A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  But how is literature to be distinguished from mere words on paper? Dryden observed that “by criticism, as first instituted by Aristotle, was meant a standard of judging well.” Trying to decide what “judging well” means has been a central part of the French literary scene since the first arts poétiques appeared during the Renaissance. In practice, it has meant, and still means, judging by the yardstick of some external authority. Du Bellay’s denunciation of medieval and “Marotic” poetry was summary and polemical rather than doctrinaire, and Montaigne was an impressionistic critic, more in tune with Anglo-Saxon empiricism than the French love of abstract absolutes. But when literary life began to organize in the seventeenth century, criticism gradually turned into a separate discipline. Both authors and critics believed in the existence of an ideal of beauty and that the ancients had achieved it. The writings of Aristotle could be used to yield principles for the guidance of those who wished to excel once more. Identifying and applying those principles proved controversial, however, and disagreements led to high-profile disputes that in venom mimicked the bitter theological disagreements that were all too familiar. The “rules” of literature constituted a code of rigorous dogma that permitted only “regular” works to be set before the sophisticated public of honnêtes gens. By 1660, polemical querelles had defined the superiority of verse over prose; of the noble and heroic over the pastoral and the satirical; the “hierarchy of genres” (epic, tragedy, exalted forms of lyric poetry, and so on); and the three unities of time, place, and unity without which no play could possibly meet the full requirements of le bon goût. Imitation of the ancients was mandatory and good taste essential. Le goût was defined by bienséance (what is seemly) and by vraisemblance (what is true-seeming), both of which sanitized the most indecorous mythological subjects for the modern public.

  The result was a literature written largely to order, though this is not to belittle it: writing against constraints has always brought out the best in good writers. They mostly worked within the limits set by self-appointed arbiters of literary excellence and the requirements of the salons. But gradually a new voice asserted itself, that of literary journalism, aided by changes in public mood, which created a reaction against the pedants and purists (half of Molière’s plays do not respect the rules) and added l’art de plaire to the equation. It was not enough that literature should satisfy the mind: it was also required to please the heart.

  The Querelle des anciens et des modernes, which broke out in 1687, opened a clear divide between two opposing views. Against the traditionalists, the “moderns” argued that taste, being variable and arbitrary, is no basis on which to found valid literary principles. Reason, being universal and absolute, is to be preferred. The dogmatism of the “ancients” was overturned, and other progressive ideas followed: the relativism of taste and even the admission that posterity is the ultimate judge of literary merit. The consequence was that the old dogmatism, based on the authority of classical theorists, was replaced by a new dogmatism based on the authority of reason.

  But striving for the true, the good, and the beautiful, though they remained formal ideals, did not convince all neoclassical authors. Moreover, readers demanded more emotion and more imagination, horrid words for the classical theorists for whom they spelled disorder and chaos. There was a new emphasis on Horace’s utile dulci, the idea that the best works mix l’utile et l’agréable, the useful being interpreted first as intellectual (as in Voltaire’s Contes philosophiques) and later conferring on literature a moral and social vocation. But Rousseau’s influential novel La nouvelle Héloïse taught not only France but the whole of Europe the importance of sentiment. It was the beginning of the Romantics’ insistence that henceforth writers and readers should feel with their imaginations and think with their feelings.

  But classical ideals were not so easily jettisoned. They were revived during the Restoration, by which time the mantle of législateurs du Parnasse was being taken over by literary journalists who also argued about how books should be judged. The most influential of them, Sainte-Beuve, discarded monolithic standards of beauty and the sublime and argued that an objective assessment of the life and times of authors should be a factor in any evaluation of their work. For positivists, this was insufficiently rigorous, and they called for more scientific approaches to be adopted. Thus, Hippolyte Taine urged that books be regarded as the product of “la race, le milieu et le moment,” while a new generation of university academics devised a methodology that ensured “scientific objectivity” took precedence over personal and impressionistic responses. Critical editions, philology, classification, and bibliography provided the basis for authoritative analysis, a formula that dominated the institutional, academic approach, embodied by Gustave Lanson, until well after the Great War.

  In the meantime, writers and groups of writers were fighting battles of their own, adding another voice to the debate. After about 1820, a new age of “movements” and “schools” dawned that laid down new paths to follow. In the 1840s, to counter Romantic excesses, the art for art’s sake creed stressed the craft of writing, and then realism decided that the role of literature was to show the world as it is. The naturalists did not think realists went far enough, and symbolism thought both had gone too far. A Niagara of “isms” took the literati (but not the public, which found many of the experiments too “difficult”) to the Great War, when literature became understandably jingoistic. But after 1918, it was quickly enrolled under the banners of Freud and Marx, and the surrealists exploited dreams to generate mental states that would force readers to see the world in a different, “revolutionary” light.

