A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  The bulk of women’s fiction, like writing generally, has remained faithful to the realistic, naturalistic tradition. It deals with relationships in both historical fiction and the novel of contemporary manners. But libertarian feminism has encouraged more open attitudes to sexuality, franker discussions of the couple and a new self-confidence in readers. Ecriture féminine, which means writing in other ways and about other things, has largely dismantled the barriers of the old misogyny.

  If authors acquired “Frenchness,” so did their readers. Before the advent of printing and for some time afterward, books were not read but heard. They were recited or declaimed in public gatherings. One of the side effects of the printing revolution was to make reading a personal experience. It was an early stage in the long, slow discovery of private life, that part of the self that is lived separately from the communal. But although no two readers have identical tastes, readers taken together constituted the new reading public, which, by creating demand, exerted a strong influence on the direction literature would take.

  The reading public is not monolithic but made up of constantly moving parts. It can be divided vertically, that is historically, in time, and horizontally, by constituencies: learned and popular, literary and scientific, and so on. The publishing trade uses broad-brush categories like the old divisions of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow and, more recently, mass-market, trade, library, digital, and others. A French specialty is the collection (Bibliothèque rose, Série noire, etc.), which targets specific interest groups, while le best seller (a term imported from the United States in 1948) applies to cookbooks or celebrity autobiographies, as well as the latest must-have fiction titles. “Literature,” a moveable concept regularly redefined, has a stubborn, but now relatively small place in the public’s affections.

  But demand does not define importance. A small minority of writers have always pleased themselves—the Sades and Rimbauds, pioneers and groundbreakers—but most have been obliged to play tunes called by their pipers: publishers, patrons, and most recently the paying public. The size of this public has always been difficult to assess, though attempts to quantify it have been made using literacy rates, the number of editions of a book, and the size of print runs. Such estimates must be treated with caution. Marx’s Das Kapital was not a publishing success, yet its influence has been enormous. On the other hand, large sales do not guarantee literary quality. For evidence of what readers thought of what they read, reception theorists look to private journals, letters, and the periodical press.

  In the sixteenth century, readers formed a small part of the population, for literacy and leisure were in short supply. Religious works and pamphlets written for and against the Reformation were printed in modest but significant numbers, and during the transition from hand-copied manuscripts to printed books, some medieval works were reissued by the new printer-publishers. But while twenty editions of the popular Roman de la rose appeared by 1540, the total number of copies circulating remained small. Before 1500, the average number of printed copies of a book was about two hundred. During the ancien régime, the figure rose in the seventeenth century from about 1,000 or 1,500 to the exceptional 4,000 copies of the first edition of Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Using another measure, the size of the cultured public of Paris in 1700 (of a population of about half a million) has been estimated by combining the total number of seats in the capital’s theaters: the figure was somewhere between ten thousand and seventeen thousand. Later estimates by Voltaire and others put the figure at about thirty thousand. These potential buyers did not all purchase literary works. Practical books, like Barrême’s Le livre des comptes faits (1682), a ready-reckoner, had huge print runs, but serious works of nonfiction averaged 600 to 800 copies, while plays and novels might run to between 1,500 and 2000. Sixteen editions of Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782) appeared within eighteen months of the first, and of these fifteen were pirated versions, a clear indication of its commercial popularity. By then, illegally or clandestinely published “seditious” books had a strong share of the market, a sure indication of the growing opposition to the ancien régime.

  At first, the reading public was socially homogenous, since it was limited to the educated elite. It was not restricted to the aristocracy (like Louis XIII, many nobles preferred hunting to books), for it had always included elements of the educated middle class. They sought information about distant lands and scientific discoveries, and in the writings of authors with distinctive personalities they discovered insights into other selves and knowledge of the world. By the early seventeenth century, readers gradually adopted the values of honnêteté, which stood for taste, discrimination, and conformity to established norms. Social pressures declared works of “low realism,” such as Scarron’s Roman comique (1651–57), which recounted the farcical adventures of a troupe of actors, to be vulgar and beneath the attention of the honnêtes gens. But by 1700, when the seat of political power was migrating from Versailles to Paris, the honnête homme had ceased to be a courtier and was mutating into an urban homme d’esprit and then into the philosophe who had emerged from the middle class through the merit that was urged as a better recommendation than birth.

