Pieces of fiction shorter than the novel have generally been known in France by two names: conte and nouvelle; these two forms can further be distinguished from such didactic short narratives as the exemplum and the fable. The term conte suggests the relation to the oral conte populaire, or folk-tale, and it tends to mean a short story containing supernatural or otherwise improbable elements. Nouvelle, on the other hand, is frequently used for longer, more literary narratives of real, contemporary life. The distinction is often unclear, particularly in the 19th c. Mérimée, in a single sentence, refers to his La Vénus d'Ille as both conte and nouvelle.
The medieval verse fabliau and lai may be seen as French ancestors of short prose fiction. The nouvelle first makes its appearance in the 15th c., notably in the successful Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, a collection of mainly bawdy stories modelled on Boccaccio's Decameron. Similar collections followed over the next 100 years, including the Grand paragon des nouvelles nouvelles et délectables (c.1535) of Nicolas de Troyes, the Nouvelles récréations of Des Périers, the rustic tales of Du Fail, and above all the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre, where traditional fabliau material sits alongside more serious stories, the whole sequence being enclosed, like the Decameron, by a frame of courtly conversation.
In the 17th c. the influence of Spanish models became more important, in particular that of Cervantes. Spanish stories were translated, adapted, and imitated by writers such as Scarron, Sorel, and Segrais, the last of whom offers a definition and defence of the genre in the Nouvelles françaises of 1658. At this time the nouvelle is seen as a short novel, coming as a welcome relief from the interminable roman héroïque; Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, now thought of as a key work in the history of the French novel, was known in its day as a nouvelle historique. The second half of the 17th c. saw a flowering of such medium-length ‘historical’ narratives, often extravagant stories of love and adventure, by authors such as Saint-Réal, Villedieu, La Roche-Guilem, Boursault, and Le Noble. At the same time, in a different vein, La Fontaine's Contes offer elegant verse treatments of the rather disreputable old repertory.
Contes en vers continued to be written throughout the following century; Gresset's Ver-vert is a good example of this entertaining genre. More generally, the 18th c. was a golden age for the conte. The success of two of the great classics of the genre, Perrault's Histoires ou contes and Galland's Les Mille et une Nuits, launched a vogue for fairy-tales and then oriental tales (d'Aulnoy, Caylus, Gueulette, Le Prince de Beaumont, Cazotte, etc.). These might explore psychological subtleties, but made little claim to verisimilitude. They were generally light-hearted, often parodic; a vein of ‘libertine’ story-telling was exploited by many writers, from Crébillon fils (Le Sopha) to Denon (Point de lendemain).
A notable 18th-c. development was the use of the non-realistic conte to explore philosophical questions. Voltaire's contes philosophiques, the summit of his work, range from brief squibs such as the Voyages de Scarmentado to the full-scale narratives of Zadig, Candide, or La Princesse de Babylone, series of contes linked by a search for meaning and happiness. More realistic anecdotes illustrating moral questions abound in Diderot's writings, mostly embedded in longer novels or dialogues. In a similar spirit, in the second half of the 18th c. Marmontel's Contes moraux helped revive the fortunes of the nouvelle. The material is not always original, but such writers as Loaisel de Tréogate,
The 19th c. saw the greatest flowering of short prose fiction in France. It has been argued, somewhat dramatically, that the modern short story was born in France in the 1830s, and Baudelaire in his introduction to Poe gave one of the best accounts of the appeal of the short nouvelle, the equivalent in prose of the brief and intensely experienced lyric poem. Innumerable stories were published in the many newly established periodicals and newspapers, in ‘keepsakes’ (anthologies of pieces in prose and verse), and in collective publications of which the most famous was the Soirées de Médan. Almost all the great novelists and poets of the Romantic period (Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Gautier, Stendhal, Sand, etc.) wrote contes and nouvelles, as did the Realists and Naturalists (Flaubert, Gobineau, Erckmann-Chatrian, Zola) and writers of the fin de siècle (Barbey d'Aurevilly, Bloy, France). Some important writers, moreover, made their name as authors of short stories (even if they themselves attached more significance to their longer works); these include Nodier, Alphonse Daudet, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and above all Mérimée and Maupassant.
It is a sign of the lack of prestige of the short story that the masterly work of both Mérimée and Maupassant has been less praised and studied than the novels of the period. Their stories range from the short novel (e.g. Colomba) to the brief comic anecdote (e.g. Maupassant's ‘Toine’). Maupassant is particularly remarkable for his attempt to maintain the oral character of the conte by way of frame stories, internal narrators, and the like—though his work remains poles apart from the folk-tale. Both writers make use of short fiction to explore exotic or unfamiliar cultures (in the case of Maupassant, the world of the Normandy peasants), and both, though in very different ways, exploit the fantastic vein of horror and mystery so characteristic of their time.
Since Maupassant, the prestige of the conte or nouvelle has declined. Short stories continue to be written and read in quite large numbers, but they rarely win the prizes which dominate the French literary scene. No 20th-c. authors of short fiction have quite matched the achievement of their 19th-c. predecessors. Even so, the genre has been variously illustrated by (among many others) Aymé's humorous tales, the stories of Pergaud, Morand, and Dabit, the surreal fictions of Supervielle and Mandiargues, Yourcenar's Nouvelles orientales (1938), Gripari's merry children's stories, and the many collections of Arland, one of the century's most dedicated short-story writers. The conte philosophique has been revived in a new form: Sartre (Le Mur) and Camus (L'Exil et le royaume) use thematically grouped collections to explore existential dilemmas, while Tournier, in his Le Coq de bruyère (1978), offers iconoclastic reworkings of old myths and legends. Meanwhile, in francophone countries overseas many writers, from Birago
[Peter France]
Bibliography
- M. Sachs (ed.), The French Short Story in the Nineteenth Century (1969)
- R. Godenne, La Nouvelle française (1974); A. Martin (ed.), Anthologie du conte en France, 1750-1799 (1981)
