to think with their feelings and imagination. One result was to generate sympathy for the poor and support for the new socialist principles. Hugo is the clearest example of the poet-as-prophet, but the invasion of literature by progressive, political, liberal ideas was widespread. Some, like Chateaubriand or Lamartine, held high political office. Poets publicized causes and initiated practical, sometimes revolutionary action. But there were also outsiderly artists who rejected the world, convention, and restrictive bourgeois values, and some, like Rimbaud or Mallarmé, adopted “difficult” modes of expression that most readers found obscure. The Jules Vernes and Paul Févals wrote for money or fame or both. But in growing numbers, socially conscious, positivist-minded authors served progress and science and sought to move the world on from the order defined by monarchism and the Church. By the 1890s, novelists in particular were beginning to fill the ranks of what, after 1898, would be called “intellectuals.” Free of patronage, authors were no longer content to be judged by public opinion: they set out to shape it. Henceforward, the contestatory role of literature would expand until it grew into a form of extraparliamentary opposition to established power.

  Since 1900, writing has been a full-time occupation for only a small minority, despite the proliferation of literary prizes and occasional government attempts to improve copyright arrangements or set up schemes to support struggling authors. In 1968, a publishers’ report set the number of active authors in France at forty thousand, of which only a handful lived by their pens. Those who venture into film or television may fare better, and star performers in popular fictional genres are richly rewarded. But writing as a career remains precarious and unpredictable, and in particular the status of the literary author has declined dramatically. Poets, playwrights, and novelists once commanded respect as teachers, sages, and prophets. But their role has been overtaken by the experimental and human sciences that explain human nature in quantifiable terms, just as specialists in many disciplines—sociology, politics, economics, psychiatry—account with greater authority for the tensions within the self and the ways the self is shaped by modern urban environments. In the 1960s, the New Criticism claimed that books were written by the zeitgeist, the socioeconomic forces of which authors were the unwitting mouthpieces. Playwrights were demoted by the création collective movement for political reasons, and writers were shackled to large, profit-driven publishing corporations that discouraged experiment and, against new writing, backed winning formulas. If writing had become a trade, publishing was a production line.

  Authors have largely stopped standing above their readers, whose uncertainties they share. One exception is provided by those who set out to raise and redirect the consciousness of women. In the Middle Ages, the idealization of women promoted by courtly love and the code of chivalry competed with the traditional gross satire of the malices des femmes. During the first of many querelles des femmes sparked by the Le roman de la rose in the thirteenth century, Christine de Pizan defended the right of women to be heard in terms echoed in the 1540s, as part of the querelle des amyes, by Louise Labé, who asserted that they were capable of competing with men in artistic endeavors. Cultivated women writers emerged around the Pléiade, and the association between women and the arts was asserted by aristocratic ladies who played a central role in the nation’s cultural life until the end of the ancien régime. They helped to define taste and consolidate classicism in the seventeenth century; in the eighteenth, the Enlightenment found a home in their salons, which offered a platform for the philosophes and intellectual debate. But women were not simply literary impresarios; they were poets, letter writers, and participants in the wider intellectual conversation. They also ceased to be the inspiration of poets and the reward of
the warrior. Mlle de Scudéry wrested the long, mythological romance from the heroic male tradition and turned it inward, to sentiment. In her wake, Mme de Lafayette and Mme de Villedieu developed the short nouvelle, which would steer fiction toward the psychology of character in contemporary situations. By the 1690s, women were writing history and short tales and took part in the religious debate over quietism and the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. Many achieved eminence. After 1700, Mme Dacier was France’s most famous Hellenist, and by the 1740s, Voltaire’s mistress, Mme du Châtelet, had become widely respected as a mathematician. Mme de Staal-Launay’s Mémoires (1755) pioneered the interest in the private lives of individuals and, after 1750, among the many novelists of both sexes, Mme Riccoboni’s elegant character studies stood out by their quality and insight. At a time when literature was starting to move out of the aristocratic sphere and express the concerns of the middle class—the noble salon hostesses of the first half of the eighteenth century became grandes bourgeoises in the second—women authors also began to turn to the paying public: Mme du Châtelet was a marquise, but Mme Riccoboni was an actress before trying to live by her pen. During the Enlightenment, women carved out a space, both social and discursive, in philosophic circles, and their input as readers and authors, especially of novels, directed attention in special ways to forms of what the eighteenth century understood as “sensibility.” Their case for the right to be heard was stated many times, and they won male supporters. In 1772, Louis Thomas said that they were “slaves” in a patriarchal society, and Laclos believed it would take a “revolution” to make them free.

  The revolution he had in mind was not that of 1789, which granted rights to men but not to women. Women like Olympe de Gouges protested vociferously to no avail. The misogyny, which was even stronger during the Revolution than it had been during the ancien régime, was aggravated by Napoleon whose Civil Code (1806) restricted women to the same legal rights as those accorded to minors and mad persons. The same battle was rejoined in the 1830s by Flora Tristan and George Sand. But the progress made during the Revolution of 1848 was rolled back by the reactionary Second Empire. Meanwhile, from the queens of the cabinets de lecture of 1810 to the franker, racier writings of Gyp, Rachides, and Colette, women authors continued to advance against largely hostile public opinion. There were victories. In 1910, Marguerite Audoux, a beneficiary of the introduction of universal primary education, won the Prix Goncourt and gave working-class women a modern voice. Yet poetry and fiction, theater and the new medium of cinema remained predominantly male domains. Between the two world wars, no female writer won the Prix Goncourt. But after 1945, women writers emerged in force. Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras were major authors of the later twentieth century, which also felt the impact of literary intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva.