French literature

A page from an old copy of La Chanson de Roland, one of the oldest long poems in French

French literature is all literature written in the French language. Much of it comes from France, but a large part also comes from other places where people speak French. These places include Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Haiti, Senegal, and the countries of North Africa. Literature written in French outside France is often called francophone literature.

French literature has a history of about 1,200 years. The first known words in French were written in the 9th century. Long poems about war and love appeared in the 11th and 12th centuries. Printing came in the 15th century. After this, books slowly became available to more and more readers.

French literature has had a strong influence on other countries. French writers played an important part in the development of the essay, the modern novel about society, Symbolism in poetry, Surrealism, and the theatre of the absurd.

Literature has an unusually important place in public life in France. Writers often speak publicly about politics and society. Newspapers and television often report on books, literary prizes, and writers. Schools also spend many hours studying both old and modern French texts.

The French language and its writers

The order of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) made French the language of the law courts

French developed from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. It is one of the Romance languages, together with Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. It also contains words from Celtic languages and from the Germanic language of the Franks.

The oldest French text that still exists is an oath. Two grandsons of Charlemagne made this oath at Strasbourg in 842. They used the everyday language of their soldiers instead of Latin, so that the soldiers could understand them.

For a long time, there was no single form of French. In the north, people spoke different forms of the langue d'oïl. In the south, they spoke the langue d'oc, which is now called Occitan. Writers usually used the language of their own region.

Some of the oldest poetry written in the area that is now France is in Occitan rather than French. Many modern histories of French literature include this poetry. They also include writing in French from countries outside France, instead of treating these forms of literature as less important.

The forms of French used around Paris, at the royal court, and in government offices slowly became the basis of standard French. In 1539, King Francis I signed the order of Villers-Cotterêts. After this, French had to be used in the law courts instead of Latin.

A rule for law courts is not the same as the language spoken by ordinary people. Most people living inside the borders of modern France did not speak French as their first language until the end of the 19th century. At that time, education became free and required by law. Breton, Basque, forms of Occitan such as Gascon and Provençal, and Alsatian were still used in daily life.

The Académie française began as a private group. From 1629, about twelve men met in a house in Paris to talk about books, language, and music. Cardinal Richelieu heard about the group in 1634. He placed it under his protection and increased its number of members to forty. Louis XIII signed its official charter in January 1635. However, the Paris parlement did not accept the charter until two and a half years later.

The members of the Académie had to protect the French language and prepare a dictionary. The belief that the language needs rules and careful protection has remained strong in France ever since.

The Middle Ages (about 800 to 1500)

The first writings

The first works written in French were religious. They were made to be read or sung in church. A short poem of 29 lines about Saint Eulalia was written around 881. Lives of saints followed. These works told how holy men and women had lived and died. Some well-known works from this time are the Sequence of Saint Eulalia, the Life of Saint Leger, the Passion of Christ, and the Life of Saint Alexis.

Most people could not read. For this reason, most works were made to be spoken or sung before a group of listeners. This is why so much medieval writing is in verse. Verse is easier to remember than prose.

Writers often did not give their names. Many important works from this time are anonymous, which means that nobody knows who wrote them.

Songs of great deeds

Two jongleurs, copied from a manuscript of the late 11th century. Singers like these carried the poems from place to place

A chanson de geste was a long poem about war, brave actions, and honour. The name means "song of deeds". Travelling singers called jongleurs performed these poems at fairs, weddings, coronations, public squares, and castles.

The poems are made of laisses, which are groups of lines without a fixed length. Most lines have ten or twelve syllables, although one poem, Gormont et Isembart, uses lines of eight syllables. The oldest poems do not rhyme. Instead, every line in one group ends with the same vowel sound. This is called assonance.

More than 120 of these poems still exist, and some are very long. They tell stories about Charlemagne and his knights, battles against enemies, and quarrels between powerful lords. Their main values are those of a world of soldiers: courage, loyalty, and faith.