  By the time the ancien régime collapsed in 1789, the lower reaches of the tiers état were also becoming enthusiastic consumers of journalism and buyers of books. Literacy rates had risen significantly, and in the late eighteenth century half the male population and under a third of women could sign the parish register. But there were probably still fewer than half a million French men and women capable of reading a book. Yet the poor had not been completely deprived. The early seventeenth century saw the appearance of the first printed volumes, illustrated by crude woodcuts and enclosed in distinctive blue paper covers, which were sold not in shops but by itinerant hawkers. The chapbooks of the Bibliothèque bleue were aimed at the barely literate and ranged from tales of chivalry and magic to almanacs, practical manuals, medical advice, and a high percentage of works of religious interest, mainly saints’ lives and devotional tracts. They were books without authors, the work of men associated with the printing trades at Troyes, Rouen, and Caen, where most were published. Although only about fifty new titles were added each year, old texts were regularly revised and printed in editions of two thousand to five thousand copies, with key volumes related to faith occasionally reaching forty thousand. By the Revolution, a million copies a year were being sold in country areas to impoverished nobles, small farmers, and village schoolmasters, who read them out loud to their families or classes. In towns, where literacy rates were higher and minimum educational attainments were required of apprentices, they were read by skilled workers, barber-surgeons, lawyer’s clerks, and servants in wealthy households, who constituted the cultural elite of the lower classes. Slowly, they graduated to the cabinets de lecture (subscription libraries), which, beginning in the 1760s, reached their height in the 1820s, when there were five hundred in Paris alone.

  The littérature de colportage continued to thrive in town and country. At its peak, in 1847, nine million chapbooks were sold by hawkers. But, faced with increasing government controls and competition from cheap books and newspapers, the Bibliothèque bleue finally ceased publication in 1863. By then, the new industrial working class constituted a growing market for books. Peasants and peasant life, the plight of the urban poor, and working-class heroes became fashionable subjects for poets and novelists. The roman feuilleton took over where the littérature (de colportage) ended, and both had a significant role in widening the scope of fiction. The promotion of the lower orders to a position of seriousness in literature is one way of defining the new realism of the midcentury, when the scene was already being set for the explosion of the mass culture of the twentieth century. In the 1880s, state primary schools opened their doors to all, and by 1900, 83 percent of French people could read and write. The literary public changed, too, as society developed more democratic forms and economic progress extended privileges
once reserved for the few to the many. Improvements in secondary education proceeded slowly, but after 1945 educational opportunities were widened further and cultural institutions made themselves more accessible, by Jean Vilar’s Théâtre national populaire movement, for example. One significant consequence was that the “high” art of the elite declined as the buying power of the mass of citizens rose.

  The technological printing revolution of the 1830s produced not only more books but more books of more kinds. With each new decade that passed, publishers catered to new subsets of the reading public, and authors supplied the new demand for practical information, knowledge, and rational discussion, but also for fiction aimed at targeted audiences: crime, romance, books for juveniles, science fiction, historical novels, adventure yarns, and so forth. The market—which directed the alliance between publishers and writers—has continued ever since, taking directions that have not always pleased the discerning reader. As the reading public expands, the status of literature may remain high, but the money is elsewhere, with reader-demand and a market that prefers meteors to masterpieces.

  For the development of literature cannot be understood by disregarding the great change brought about by the printing revolution and its lasting influence on the attitudes and practices of authors, publishers, and readers. A great disruption began with the arrival of the printing press in Paris in 1470. The first books were works of theology and erudite commentaries, mainly in Latin and Greek. The first best-selling author was Erasmus, who sparked the humanist revolution, which steadily abandoned the classical languages and adopted the vernacular. The Protestant Reformation in France was launched on the back of the French language.

  Progressive minds were delighted with Gutenberg’s invention and foresaw a time when the free circulation of knowledge would replace the empire of kings by a Europe-wide republic of letters that promised the communion of scholars and human cooperation. There were casualties, from the disappearance of the scrivener’s craft to the general undermining of Latin and Greek, both made necessary by the urge to make the new printed books available to as many people as possible. For Renaissance scholars, this was an article of faith. But it was also the creed of the printers who financed the revolution. The drive to make books accessible to many was a business requirement, and printers took steps to accelerate the process by developing practices that made reading print easier for their customers. Regional and local dialects were marginalized, and vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation were standardized. Paragraphs were introduced, as were the apostrophe and acute and grave accents, so that the way texts were displayed on the page made the meaning clear: the Greek New Testament published by Estienne in 1551 divided the chapters into numbered verses, a practice that became standard.

  But new kinds of writing were also generated. The first printed books maintained medieval literary categories, but in the decades after 1500, printing helped fix poetic meters, shaped the five-act structure of plays, and oversaw the birth of the novel. From the start, the French book trade was thus marked by the same centralizing tendency and elegance of style that were already expressive of the national temperament. The guiding hand of a series of authoritative scholar-printer-publishers, the most celebrated being the Estienne dynasty, which lasted until 1674, was instrumental in shaping the modern idea of literature.

  The authorities were wary, for they could not foresee where the new invention would lead. The unsupervised dissemination of knowledge and opinion was a potential threat to church and state, for Luther’s ideas would not have spread so far and so quickly without the printing press. Although François I welcomed printing, the theologians of the Sorbonne were less tolerant. To curb dissent, the Church of Rome instituted a chambre ardente in 1547 and two years later the Index librorum prohibitorum, the list of banned books that, regularly updated, would last until 1966. Subsequently, measures were taken to reduce the number of printers in Paris and the provinces and particularly to neutralize the importance of Lyons, which the Inquisition identified as a hotbed of Protestantism.