  For some, the tail of criticism was wagging the dog of literature. Boileau had warned, “Le plaisir de la critique nous ôte celui d’être touché par les belles choses.” The thought that there was too much doctrine also alarmed Anatole France, who observed, “La critique est la dernière de toutes les formes de l’art; elle finira par absorber toutes les autres.” Literature had been saddled at various times with an educational role, a social conscience, a moral purpose, a civilizing mission, a satirical duty, an aesthetic vocation, and much else besides. But despite the protests, faintly heard, the mill of theory ground on. After 1945, existentialists used novels and plays to publicize the new duty of revolt and revolutionary resistance to fascism and the bourgeois order. Writers were required to “engage” with reality and “commit” to positive action.

  By 1960, a new generation of intellectuals began to see literature as the expression of collective forces operating beneath the level of consciousness. Drawing on a range of specialized social sciences—anthropology, linguistics, psychiatry, political ideology, economics—they set out a new agenda for analyzing literary products. The intentions of authors were declared irrelevant, and, since what they wrote is shaped and determined by the deep psyche and socioeconomic climate, it followed that books are written not by individuals but the zeitgeist. Phenomena were surfaces that disguised truth, and everything was a sign of something else. When properly deconstructed, literature was shown to be a force working through society, not a vehicle of the conscious expression of anything. When structuralism and deconstruction had run their course, postmodernists fled certainties and preferred boundaries, margins, and uncertainties. The ideas were new, but the mechanism was the same: a new absolutism had shown its hand, which remobilized the old centralizing tendencies that now, however, were not institutional, but Parisian.

  Many of these debates have been too rarefied to compete with the market concept of literature as entertainment aimed at the majority and instead suit professional writers for whom “literature” is a trade, perhaps a craft but no art. But literary authors have worked, as they always have, with or against the new “législateurs du Parnasse.” Generations of journalists, cultural institutions, schools, and movements have sought to set limits as rigorous in their own way as those once imposed by church and state. After a half-century of feverish reflection on the nature and purp
ose of literature, the flow of new, high-profile theories has, since 2000, slowed significantly. This is unlikely to be the end of the story, however. The centralizing principle is not dead, for it survives in the irrepressible glamour of the cultural elites who inhabit the capital where new ideas are forged and new fashions—the most enduring of all prescriptive influences—are promoted.

  But past performance cannot be regarded as a sure indicator of future trends. The history of French literature is by tradition marked out by convenient milestones, broadly corresponding to centuries: Renaissance, classicism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism. Thereafter, as the pace quickened after 1830, easy labeling proved unsuitable for the many new catechisms generated by individualism, corporatism, fragmentation, and diversity. Clearer ways of marshaling the characteristics of past centuries have been proposed. Thus, it might be more useful to speak of an initial phase of exploration and experimentation; an era of formal discipline; and then a period of contestation and progress that ended in the Revolution, which freed personal expression and widened democratic participation, which led to the creative turmoil of the late twentieth century. The implication of a remark made by Marcel Pagnol in 1930 was profound: more people, he said, had seen the films of Chaplin in two decades than all the plays of Molière in three hundred years.

  The division by centuries is a useful mnemonic, however, for centuries have their own weather. But it fails to bind the phases of the literature of France into an organic force that both directed and reflected human and social development. The Renaissance began the process of detaching humankind from its feudal deference to a divine creator whose laws were to be obeyed without question. In the seventeenth century, awareness of the self was revealed by Descartes, who showed that thinking defined human nature, that we are able to think about our thinking, and that rational thought is a credible tool for solving the mysteries of creation. The Enlightenment identified natural laws that governed individuals and societies, expressed faith in humankind’s ability to accept the implications of reason, and, through Rousseau, began to perceived new ways of preserving the self and improving its relationship with the group. More direct action was taken by the French Revolution, which simply jettisoned the religion, absolutist politics, and centuries of tradition and set about, with mixed success, applying natural laws and reason as a way of directing human affairs. Literary history not only tracks the way society has constantly reinvented itself on new principles; it also demonstrates that literature was itself subject to the same evolutionary processes that Montesquieu defined in 1734: human affairs are not directed by Providence but by action and reaction. Literary history, like any other kind of history, is a chain of causes and effects, the dominant view of one age being the effect of the previous age and the cause of the next. It is dependent on political and institutional change, altered conditions of the book trade, new constituencies of readers, changes in taste and—perhaps most influential of all—fashion. But the process, working in reverse, can also skip centuries. The Romantics fell out of love with classical theater because it was actionless and passionless, in which they agreed with Queen Victoria, who found French tragedy “not pleasing and extremely unnatural.” But they also discovered the Pléiade poets, dismissed by previous arbiters of taste as unruly and uncouth.