The death of Roland at Roncevaux, in a French manuscript of about 1455 painted by Jean Fouquet

The most famous of these poems is La Chanson de Roland. Its oldest copy is kept at Oxford and has about 4,000 lines. It is not possible to give the poem an exact date. The Oxford copy was made during the second quarter of the 12th century. Its language comes from about 1100, but the story itself is older because people sang it for many years before it was written down.

The poem tells the story of the death of Roland, one of Charlemagne's military leaders, in a mountain pass. The real event behind the story happened in 778. The poem changes a small military defeat into a story about duty and holy war.

There is no single form of Roland. The poem was rewritten with rhyme around 1180. Other versions are thousands of lines longer than the Oxford version.

Other well-known songs about great deeds, are The Song of William, The Crowning of Louis, The Cart of Nîmes, The Taking of Orange, Aliscans, Raoul of Cambrai, The Four Sons of Aymon, Huon of Bordeaux, and The Song of Antioch.

These poems tell the story of a whole people rather than the life of only one person. In later centuries, they became part of the stories that French people told about their own nation.

Songs of love

Guilhem IX, duke of Aquitaine, the first troubadour whose name we know, in an Occitan songbook of the 13th century

In the south, poets called troubadours wrote love songs in Occitan. They began to do this around 1100. The first troubadour whose name is known is Guilhem IX, duke of Aquitaine, who died in 1127. He was one of the richest lords in Europe. His songs are already so skilful that the art seems to appear in a complete form. This is the oldest known love poetry written in any of the spoken languages of western Europe. In the north, poets called trouvères began to write similar songs in French a little later.

Other well-known troubadours are Jaufre Rudel, Bernart de Ventadorn, Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, Guiraut de Bornelh, Peire Vidal, and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Their main subject was fin'amor, which is often called courtly love. The poet loves a lady who has a higher social position than he does and who is often married. He serves her, praises her, and suffers because of his love. Love is supposed to make him a better man.

This idea spread across Europe. It shaped the way writers described love for hundreds of years. Dante admired the difficult and carefully made songs of the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, and he learned from them.

Not every poet wrote about noble ladies. Rutebeuf, who worked in Paris in the 13th century, wrote about his own poverty, bad luck, and debts. His voice still feels close to modern readers.

Romances and the matter of Britain

Chrétien de Troyes wrote the first great stories about King Arthur's knights

A romance was a long story in verse about knights, love, and strange adventures. At first, the word only meant "a book written in the romanz language", which meant French rather than Latin.

Chrétien de Troyes wrote between about 1170 and 1190. He took the old stories of King Arthur and made something new from them. In his works, Arthur's court is not shown as real history. It becomes a place where the feelings and moral strength of the characters are tested. Chrétien wrote Erec and Enide, Yvain, Lancelot, and Perceval.

Perceval brought the Grail into literature. The Grail is a sacred object that a knight must search for. Chrétien stopped writing the poem in the middle of a sentence. Over the next thirty or forty years, four other writers added endings to it. Together, they added about 60,000 lines to Chrétien's 9,000 lines.

After about 1215, the stories about King Arthur were told again in prose. They became a very long group of connected books now called the Lancelot-Grail or Vulgate cycle. This was the form in which the legend reached the English writer Malory. His Le Morte d'Arthur later brought the stories to most readers in English.

The Romance of the Rose

The author at his writing desk, in a copy of Le Roman de la Rose made in the 14th century

Le Roman de la Rose is a poem of more than 20,000 lines. Guillaume de Lorris began it around 1230. Jean de Meun completed it about forty years later and made it much longer.

The first part describes a dream about love. A young man tries to reach a rose inside a garden surrounded by walls. Each person whom he meets represents a feeling or an idea, such as Hope, Shame, or Fear. This kind of writing is called allegory. The feelings and ideas are given human form and act like people.

The second part is very different. Jean de Meun uses the story as a frame for long speeches about nature, money, women, kings, and the church. His tone is often bitter and rude.

People continued to read the poem for about three hundred years. It also helped to make the dream a common frame for later stories. In 1401 and 1402, the poem caused a public argument between writers. They carried on the argument through letters. It is often called the first literary debate in France.