  In the seventeenth century, a combination of absolutist political theory and Gallican tendencies within the Church led to the eventual transfer to royal officials of supervision of the book trade, leaving the Sorbonne to root out theological unorthodoxy. Whereas England in the 1690s allowed books to be published and the courts to rule after publication on whether they should be banned or not, France opted for a system of prepublication censorship. A permission to print (privilège) was required, manuscripts being vetted by censors who grew in number throughout the eighteenth century. Controls on the number and activities of printers were tightened, and the publication of pirated or banned matter (mainly religious and political unorthodoxy and obscenity) was made a punishable offense. The effect was to make the producers of literature more cautious and to curb freedom of speech, which had once fired hopes of a new republic of letters. After 1750, however, the rules were applied with increasingly laxity as the censors themselves were won over to the aims of the Enlightenment.

  But authors and publishers could not afford to provoke the authorities. Consciously or unconsciously, most authors practiced a form of self-censorship (the avoidance or removal of potentially dangerous matter before submission to the authorities), thus blunting what they had to say. To escape detection, others resorted to subterfuge by publishing books under false names and false imprints in the provinces or in Holland. Either way, their freedom to speak their minds was modified by the constraints under which they worked. Some libraires lent themselves to such practices, but most could not afford to offend government, churches, schools, institutions, and conservative book-buyers on whose custom they depended. Many considered it safer to avoid controversial matters and restricted themselves to poetry, plays, fiction, and works by recognized authors.

  In August 1789, censorship was abolished by the National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, which stated that “la libre communication des pensées et des opinions est un des droits les plus précieux de l’homme; tout citoyen peut donc parler, écrire, imprimer librement.” The new freedom was short-lived, and restrictions—much more draconian than those imposed by the direction de la librairie during the ancien régime—were reintroduced and later confirmed and extended by Napoleon who silenced “seditious” authors, closed most newspapers (just four remained in 1811), and allowed only eight theaters to operate in the capital. In 1810, a third of the capital’s print shops were closed, and publishers were required to swear an oath of allegiance to state and emperor.

  Thereafter, official attitudes to censorship continued to follow the ebb and flow of politics. Liberal after a change of conservative regime, they turned repressive and were often a cause of the next upheaval. The limited freedom allowed by the Charter of 1814 was reduced in 1819; those controls were lifted after the Revolution of 1830 but reimposed in 1835, relaxed again after 1848, but restored by the repressive Second Empire, which prosecuted, among others, Baudelaire and Flaubert in 1857. It was not until 1881 that a law granting the freedom of the press ended the system of state censorship and made alleged offenses against the public interest a matter, not for the state, but for juries in open courts.

  From then on, except at times of national crisis, notably the Great War, the German occupation of France after 1940, and the Algerian War, state-directed censorship ceased, and the role of government was limited to enforcing laws concerning public morality, personal privacy, and national security. The occasional prosecutions for obscenity culminated in 1957 with a high-profile action that ended in a fine for the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert for issuing a scholarly edition of Sade. The trial opened a debate that was ended not by argument but by the permissive climate of the 1960s, and writers thereafter were rarely troubled, though anti-obscenity curbs were reinstated for a time in the 1970s. The huge expansion of the book trade has made it more difficult to keep a rein on what appears in print. The advent of the Internet has raised a question over what exactly constitutes �
�publication” and throws doubts on the ability of governments to enforce infringements of laws covering sedition, obscenity, or slander, which have come to loom less large than the new targets of terrorism, industrial espionage, and child abuse.

  Although prepublication censorship has been long since abandoned, the literary consciousness still harbors suspicions of authority. For generations, injustice and oppression have been associated with the Church’s hold on moral absolutes and the dangers of the Caesarism that motivated Napoléon, Louis-Napoléon, General Boulanger, and, so his critics say, General de Gaulle. The idealistic goals of 1789 have yet to be fully attained, and the autocratic exercise of power of the Terror of 1794 still touches nerves. As a consequence, the default position of progressive authors in the twentieth century has been contestation, of which Sade has been elected the patron saint. Since 1945, with a few exceptions like the “Hussards” of the 1950s or Raymond Picard’s rejection in 1965 of the super-liberal New Criticism as a Nouvelle imposture, the center of gravity of intellectuals and serious writers has been left of center. Anticapitalist, anti-American, antiglobalist attitudes have replaced the traditional target since the time of Louis-Philippe: the bourgeoisie. Such views are held by a sufficient section of the reading public for the book trade to maintain its now centuries-old role of midwife to literature.