  But there are also permanent losses and gains. Poetry has lost its glamour, but the poetic sense lives on. Tragedy as a genre died finally in the 1840s, but the tragic remains. Comedy reached a fork in the road around the time of Molière and divided into openly comic theater and the “serious” play that has been the staple form of dramatic art for the past two hundred years. Fiction has forged ahead, widening its scope and recently acquiring graphic and interactive forms. Autobiography, a latecomer, has flourished. Before the first stirrings of private life around 1750, writing about the self took two forms: it was either a record of public service or a confession of sins intended as a step on the road to salvation. Modern autobiography was invented by Rousseau, Rétif de la Bretonne, and Casanova, who offered readers personalities that were distinctive and secular. Belief in God had ceased to be an adequate guide to living. Instead, exposing their warts to public view, autobiographers hoped to achieve self-knowledge, forge a personal identity, and gain public acceptance of their unique personas. The “hierarchy of genres” is still in force, though now its summits are occupied not by tragedy and the epic but by the novel and—France’s latest gift to literature—the cinema.

  At the start of the twenty-first century, literature faces serious challenges. For generations, and especially since the introduction of the cheap livre de poche format in 1953, publishers have been targeting mass markets where fiction and accounts of real lives, the biggest winners of the Darwinian struggle for literary survival, seem unstoppable. French publishers cater to many carefully differentiated readerships (crime, books for women, juvenile and science fiction, espionage, graphic fiction), though not all aim at the bottom line. Some imprints reflect more serious interests, women’s writing, avant-garde fiction, or the poetry issued by small presses, as respect in France for the nation’s literary heritage is generally stronger than in Anglo-Saxon countries. Further competition comes from a new area, francophone writing, which also privileges fiction and true lives. French universities still give pride of place to the traditional syllabus, but they face mounting pressure from influences that set a higher value on popular literature than on the canon of great authors. Literature is subject to intense pressures: commercial imperatives are making literature a branch of entertainment, while prominent intellectuals treat it as a suburb of sociology. For the first, quality is measured by sales; for the second, the use of literature is to reveal truths about society at large and in particular the condition of women and the problems of race, immigration, the marginalized, and the troubled youth of the banlieues. By this reasoning, a newspaper, a government form, or a piece of pornography can be more revealing about social realities than Proust and no less estimable for that.

  Even the term “French literature” is being challenged, for it has become too general to be useful. Alternatives have been suggested. “Histories of French literature” would cast a wider net and include the history of reading: why should sophisticated tastes be more significant than the concerns of readers of the Bibliothèque bleue or the Série noire? “Literature in European languages” widens the boundaries by focusing on France, Switzerland, and Belgium, while “literature in French” goes further and opens the door to francophone writings that serve local and nontraditional readerships. “French literatures” gives member-state status to cinema (heir to theater), women’s fiction, graphic novels, and, leading the charge, crime fiction. Until recently literary history has been the history of elites. The outsiders are now on the inside.

  Although the effect is to disperse the notion of “literature,” these trends remain a reflection of the centralizing influence of a Paris-based intellectual elite. But if Barthes’s observation that literature is “ce qui s’enseigne” is true, then governments will continue to set the official parameters of literature. But that will be as nothing compared with what looms on the horizon.

  The introduction of printing in Paris in 1470 set in motion forces that changed the world: it ended the divine right of kings to rule, overcame the feudal system, and delivered a body blow to the Church. The rise of the Internet will have no less far-reaching effects. Our twenty-first-century world is still at the incunabula stage of the new electronic revolution. Literature is set to become information that will be posted and accessed in new ways. “Frenchness,” like “Englishness,” will be absorbed into a wider human diversity. A cheap device can hold libraries larger than those once owned by the cultured few, and if the ownership of books can be so quickly transformed, what new ways will be found of writing them? Already there are novel forms of automatic writing, bloggers are the new chroniclers of their times, and interventionist fiction allows readers to make up the story they want to read as they read it.
Will national literature be subsumed into a global literature? Will language be needed when stories can be told, transnationally, in moving pictures? Publishers will disappear like the scriveners of old, books will persist for a time then acquire new e-forms, programmers will be the new authors, readers will be consumers, and reading itself may be abandoned in favor of some other mode of communication.

  What we call literature is a procession, a parade that is constantly on the move. What looms at the beginning of the twenty-first century is what loomed in 1500 and it, too, is also merely the next moment in the continuum. But whatever metamorphoses it undergoes, the literary impulse will continue until humans cease to feel a need to understand themselves and the world around them.

  Erasmus and the “First Renaissance” in France

  EDWIN M. DUVAL

  In 1495, an impoverished Augustinian monk from the Netherlands arrived in Paris, intending to earn a doctorate in theology at the Faculté de Théologie—or “Sorbonne” as it was then known—of the University of Paris. He spent the better part of the next four years in the French capital, returned again in 1502 for two more years, and a third time at the end of 1504 for yet another year or two, with increasingly frequent interludes elsewhere. In all that time he never came close to earning his doctorate, but he was transformed by his experience in Paris from an obscure but ambitious monk into the citizen of the world and the towering intellectual figure we know today as Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467/69–1536).