Laughter and everyday life

Renart the fox, in a French manuscript of about 1290

Not all writing from the Middle Ages was about noble people and great deeds. The fabliaux are short and funny stories written in verse. They make fun of greedy priests, foolish husbands, and clever thieves. Their humour is often coarse.

Le Roman de Renart is a group of stories about a fox. Renart the fox tricks the wolf, the cat, and the lion, who is the king. The animals think and act like human beings. The stories are amusing, but they also make sharp comments about royal courts, the law, and political power.

These works show another side of life in the Middle Ages. Beside the world of knights and castles, there was also a world of towns, markets, ordinary people, and jokes.

Plays

The stage built for a mystery play at Valenciennes in 1547, drawn in 1577. All the places in the story stood side by side on one long stage

People often say that medieval theatre grew out of church services. Scholars are now more careful about this idea because there is little clear evidence for it. Plays may have begun in several places at the same time.

What is certain is that the oldest plays which still exist are religious. The Sponsus is found in a manuscript from the abbey of Saint-Martial at Limoges. Monks probably wrote it in the 11th century. It uses both Latin and Occitan, but not French.

The oldest known play in French is the Jeu d'Adam. It was written in Anglo-Norman between about 1146 and 1174. It tells the story of Adam and Eve. God calls to Adam, and Adam answers in French. Notes in Latin tell the actors how to move and what objects to use on the stage. These include a well-made serpent and pots which the devils must strike together to make noise.

Later, theatre moved away from the church. In towns in the north of France, especially Arras, writers made plays about town life. Jean Bodel wrote the Jeu de saint Nicolas around 1200. It uses the story of a saint to make a sharp comment about the crusades. Adam de la Halle wrote the Jeu de la feuillée around 1276. It makes fun of people from his own town. He also wrote the Jeu de Robin et Marion around 1285, a short play with songs.

Later came the mystery plays. A mystery play could continue for several days and use hundreds of actors. Whole towns sometimes took part.

Comic plays developed beside them. A farce is short, fast, and full of tricks. La Farce de Maître Pathelin, written around 1460, is the best-known example. A lawyer cheats a cloth seller, but a shepherd later cheats the lawyer.

Writing history

A page from a 15th-century copy of Froissart's Chroniques, showing the battle of Crécy. The picture is set around the text and fills the whole page

Some medieval writers wrote about events that they had seen themselves. Their books are among the first works of history written in French prose.

Geoffroi de Villehardouin took part in the Fourth Crusade. This crusade ended with the attack and capture of Constantinople in 1204. He wrote his account soon after 1207. He writes as one of the leaders and tries to defend the actions of his own side.

Jean de Joinville completed his life of King Louis IX in 1309. He had gone on a crusade with the king and remembered many small human details.

Jean Froissart, who lived from about 1337 to 1404, wrote his Chroniques about the wars between France and England. He travelled, spoke to people who had seen the events, and wrote long and colourful scenes. His work is closer to a story than to modern history, but it is full of life.

Fixed forms and the poet as maker

During the 14th and 15th centuries, poetry slowly became separate from music. Poems were now often written to be read on the page. They followed fixed forms such as the ballade, the rondeau, and the virelai. All three had first been dance songs.

A ballade usually has three stanzas. Each stanza ends with the same repeated line, called a refrain. The poem often ends with a short final stanza called an envoi. A rondeau returns to its beginning. It repeats part of its opening lines in the middle and repeats them fully at the end.

Guillaume de Machaut, who lived from about 1300 to 1377, was the main figure of this period. He was both a composer and a poet. He was also one of the last writers to create both the words and the music of his songs.

Machaut wrote long poems called dits. In these poems, he often places himself inside the story as a character. In his own manuscripts, he clearly separates poems with music from poems without music. The poets who followed him usually wrote words only. From that time, French poetry and music began to follow separate paths.

Eustache Deschamps worked at the same royal court. He left thousands of poems. In 1392, he also wrote Art de dictier, the first book in French about how to write verse.

