French Literature

I

Introduction

French Literature, literature written in the language of France from the late 11th century to the present day. Before this time, the written language of the French was Latin.

II

The Medieval Period

The first notable works in the French language were the chansons de geste, stories in verse, told or sung in the feudal courts by wandering minstrels (jongleurs or trouvères). They related the heroic deeds of Christian knights in the service of Charlemagne and other great leaders. The most famous epic of this kind is the early 12th-century Chanson de Roland.

Another important group of verse tales drew its inspiration from Celtic folklore, including the legends of the Holy Grail and the story of Tristan. Their best-known exponent was the late 12th-century poet Chrétien de Troyes, a skilled narrator of love and adventure, particularly popular in the female-dominated aristocratic courts he frequented. His contemporary Marie de France also drew on Celtic sources for the verse fictions she called Lais, although she also wrote animal fables on similar lines to those by the Greek writer Aesop.

At the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, another category of verse tale, the fabliau, became popular. These narratives are short, simple, down-to-earth, and often ironic, coarse, or irreverent. (Some of the same stories appear in The Canterbury Tales by the English author Geoffrey Chaucer.) More sophisticated in its satirical depiction of feudal society than the fabliaux is Le Roman de Renart (Reynard the Fox), a collection of tales by different, mostly unidentified, poets, completed probably between 1175 and 1205. Through the adventures of a number of animals, including Reynard the fox, this hugely popular work satirizes its world with varying degrees of wit and narrative skill.

Later in the 13th century a verse allegory, Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), achieved similar popularity. Guillaume de Lorris completed the first part, of some 4,000 lines, between 1230 and 1240, conceiving it as a piece in the tradition of courtly love. The poet dreams of a beautiful rose, in a garden full of allegorical figures, who either encourage or thwart him in his efforts to pluck it. The second part of the poem, of some 18,000 lines, completed by Jean de Meun between 1275 and 1280, is different in character, containing disquisitions on all aspects of medieval life: social, economic, political, and religious. Meun’s advocacy of nature as a guide to living was later elaborated by the 16th-century writer François Rabelais. The poem influenced many later writers, including the 14th-century poet-musician, Guillaume de Machaut, whose verse contains the same use of allegory, the moralizing, the dream device, the suffering lover, and the personification of love. Machaut’s technique, however, is considerably more innovative and assured.

By the 15th century poetry was increasingly a vehicle for personal lyrical expression, as in the graceful verses of Charles d’Orléans, its popularity enhanced by poetry contests with prizes awarded by the academies. The outstanding lyric poet of the period, François Villon, writes of his own ill-spent life with wit, exuberance, tenderness, and a profound sense of sin and mortality. His two best-known works, Le Petit Testament (1456) and Le Grand Testament (1461), both in the form of burlesque wills, show an easy inventiveness, particularly in their mastery of the ballade form, and a gift for conveying simple emotion.

Medieval theatre, again in verse, grew out of the liturgy and was, until the 13th century, performed by clerics. Mystery plays, on biblical subjects, survive from the 12th century, their authors unknown. Miracle plays, of divine intervention, survive from the 13th century, notably Jean Bodel’s Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas (The Play of Saint Nicolas), a comic invention of not entirely religious inspiration. There was, in fact, some secular theatre in the 13th century, exemplified by Adam de la Halle, whose Le Jeu de la Feuillée (The Play of the Greensward, c. 1275) is a comedy of ordinary people and whose Jeu de Robin et Marion (The Play of Robin and Marion, 1280) is a dramatized pastourelle with singing and dancing. During the 14th and 15th centuries there was increasing secularization of the theatre: mystery and miracle plays were acted by laymen—jongleurs, tradesmen, and even lawyers—and might be followed by the performance of a farce or sotie, poking fun at the foibles and vices of contemporary society and institutions. Of these, the anonymous Farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin (Master Pathelin’s Farce), written some time before 1469, is the best known, and anticipates the early farces of Molière.

Verse dominates medieval literature; prose is largely the province of historians. The late 12th-century Geoffroi de Villehardouin produced a readable, if rather dry, account of the Fourth Crusade. In the 14th century, the Histoire de Saint Louis (1309) by Jean de Joinville provides a livelier, more personal account of the Seventh Crusade and of his own relationship with Louis IX. Later in the century, Jean Froissart gives a vivid and historically important account of the Hundred Years’ War in his Chroniques. The Mémoires of Philippe de Comines, from the closing decade of the 15th century, provide an insider’s picture of contemporary political life, with personal views on government, taxation, and the obligations of the powerful. His intelligence and objectivity set him apart from much that seems to characterize the feudal mentality, and some of his opinions would not disgrace a modern statesman.

III

The 16th Century

It was only at the beginning of the 16th century that French literature began to undergo the influence of the Italian Renaissance, which had reached its peak a century earlier. Following the Italian example, 16th-century French writers turned away from the Christian Middle Ages to pre-Christian Classical antiquity for inspiration, finding there both an attitude to life and learning centred on man rather than on God (humanism), and a wide range of literary masterpieces which they used to stimulate their own creative aspirations.

A

1500 to 1550

The influence of the Italian Renaissance was first of all felt at Lyon, the leading centre for printed books in France. The most prominent Lyon poet was Maurice Scève. His Délie (1544) is a sequence of 448 dizains (ten-line verses) expressing his love for a woman of ideal beauty and intellect. The self-imposed necessity of compressing thought and feeling into ten-line poems of ten syllables each makes Délie a challenge to the reader’s mental powers without diminishing the poem’s emotional charge. In this, Scève foreshadows certain 20th-century French poets, notably Paul Éluard. A quite different style, poignant and direct, characterizes the 3 elegies and 24 sonnets by another Lyon poet, Louise Labé, one of several successful women writers in this period, including Queen Margaret of Navarre, a Classical scholar as well as a successful writer of prose.

In Paris, Renaissance influences coexisted with the legacy of the Middle Ages. Clément Marot continued to use forms such as the ballade and the rondeau, but he also introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into France. Marot’s chief strength is in lighter verse, but his biblical translations such as Psaumes (Psalms, 1541-1543) made a substantial contribution to religious poetry in French. French literature at this time was also influenced by the Reformation. This began as a movement to reform the Catholic Church from within, by returning to the “pure” Christianity of the Gospels, much as secular authors had discovered a humanistic philosophy in the original texts of the classics. Later, when the movement came under the leadership of John Calvin, who opposed free inquiry, it alienated humanists as well as Catholics. Marot, who had revised the Psaumes with help from Calvin, later rejected Calvinism and returned to the Catholic fold.

Humanism and the spirit of the early Reformation meet in the writings of François Rabelais, whose Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534) have enjoyed worldwide popularity ever since their first publication. Rabelais’s heroes are two giants whose often fantastical adventures in a realistic contemporary setting parody the adventure stories of the Middle Ages. Rabelais’s work is an enthusiastic celebration of sensual pleasures and intellectual freedom, in which humanist ideas, for example on education and war, are expounded, and the corruption of the priesthood and obscurantism of theologians are mercilessly satirized. Rabelais is a comic realist, who uses real-life detail to evoke scenes whose tonality ranges from undisguised absurdity to frank obscenity.