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Eventually, the dialect in popular use around Paris gained supremacy over the others and by the 10th century was vying with Latin for prestige. The 11th century witnessed the emergence of a literature in the French language in the form of numerous epic poems, called CHANSONS DE GESTE. These poems told of the heroic deeds of the knights fighting with or against Charlemagne. Of the more than 80 chansons remaining, the masterpiece is the CHANSON DE ROLAND (12th century), which narrates the death of Charlemagne's nephew, Roland, in a rearguard action against the Saracens at Roncesvallés in the Pyrénées. Exhibiting great skill in the differentiation of characters, this poem contributed to the awakening of a French national consciousness.

THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE

A third of the way into the 16th century, François Rabelais, in one of the great comic works of world literature, gave pointed expression to the feeling of rebirth then being experienced by the European intellectual community. In Gargantua (1534) his giant hero reports to his son Pantagruel on the amazing intellectual progress that has occurred in the course of just one generation thanks to the revival of the literature and thought of antiquity. This was primarily due to the popularization of printed books, which encouraged the translation of ancient texts and the development of precise critical methods. Behind the rollicking carnival-like story, the incoherence, the coarse humor, and the symbolic exaggerations of Gargantua and the associated Pantagruel volumes (1532, 1556; Eng. trans. of Rabelais's Works, 1653-94) hid an immense learning and understanding of the problems faced by Rabelais' contemporaries.

Out of such sources, likely and unlikely, a new ideal of humankind in relation to God and life, known as humanism, was being forged. In religion this found expression in Protestantism, whose chief voice in France, during the years it competed with Catholicism, was the great Genevan reformer John Calvin. Calvin explained his complex doctrines in a simple style in The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1541; Eng. trans., 1813), which conquered for the French language the ability to discuss religious subjects that had previously been reserved for Latin.

Humanism was perhaps best exemplified by Michel de Montaigne, who in the second half of the 16th century invented a genre, the familiar ESSAY, that proved ideally suited both as a showcase for his learning and urbanity and as a forum for the critical exploration of personality and ideas. Although inspired by an enormous number of quotations, his Essays (1580, 1588; Eng. trans., 1603) are nevertheless profoundly original and together constitute one of the most honest and ingratiating self-examinations ever conducted in a literary work. With them Montaigne found a mode of expression that would be imitated, if not surpassed, by scores of writers in innumerable countries from the 17th to the 20th century.

French prose was not alone in feeling the winds of change. The break with the past was even more pronounced in poetry. New forms like the sonnet imported from Italy, as well as Greek and Latin odes, all enjoyed popularity. But French poets were also interested in making of their native language a more supple instrument. In 1549, Joachim du Bellay wrote a nationalistic manifesto calling for the enrichment of the French language to insure its parity with ancient tongues. His poetic works are delicate, melancholy, and sensitive. The prince of Renaissance poets, however, was Pierre de Ronsard, the uncontested leader of the constellation of poets called the PLEIADE. With the lyric sonnets, light odes, and political verse of his later career, he helped to free French poetry from the pedantry of the past.

THE TRIUMPH OF CLASSICISM

France's political position as the most powerful nation in Europe during the reign of Louis XIV was reflected in the preeminence French literature attained in the 17th century. This Golden Age literature still forms the foundation of French liberal education. The period showed a continuing trend toward the reinforcement of royal authority and, except at the end, of Catholic influence. In 1635, Cardinal Richelieu created the Académie Française with the aim of regulating language and literary expression. The conflict between two literary tendencies--one toward greater creative freedom, which modern critics call baroque, and the other toward an acceptance of literary rules--had been virtually resolved in favor of CLASSICISM by 1660. The components of this creed would be codified by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, the founder of French literary criticism, in his Art of Poetry (1674; Eng. trans., 1683), in which reason, proportion, and harmony were defined as the outstanding literary values.

France's greatest dramatists emerged during this period. Pierre Corneille, whose tragic masterpiece The Cid (1637), dramatizing the conflict between duty and passion, remains unequaled in the grandeur of its conception, wrote over 30 plays, most of them, after 1634, in accordance with the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. He was surpassed in popularity and critical esteem only by Jean Racine, whose simpler style and more realistic characters and plot structures, as in Andromache (1667; Eng. trans., 1675) and Phaedra (1677; Eng. trans., 1776), reveal a world of ferocious passions beneath a veneer of elegant poetry. In the comic arena, Molière, ranging from the farcical to the sharpest explorations of social, psychological, and metaphysical questions, created a body of plays that seem as fresh and pointed today as they were when first produced. His masterpieces were Tartuffe (1664; Eng. trans., 1670) and The Misanthrope (1666; Eng. trans., 1709).