Alain Chartier's poem La Belle Dame sans mercy, written in 1424, began a long written argument about love and about the way poems describe and treat women.

The last medieval poets

Christine de Pizan presents her book to the queen

Christine de Pizan lived from 1364 to about 1431. She was one of the first women in Europe known to have earned enough money from writing to support herself and her family. She began to write for money after her husband died.

She criticised Le Roman de la Rose because of the way it spoke about women. In The Book of the City of Ladies, she creates an imaginary city where good and important women from the past live. She also wrote a poem praising Joan of Arc.

Charles d'Orléans lived from 1394 to 1465. He was a prince who was kept as a prisoner in England for 25 years. He wrote short and quiet poems about time, memory, and the seasons.

An early printed picture of the poet François Villon

François Villon was born around 1431 with the name François de Montcorbier. A churchman named Guillaume de Villon raised him, paid for his education, and gave him the name that he later used. Villon became a bachelor of arts in 1448 and a master of arts in 1452. He then became involved in crime.

Villon was sent to prison more than once. In 1463, he was sentenced to death by hanging because of his part in a street fight. The sentence was later changed, and he was ordered to leave Paris. Nobody knows what happened to him after that.

He wrote two poems in the form of a will. The first was the short Lais, written around 1456. The second was the much longer Testament, written around 1461, which contains ballades and rondeaux. Both works were printed in Paris in 1489.

In these poems, Villon leaves useless gifts to his friends and enemies. Between the jokes, he writes about hunger, cold, prison, old age, and death.

Villon's poetry sounds direct and personal. Later poets, from the Romantics to modern songwriters, have seen him as the first modern poet in French.

The 16th century: the Renaissance

New learning

Guillaume Budé, the leading French scholar of Greek in his day, painted by Jean Clouet about 1536

During the 16th century, French writers looked to Italy and to the ancient world for new ideas. Scholars studied Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin. They wanted to read old books in the original languages used by their writers.

This movement is called humanism. Humanists believed that studying old texts could make people wiser and better. They also believed that languages other than Latin could be used to express serious ideas.

Printing helped to spread these ideas, but the change was slow. In 1528, only about one book in five printed in France was written in French. Most of the others were in Latin or Greek. French did not make up more than half of new book titles until around the middle of the century.

At the same time, the Christian church was dividing. The Protestant Reformation reached France during the 1520s. Many writers had to choose between the two sides, and some had to leave the country.

Poets before the Pléiade

Louise Labé, in an engraving made by Pierre Woeiriot in 1555

Clément Marot, who lived from 1496 to 1544, was the main French poet of the first half of the century. He wrote light and clever poems, letters in verse, and songs. He also translated psalms into French, and this caused trouble for him with the church.

In Lyon, a group of poets wrote a more difficult kind of love poetry. Maurice Scève wrote long groups of short, dark, and carefully made poems. Two women from the same city, Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé, wrote as women who felt and expressed desire, rather than only as women desired by men. This was something new.

Labé's book of 1555 contains three elegies, twenty-four love sonnets, and a prose debate between Love and Folly. In 2006, a scholar argued that the real Louise Labé did not write these works. According to this view, they were written by a group of men around Scève. The question has not been settled, and people continue to read the poems in the same way.

The Pléiade

Pierre de Ronsard, the leading poet of the Pléiade

Around 1550, a group of young poets in Paris decided to make French poetry as great as poetry in Latin and Greek. This group became known as the Pléiade.

The first edition of Du Bellay's Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, 1549

In 1549, Joachim du Bellay published their plan in La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse. He said that French was not naturally a poor language. It seemed poor because writers had not worked enough to develop it. Poets should study ancient writers, create new words, and use the great forms of poetry.

Pierre de Ronsard, who lived from 1524 to 1585, was the leader of the group. He wrote odes, sonnets, hymns, and an unfinished long poem about the beginnings of France. His love poems are still read, especially those about the passing of time and the fading of roses.

Du Bellay is best remembered for Les Regrets. He wrote this book during four unhappy years in Rome. Its sonnets are simple, sad, and full of longing for home.

