British, Irish, and American Influences

1. Before 1700

The English crown held sway over much of what is now France for long periods in the Middle Ages. After the Norman Conquest, however, French was the dominant literary language in England for three centuries; even at the end of the 14th c., Gower was writing as much in French as in English and Latin. Anglo-Norman literature was continuous with its continental French counterpart, and specifically English literature had little influence in France for most of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the Celtic matière de Bretagne penetrated into France in the 12th c. and was massively exploited by writers of romances. In addition, numerous natives of Britain played an important part in French intellectual life through the medium of Latin [see Scholasticism]. The Scot George Buchanan, teaching at Bordeaux, was to make a significant contribution to French Renaissance humanism, although it does not appear that, even at the time of the Auld Alliance, the rich Scottish literary tradition was much known in France.

Throughout the great flowering of English literature in the 16th and 17th c., the attention of French writers and readers was turned more to Italy and Spain than to their northern neighbours. There was some two-way movement between France and Britain, certain themes from British history appear in French tragedies and novels, and there are occasional examples of specific literary contacts (e.g. Cyrano's use of a text by Godwin in L'Autre Monde), but no large-scale influence. Saint-Évremond lived in London for some 40 years, but was able to move in a French world there.

2. 18th Century

This was the time when Britain became fashionable. The peak of ‘Anglomania’ was reached in the last three decades of the ancien régime, though this does not mean that French writers abandoned their national traditions so as to write like their neighbours. Much English and Scottish literature was translated in the 18th c. and became an essential point of reference for educated people. The key figure was Voltaire, who, after living in England for two years, sang the praises of English life, philosophy, and literature in his Lettres philosophiques. Other important early commentators were the Swiss Béat Louis de Muralt (Lettres sur les Anglais et les Français, 1725), abbé Jean-Bernard le Blanc (Lettres d'un Français, 1745), Prévost, who translated extensively and wrote about England in his novels and journalism, and Montesquieu, who drew on his stay in England in De l' esprit des lois.

Perhaps the most significant area was philosophy. d'Alembert's ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the Encyclopédie indicates the immense prestige enjoyed by Bacon and by many British scientists, but above all by Newton and Locke. Newton was only gradually acclimatized, principally by Maupertuis and Voltaire, in the face of strong resistance from the followers of Descartes. Locke not only provided a model for the epistemology of Condillac, Helvétius, and others; his writings on politics and education were highly influential, not least on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Other widely known philosophers included Hobbes, Mandeville, Shaftesbury (a major influence on Diderot), Hume (though more as a historian), and the ‘common sense’ Scottish philosophers, who enjoyed a great reputation among the Idéologues and their successors.

It was in the 18th c. that Shakespeare began to be known and admired (though with reservations). His plays were translated in P.-A. de la Place's Théâtre anglais (8 vols., 1745-9); this also included work by Jonson, Dryden, Otway, and others. In the second half of the century the ‘domestic tragedy’ of Lillo and Moore struck a chord in the partisans of the drame. Milton, whose Paradise Lost was translated several times in both prose and verse (first by Dupré de Saint-Maur, 1729), became established as an example of ‘sublime’ writing. Thomson's Seasons provided a model (alongside Virgil's Georgics) for the descriptive poems of Delille, Saint-Lambert, and Roucher, and the ‘graveyard’ poems of Gray and Young (translated by Le Tourneur) found echoes in the developing current of sensibilité. But the most important poets for the French were Pope and ‘Ossian’. Pope, much translated, was at first seen largely as a verse philosopher, his Essay on Man causing considerable controversy; later in the century Colardeau's version of Eloisa to Abelard launched a vogue for the emotional ‘héroïde’. James Macpherson's ‘translations’ of Fingal and the other poems attributed to the 5th-c. Caledonian bard Ossian found a ready audience among those interested in primitive art; translated by Le Tourneur, the poems of Ossian won the allegiance of Napoleon, Chateaubriand, and many other admirers in France and beyond.