The French novel, which in the first part of the 17th century was long, diffuse, and full of improbable adventures (L'Astree, 1607-28, for instance), also came of age. In The Princess of Clèves (1678; Eng. trans., 1925), a concise psychological analysis of a moral problem in married life, the Comtesse de la Fayette fashioned a perfect model of the novel of character as the genre would develop in France.

Minor literary forms were ennobled by such brilliant practitioners as Madame de Sevigne, who in her correspondence created definitive models of letter writing; the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, whose Maxims (1665; Eng. trans., 1694) wittily analyzed human motives in terms of self-interest; and Jean de la Bruyère, whose wide-ranging and insightful study of social conditions and types in his Characters (1688; Eng. trans., 1699) anticipated the liberal, scientifically oriented tendencies of the 18th century. The poet Jean de la Fontaine achieved lasting fame with his successive volumes of Fables (1668, 1678, 1694; Eng. trans., 1734), a genre he made indelibly his own by combining sophisticated "morals" with a deliberately archaic and deceptively simple style. The art of memoir writing assumed a new power and subtlety when composed by such participants in historical events as the Duc de Saint-Simon, La Rochefoucauld, and Cardinal de Retz.

The enormously influential DISCOURSE ON METHOD (1637) not only established its author, René Descartes, as the first modern philosopher but set the precedent for that clarity, precision, and rationalism with which French thinking and writing would subsequently be associated. Another philosopher admired as much for the perfection of his prose as for the character of his thought was Blaise Pascal. His Lettres provinciales (1656-57; Eng. trans., 1816) demonstrated the devastating effectiveness of a simplicity informed by intelligence and wit, whereas the Pensées (1670; Eng. trans., 1688) directed the reader to faith in the Christian God through an eloquent combination of reason, passion, and insight into the human condition. More grandiloquent, and certainly better representative of 17th-century religious orthodoxy, were the sermons and funeral orations of the great preacher and theological polemicist Jacques BOSSUET. His Quietist opponent, François Fenelon, combined the interests of a classicist with the critical spirit of the 18th century in his didactic novel Telemaque (1699; Eng. trans., 1743).

THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

If reason, understood as harmony and balance, stamped the "splendid century," it was above all the spirit of scientific inquiry that gave to the 18th century its special character. With the decline in the authority of the French monarchy, all social and political institutions came under question and, eventually, attack. Ideas assumed sovereign power as, one by one, traditional bastions were subjected to the scrutiny of the PHILOSOPHES. Probably no other country or century has witnessed such a concentration of intellectual talent as that represented by the French ENLIGHTENMENT.

Pierre Bayle, a Protestant philosopher turned freethinker who advocated religious toleration, set the tone of the century with his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; rev. 1704-06; Eng. trans., 1709). In this work he foreshadowed the aggressive strategy of religious and social criticism that would later be used by VOLTAIRE in his malicious but amusing Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Eng. trans., 1765). Voltaire wrote tragedies in the classical mode, works of history, deistic poetry, and light verse. He is chiefly remembered, however, for his philosophical tales, such as Zadig (1747; Eng. trans., 1749) and Candide (1759; Eng. trans., 1759); his Letters concerning the English Nation (1733), comparing English and French institutions (to the latter's disadvantage); and his Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (1769; partially trans. as The General History and State of Europe, 1754), an anthropologically organized comparative history of national characteristics. These works were the centerpiece of his lifelong battle against intolerance, injustice, and obscurantism.

Montesquieu also adopted the method of comparative analysis, producing in his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws (1748; Eng. trans., 1750), a profound study of the different types of government. In this treatise he expounded the doctrine of the separation of powers. This contributed to the 18th-century French admiration for British political institutions and helped mold the U.S. Constitution.