The Pléiade also changed the form of French verse. Their first sonnets used lines of ten syllables. Ronsard began to write lines of twelve syllables around 1554, and Du Bellay used them throughout Les Regrets. This twelve-syllable line, called the alexandrine, became the main form used for serious French poetry during the following century.

Rabelais

François Rabelais, a monk, doctor, and comic writer

François Rabelais, who lived from about 1483 to 1553, was first a monk and later a doctor. He did not invent the giants in his books. Gargantua already appeared in a cheap book of popular stories printed in 1532. Rabelais answered it in the same year with Pantagruel. He later wrote Gargantua and two more books. The last of these appeared in 1552. A fifth book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death. Scholars still disagree about how much of it Rabelais wrote.

The books are long, wild, and full of lists, jokes, and new words. Rabelais makes fun of bad teachers, greedy lawyers, foolish soldiers, and narrow-minded priests.

There is also a serious purpose behind the comedy. Rabelais wanted education to train both the body and the mind. He wanted people to think for themselves instead of only repeating old lessons.

The group of religious teachers at the University of Paris, known as the Sorbonne, condemned his books. Rabelais continued to write. He is now one of the best-loved French writers. The word rabelaisian is still used for wild and physical comedy.

Marguerite de Navarre and the short story

Marguerite de Navarre, queen, poet, and story writer

Marguerite de Navarre, who lived from 1492 to 1549, was the sister of King Francis I. She protected writers who were in danger, including Rabelais and Marot.

She wrote poems and plays, as well as a book of short stories called L'Heptaméron. In the book, five women and five men are stopped by a flood and tell stories to one another. The work follows the example of Boccaccio, but the storytellers promise to tell only stories that they know to be true. French readers already knew another book with the same kind of structure, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, which was put together at the court of Burgundy around 1460.

Marguerite died before she could finish the book. She seems to have planned one hundred stories but left only about seventy. The book was first printed in 1558, nine years after her death.

The stories deal with love, marriage, violence, and religious faith. After each story, the people in the group discuss its meaning. They do not reach one final answer, and this is part of the purpose of the book.

Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne gave the essay its name and made it a major form

Michel de Montaigne, who lived from 1533 to 1592, was a judge at the court of Bordeaux. In 1571, when he was thirty-eight, he left this job and went to live in a tower with his books.

There he wrote his Essais. Short, personal, searching pieces had been written before him, but he gave them their name and made the form a major kind of writing. The French word essai means an attempt or a try. Montaigne wrote short pieces about many different subjects, including friendship, thumbs, sleep, cannibals, fear, books, and his own kidney stones.

His method was to study himself. He said that he was the subject of his own book. He changes his mind, repeats himself, and allows the reader to watch his thought as it develops.

Montaigne did not remain alone in his tower. The first part of the Essais was published in 1580. He was mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585, and he continued adding to his book until his death.

Montaigne lived during the wars of religion, when Catholics and Protestants killed one another in France. He supported the moderate side. Against this violent background, he argued for doubt, self-control, and the right to think freely.

The essay became one of the main forms of European writing. English writers began using it very quickly, and Shakespeare read Montaigne in translation.

Some well-known works

This is a short choice of works, not a full list. Titles are given in French, with an English title when there is an article about the work.