Of the prose writers, Swift and particularly Addison were among the first to make an impact. Gulliver's Travels, translated by Desfontaines (1727), seems to have inspired Marivaux and Voltaire before becoming a children's classic; Addison's Spectator, imitated by Marivaux and others, set a standard for polite journalism. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was an exceptional case; it became a European classic and was presented in Rousseau's Émile as the one book needful to a boy, ‘le plus heureux traité d'éducation naturelle’. In general, though, Richardson was the English novelist most admired in 18th-c. France (in the inadequate translations of Prévost); the influence of Clarissa on Rousseau's Julie has been exaggerated, but Richardson found an enthusiastic champion in Diderot (Éloge de Richardson). Goldsmith and Sterne were also appreciated (Tristram Shandy gave Diderot the starting-point for Jacques le fataliste), as was Fielding, though the latter was most influential on Stendhal some decades later. Late in the century, the English ‘Gothic’ novel appealed to the readers of Baculard d'Arnaud or Mercier and to the spectators of the budding melodrama.

3. 19th and 20th Centuries

English and Scottish writing benefited from the Romantic celebration of Nordic literature, launched principally by Madame de Staël. Chateaubriand, who spent several years in England, admired and translated Paradise Lost and inserted several pages on English literature in his Mémoires d'outre-tombe. He gives pride of place to Byron, who was the only British Romantic poet to make much of a stir in France (though Pichot drew attention to the Lake poets, later important for Sainte-Beuve, and Stendhal was an admirer of Shelley). But the dominant British writer in France at this time (along with Shakespeare) was Walter Scott, who not only followed ‘Ossian’ in creating a Romantic image of Scotland, but provided a model for the historical novel which was followed by Vigny, Mérimée, and Hugo, and applied to the recent past by Stendhal and Balzac. None of the other great 19th-c. British novelists was to have a comparable impact, though Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot received considerable critical praise. De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was given new currency by Baudelaire.

North America had long been the subject of travel writing, and Chateaubriand, for instance, who travelled there in 1791-2, set his main fictional works in America. In the early 19th c. French opinion began gradually to take note of American writers, including Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. Then, in the 1850s, Baudelaire translated many of the writings of Poe, thus launching him on an extraordinary French career.

American literature, particularly the novel, has naturally occupied an ever-greater place on the French literary horizon. Particularly important was the French discovery of the modern American novel in the 1930s; Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dashiel Hammett, and others offered a mode of fiction very different from the traditional French psychological novel: fragmentation, simultaneous action, objective narration, ‘hard-boiled’ style, a ‘behaviourist’ view of human actions. Such techniques were praised and imitated by writers such as Malraux ( L'Espoir), Sartre (Le Sursis), and Camus ( L'Étranger). Faulkner in particular was very popular, and his influence can be seen in writers as diverse as Anne Hébert, Kateb Yacine, and Claude Simon. But perhaps the greatest single American contribution has been in the field of detective fiction. The Série Noire was from the outset dominated by translations from the American, just as the Hollywood thriller has been an inescapable model for the post-war cinema.

The impact of British and Irish writing has been more diffuse and difficult to pinpoint. At the end of the 19th c. writers such as Wilde and Swinburne found a following among the Symbolists and Decadents, and Proust translated Ruskin. Some 19th-c. writers were ‘rediscovered’ and acclaimed in the 20th c. because they offered something different from mainstream culture: Gide praised Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner; the maximalism of Wuthering Heights appealed to Georges Bataille and others; Hopkins won a following in the brilliant translations of Pierre Leyris; Lewis Carroll captivated the Surrealists; story-tellers and travel writers found inspiration in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. Certain 20th-c. critics and translators made a speciality of the British, notably Maurois, with his biographies of Byron, Shelley, and others, and Larbaud, who translated Joyce's Ulysses. This, with Finnegans Wake, has perhaps been the strongest single influence on experimental French writing, from the Surrealists to Perec, and the impact of Irish literature is reinforced by the work of Beckett, straddling two cultures. Most major British and Irish writers have had translators and admirers; it seems likely, for instance, that Sarraute found support for her explorations in the example of Virginia Woolf. There have also been writers, often resident in France, whose reputation has been greater there than in Britain, e.g. Graham Greene, Charles Morgan, Lawrence Durrell, and the Scottish poet Kenneth White. And, finally, British writing has been much used in areas where there were gaps in the native tradition: children's literature, for instance, or popular romance.

Certain major writers are conspicuous by their virtual absence from the French literary scene, for instance Burns and Austen. As for those who are present at the end of the 20th c., it is interesting to scan the list of those accorded the classic status of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Carroll, Conrad, Defoe, Dickens, Faulkner, Fielding, Hemingway, Joyce, Kipling, Poe, Shakespeare, Swift.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• F. C. Green, Minuet: A Critical Survey of French and English Literary Ideas in the Eighteenth Century (1935)
• P. van Tieghem, Les Influences étrangères sur la littérature française (1967)