French Literature

A

Theatre

The influence of the 17th century was felt most strongly in tragedy. The tragedies of Campistron and La Fosse resembled a sentimentalized Racine, and those of Crébillon père, Racine with the addition of gratuitous violence. Voltaire (pseudonym of François-Marie Arouët), despite his lifelong idolization of Racine, was the most successful innovator. He took local colour and crowd scenes from Shakespeare, and introduced Enlightenment themes into tragedy. Comedy was similarly inhibited by the example of Molière. Jean-François Regnard imitated Molière’s farcical side, Florent Dancourt and Alain-René Le Sage his social realism. Le Sage’s Turcaret (1709) recalls Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in its ridicule of a social climber, but anticipates the Enlightenment by its bitter satire of the corruption of the financial bureaucracy. The two most original comic dramatists of the 18th century were Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Marivaux distanced himself from the Molière tradition by writing romantic comedies based on lovers’ misunderstandings, which were performed by the actors of the Comédie-Italienne (re-established in Paris since 1716) to whose style they were better suited than the Comédie-Française, which increasingly preferred the moralizing comédies larmoyantes (tear-jerkers) of authors like La Chaussée, which were comic only in having a happy ending. In the latter half of the century, Beaumarchais took on the mantle of Molière in combining all the elements of existing comic traditions. Beaumarchais was an open admirer of the Philosophes (see below), and in his Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), his hero Figaro represents the man of talent marginalized by a society in which birth counts for more than merit.

The greatest stranglehold on theatrical innovation in the 18th century was the traditional distinction between tragedy, which takes seriously the misfortunes of high-born figures, and comedy, in which the ridiculous figures are always middle class. To break this stranglehold, Denis Diderot invented a midway genre, the prose drame, a serious play in prose intended to portray the real dilemmas of middle-class characters. Diderot’s own drames were unsuccessful. The best example of the new form is Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le Savoir (The Unwitting Philosopher, 1765), a well-made, genuinely suspenseful play that attacked the aristocratic prejudice against trade. Closer in date to the French Revolution, Louis-Sébastien Mercier introduced working-class characters into the drame and, in plays such as Le Déserteur (1782) and La Brouette du Vinaigrier (The Vinegar-Seller’s Cart, 1784), defended pacifism and made a plea for social equality, while Beaumarchais himself showed his approval for the form by using it for the third play of his Figaro trilogy, La Mère Coupable (The Guilty Mother, 1792). However, serious prose drama did not really become established until the 19th century with the work of Émile Augier and Dumas fils.

B

Prose Writing: The Philosophes

In France, the chief representatives of the Enlightenment were the Philosophes, writers who attacked abstract systems of philosophy and judged the worth of ideas by their social utility, dismissing the work of philosophers like Aristotle, Descartes, and (in their own day) Leibniz as harmful fictions, and promoting the empiricists Bacon, Locke, and Newton.

The Philosophes expressed their views in two ways: through treatises and pamphlets, and through the fictional forms of the novel and the short story. In his Lettres Philosophiques (Philosophical Letters, 1734), Voltaire criticizes superstition and intolerance in the name of deism (universal belief in a Supreme Being) and praises constitutional monarchy on the English model. The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Encyclopedia or General Dictionary of Sciences, Techniques, and Crafts, 1751-1772), principally edited by Diderot, and aimed at “changing people’s ingrained ways of thinking”, is not only a compilation of useful knowledge, but also a swingeing attack on superstition, intolerance, social inequality, and political tyranny. L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws, 1748) by Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu praised constitutional monarchy and attacked religious intolerance. Jean-Jacques Rousseau expounded the principles of democratic government on republican lines in Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract, 1762), and progressive views on education in Emile (1762). Like Montesquieu and Voltaire, he believed in a Supreme Being, as his Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard (Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Curate), included in Emile, makes clear, whereas Claude-Adrien Helvétius, in De l’Esprit (On the Mind, 1758), and Paul Thiry D’Holbach, in his Système de la Nature (The System of Nature, 1770), were atheists and materialists whose attitude split the Philosophe movement.

The Philosophes’ use of fictional forms to propagate their ideas is illustrated early in the history of the Enlightenment by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), an epistolary novel in which Philosophe concerns are addressed through the observations of two fictitious Persian visitors to Paris, with some degree of individual characterization and a well-plotted narrative. Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître (James the Fatalist and His Master, 1796) is a comic novel that explores the problem of free will and determinism, while he uses the dialogue form in Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew, c. 1761) for challenging discussion of ethical problems, and in Le Rêve de D’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream, 1769) for wide-ranging speculations on the concept of evolution that still have an astonishingly modern ring. All these works were published after his death. Most effective of all was Voltaire, who displayed his genius for caricature and satire in a series of stories, the most famous being Candide (1759), through which he created what was effectively a new genre, the conte philosophique (philosophical tale).

C

The Novel

In addition to its use as a vehicle for Philosophe propaganda, the 18th-century novel was popular in its own right, exploiting readers’ new-found curiosity about unfamiliar places and their taste for realistic description primarily for literary ends. Manon Lescaut (1731) by the Abbé Antoine-François Prévost is a story of romantic obsession and betrayal, in the setting of Parisian low life and the rigours of the newly established French colony at New Orleans, which ends in tragedy for the two lovers. Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Acquaintances, 1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the masterpiece of the 18th-century epistolary novel, exposes the dangers of romantic love with a cynical detachment that many contemporary readers found immoral, although Charles Baudelaire in the 19th century declared it to be a highly moral book. In Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (The New Heloïse, 1762), also in letter form, love is idealized. The novel describes a triangular relationship in which conjugal love triumphs over the temptations of an adulterous affair, set in the idyllic (and idealized) surroundings of the Swiss Alps. In Paul et Virginie (1787) by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, set mainly on an exotic island in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius), idealized love turns to tragedy because even in a world so close to nature the heroine cannot dissociate love from the puritanical morality she has learnt in “civilized” France.

Rousseau also wrote two highly original autobiographical works, the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (Musings of a Lonely Stroller, posthumously published 1782), ten introspective meditations on various phases of his life, and the Confessions (also posthumously published 1782), which combine self-revelation with self-justification. The Rêveries are written in a poetic style that overshadows the shallow lyricism of most of the verse of the period.

D

Poetry

Evariste de Parny wrote poetry in both verse and prose, the former conventional in style, the latter, notably in his Chansons Madécasses (Songs from Madagascar, 1778), passionate and committed in its anti-colonialism. The century did however produce, in André Chénier, one fine poet who wrote in verse. Chénier took his inspiration from Classical antiquity, but he saw the Classical past through modern eyes, and his rhythmic and metrical innovations broke with the rules of versification that French poetry had inherited from the 17th century. It is not surprising that the Romantics should have claimed him as a precursor (he published only two poems before his death in 1794, and the rest were not discovered and published until 1819, the year before Lamartine’s Méditations).

VI

The 19th Century

This was a century of great literary activity, much of which is traditionally grouped into movements: Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and so forth. These labels can sometimes obscure a writer’s true originality.