Novels and stories

• Middle Ages
  • anonymous, La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland)
  • Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, ou le Chevalier au lion; Lancelot, ou le Chevalier de la charrette
  • Tristan et Iseut, retold by several writers, among them Thomas of Brittany (see Tristan)
  • anonymous, Lancelot-Graal, also called the prose Lancelot or the Vulgate Cycle
  • Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose
• 16th century
  • François Rabelais, Pantagruel; Gargantua
• 17th century
  • Madame de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves
• 18th century
  • Voltaire, Candide
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
  • Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste
• 19th century
  • Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir; La Chartreuse de Parme
  • Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, a group of novels that includes Le Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Salammbô; L'Éducation sentimentale
  • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux
  • Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, and many short stories
  • Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, a group of novels that includes L'Assommoir, Nana and Germinal
• 20th century
  • Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)
  • André Gide, Les Faux-monnayeurs
  • André Breton, Nadja
  • Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit
  • Colette, Le Blé en herbe; Gigi
  • Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
  • Albert Camus, L'Étranger (The Stranger)
  • Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien
  • Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dans le labyrinthe
  • Michel Butor, La Modification
  • Marguerite Duras, L'Amant
  • Georges Perec, La Vie mode d'emploi
  • Robert Pinget, Passacaille
• 21st century
  • Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
  • Annie Ernaux, Les Années
  • Michel Houellebecq, La Carte et le Territoire
• Writing in French outside France
  • René Maran, Batouala
  • Ousmane Sembène, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu
  • Ahmadou Kourouma, Les Soleils des indépendances
  • Assia Djebar, L'Amour, la fantasia
  • Maryse Condé, Ségou

Poetry

• François Villon, Le Testament
• Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, poets of the Pléiade
• Jean de La Fontaine, Fables
• Alphonse de Lamartine, Méditations poétiques
• Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations
• Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal
• Paul Verlaine, Jadis et naguère
• Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer
• Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard
• Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools
• Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
• Léopold Sédar Senghor, Chants d'ombre
• Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses
• Raymond Queneau, Cent mille milliards de poèmes
• Philippe Jaccottet, L'Ignorant

Plays

• Pierre Corneille, Le Cid
• Molière, Tartuffe; Le Misanthrope; Dom Juan
• Jean Racine, Andromaque; Phèdre
• Marivaux, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard
• Beaumarchais, Le Barbier de Séville; Le Mariage de Figaro
• Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
• Jean Giraudoux, La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu
• Jean Anouilh, Antigone; Becket
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos
• Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot); Fin de partie
• Eugène Ionesco, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano); Rhinocéros
• Jean Genet, Les Bonnes; Les Nègres

Essays, history and ideas

• Michel de Montaigne, Essais
• René Descartes, Discours de la méthode
• Blaise Pascal, Pensées
• François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes
• Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts; Du contrat social
• François-René de Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme
• Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique
• Jules Michelet, Histoire de France; La Sorcière
• Adolphe Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française
• Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe
• Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness)
• Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe
• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Criticism and literary theory

• Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle
• Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture
• Jacques Lacan, Écrits
• Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie
• Gérard Genette, Figures III
• Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique
• Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique
• Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne

Writers who won the Nobel Prize in Literature

Several writers of French literature have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• 1901: Sully Prudhomme, the first winner of the prize
• 1904: Frédéric Mistral, who wrote in Occitan
• 1911: Maurice Maeterlinck, from Belgium
• 1915: Romain Rolland
• 1921: Anatole France
• 1927: Henri Bergson
• 1937: Roger Martin du Gard
• 1947: André Gide
• 1952: François Mauriac
• 1957: Albert Camus
• 1960: Saint-John Perse
• 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the prize
• 1969: Samuel Beckett, from Ireland, who wrote in French and in English
• 1985: Claude Simon
• 2000: Gao Xingjian, a French citizen who writes in Chinese
• 2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio
• 2014: Patrick Modiano
• 2022: Annie Ernaux

Sources

• Bergez, Daniel; et al. (2023). Précis de littérature française (in French) (6th ed.). Malakoff: Armand Colin. ISBN 978-2-200-63730-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Burgwinkle, William; Hammond, Nicholas; Wilson, Emma, eds. (2011). The Cambridge History of French Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-89786-0.
• Coward, David (2002). A History of French Literature: From Chanson de geste to Cinema. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16758-7.
• Gaunt, Simon; Kay, Sarah, eds. (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-67975-6.
• Hollier, Denis, ed. (1989). A New History of French Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-61565-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Lyons, John D. (2010). French Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199568727.
• Taylor, Karen L. (2007). The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-8160-5405-3.

Related pages

• French language
• Académie Française
• Prix Goncourt
• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
• List of Nobel Prize winners in Literature

Other websites

• Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (in French)