The biggest weapon leveled against prejudice and traditional authorities was the Encyclopedie, published in 35 volumes between 1751 and 1780 and incorporating most of the materialist, skeptical, and antireligious ideas of the day. This was a collective enterprise directed by Denis Diderot to which the best minds of the age contributed: Jean d'Alembert, Baron d'Holbach, Etienne de Condillac, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose political and social ideas enjoyed an even wider vogue in the 19th and 20th centuries than in the 18th, asserted the principle of the collective sovereignty of the people in The Social Contract (1762; Eng. trans., 1764); in Emile (1762) he expressed pedagogical theories that formed the basis of later experiments in progressive education. His novel La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), a compendium of the major intellectual questions discussed at the time, was a forerunner of ROMANTICISM through which Rousseau popularized the "return to nature" and the natural morality he believed would flow from such a state. Rousseau's Confessions (1781, 1788) and Reveries (1782; Eng. trans. for both, 1783) were daring autobiographical works that helped to develop the romantic taste for the public display of the inner self.

The development of the novel and the drama contributed to the explosion of the new sensibility. Alain Rene Lesage's (1668-1747) picaresque romance Gil Blas (1715, 1724, 1735; Eng. trans., 1749) opened the way to the novels of "sentimental education," especially as produced in England by Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. In Manon Lescaut (1731; Eng. trans., 1738), the Abbe Prévost presented a tale of passion triumphing over every obstacle but death, while in Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) analyzed the perverse psychology of a cynical seducer. From the lively plays of Pierre de Marivaux came the term marivaudage, meaning the style in which the subtle psychological components of love and dalliance were portrayed by the playwright. Toward the end of the century Beaumarchais held the stage with his popular comedies The Barber of Seville (1775; Eng. trans., 1776) and The Marriage of Figaro (1784; Eng. trans., 1785), which also conveyed a subtly rebellious political message.

Poetry in the 18th century suffered from the desiccating influence of rational analysis, but one great poet emerged. André Chenier, whose verse was inspired by the harmonies of classical Greek models and by a love of liberty, became after his execution during the Terror an important influence on the early romantic school.

THE 19TH CENTURY

The romantic tendencies implicit in the 18th century had by 1830 become a full-fledged and triumphant movement affecting every area of French letters--poetry, drama, the novel, history, and criticism. Poetry completely recovered its elan, while the novel, as the most suitable genre for registering the social upheavals brought first by the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars and then by the expansion of capitalism and the industrial revolution, ultimately became the dominant mode of expression. The century-long conflicts between reactionaries and liberals, the church and the anticlericals, and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat provided ample scope for the literary giants of the age--Hugo, Balzac, Michelet, and Zola, each endowed with a prodigious productivity.

The aristocratic Vicomte de Chateaubriand ushered in the century with an aggressive defense of Catholicism, Le Genie du christianisme (1802; trans. as The Beauties of Christianity, 1815), and two novels set among the American Indians. His Memoires d'outre-tombe (Eng. trans., 1902), composed between 1811 and 1841 in a romantic vein, is considered a classic of French autobiographical writing. Madame de Stael, notable chiefly as a literary critic, became the champion of German romantic literature in her De L'Allemagne (1813; trans. as Germany, 1913). Her influence can be seen in Benjamin Constant's novel Adolphe (1816; Eng. trans., 1817), analyzing the waning passion of a young man for an older woman, which suggests many parallels with Constant and de Stael's own tortuous relationship.

Alphonse de Lamartine, with his Meditations poetiques (1820; Eng. trans., 1839), brought French poetry back to its lyric roots. He was the first in a line of great French romantic poets that included Alfred de Vigny, who came to prominence with his Poemes antiques et modernes (1826); Alfred de Musset, known alike for his Byronic poetry--alternately impish and moving--and his affair with George Sand, herself a romantic novelist and early feminist; and the giant among them, Victor Hugo, who for 65 years would magnificently amplify every possible poetic theme and reign as chief spokesman and practitioner of the romantic credo.

The first break with romanticism was made by Théophile Gautier, a onetime enthusiast whose art-for-art's-sake credo announced the arrival of the PARNASSIANS, a group of poets infatuated with formal perfection and objectivity and hostile to the romantics' subjective effusions. Led by Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle in the 1860s, the Parnassians saw their ideals best realized in the sonnet collection Les Trophees (1893; Eng. trans., 1897) of Jose Maria de Heredia.

Influenced by the Parnassians but determined to create beauty even out of the horrors of life, Charles Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil (1857; Eng. trans., 1909) sounded a new note--obsessive, morbid, presenting the poet as an accursed being--that would significantly influence all subsequent French poetry. Arthur Rimbaud, in A Season in Hell (1873; Eng. trans., 1932) and Illuminations (1886; Eng. trans., 1932), reached an absolute of revolt, experimenting with mixtures of verse and prose, with rhythms, and with the juxtaposition of unrelated words. His older friend and lover Paul Verlaine brought to French poetry a musical, melodic quality it had not previously attained, seen especially in his collection Jadis et naguere (Once Upon a Time and Not Long Ago, 1884). Stéphane Mallarmé, whose most celebrated poem was Afternoon of a Faun (1876; Eng. trans., 1951), which Debussy later set to music, guided poetry toward even more abstruse paths and, as the leader of the symbolists in the 1880s and 1890s, exercised an enormous influence over his contemporaries that is still lively today.

The 50 years between 1830 and 1880 witnessed enormous changes in the shape of the novel as it was molded by a succession of innovators. Madame George Sand, exemplifying romanticism in its most individualistic form, in Lelia (1833; Eng. trans., 1978) championed the ultimate moral claim of passion over convention, though her novels of country life, such as The Country Waif (1847; Eng. trans., 1976) and Fanchon the Cricket (1848; Eng. trans., 1977), have endured better. Stendhal, who also portrayed the dominant role of passion as a motivating force in life, nevertheless injected into his two great novels, The Red and the Black (1830; Eng. trans., 1916) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839; Eng. trans., 1901), an ironic tone and analytical power that foreshadowed the 20th-century psychological novel. Victor Hugo, in his evocation of medieval Parisian life, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831; Eng. trans., 1833), and Alexandre Dumas père, in a whole series of adventures covering high points of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries in France, made the historical novel a genre to be reckoned with. Hugo's later work, Les Misérables (1862; Eng. trans., 1862), recounting the redemption of a convict emerging from the lower depths, successfully merged high drama with questions of social morality.

The colossus of 19th-century French novelists, however, was Honoré de Balzac, whose prodigious, multivolume Human Comedy (1842-48; Eng. trans., 1895-98), encompassing more than 2,000 characters drawn from every rank and walk of life and sweeping imaginatively over 40 years of French history, brilliantly delineated a major society in flux. His genius for realistic detail, together with his emphasis on material gain as the engine of human behavior, directly links Balzac with the novelistic REALISM that won the day in the second half of the century.

This was most triumphantly realized in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans., 1886), the story of a provincial adulteress whose bleak life ends in tragedy--a novel as notable for its perfection of style as for its unerring observation. A disciple of Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, excelled in the sparely told, realistic, often ironic short story, as in such collections as La Maison Tellier (1881; Eng. trans., 1910) and Mademoiselle Fifi (1882; Eng. trans., 1917). Influenced by contemporary determinist thought, Émile Zola sought to make the novel a more scientific reflection of reality. His 20-volume fictional examination of every level of social life during the Second Empire, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), with its emphasis on the sordid and the depressing, remains the outstanding exemplar of NATURALISM whose influence as a movement it spanned.

History and criticism also came to maturity during the 19th century. Jules Michelet, whose immense 17-volume History of France (1833-43, 1855-67; Eng. trans., 1882-87) vibrantly resurrected the past, exemplified the romantic narrative tradition at its best. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his probing Democracy in America (1835, 1840; both trans. the same years), offered analyses of American politics and character in large part still valid today. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, in his astute study Port-Royal (1840-59) and in his in-depth analyses of French literary figures, gave to literary criticism the importance it has retained since. In applying his erudition as Hebrew scholar and philologist to religion in The Origins of Christianity (7 vols., 1863-83; Eng. trans., 1888-89), Ernest Renan established modern critical methods in France. Simultaneously, the philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine, seeking a scientific explanation for historical and cultural phenomena, professed to discover in the interplay of physical and psychological factors the cause of national and individual variations. Zola's naturalistic oeuvre was the application of this hypothesis to literature.

The French theater was at first dominated by the romantic dramas of Hugo, whose Hernani (1830; Eng. trans., 1830) liberated playwrights from the confining traditions of the past, and by those of Dumas père. These were followed in popularity by the well-made plays of Eugène Scribe, Victorien Sardou, and Alexandre Dumas fils, who also defended social theses.