Novel in France, The [for other francophone countries see relevant entries]
1. Romance and Novel before 1700
French has only one term, roman, for the English ‘romance’ and ‘novel’. The French novel both continues the medieval romance and defines itself against it. In the 16th c., romance is best represented by Amadis de Gaule, the butt of Cervantes's mockery in Don Quixote, the founding text of the modern novel. Rabelais's unclassifiable work can be seen both as an ‘anti-roman’ in its parody of epic and romance, and (with Bakhtin) as a novel in its bringing together of the varied and conflicting voices of contemporary society.
Similarly, one important strand in the 17th-c. novel is the comic tradition, though this comes nowhere near the greatness of Cervantes or Rabelais. The best examples are Sorel's Francion and Le Berger extravagant, Scarron's Roman comique, and Furetière's Roman bourgeois; these novels, all written by men, mock the heroic or romantic pretensions of contemporary fiction, giving an often grotesque image of the reality of ordinary life.
The very existence of such novels, as of Boileau's skittish Dialogue des héros de roman, shows the continuing popularity of romance, which had flourished from the end of the Wars of Religion. In the 1620s Jean-Pierre Camus began a series of spiritual romances in which tragic events are meant to give the lie to the illusions of profane fiction. Probably the most influential novel of the century, however, was d'Urfé's pastoral L' Astrée; equally popular were the
The same concerns are visible in the shorter works set in the recent past which became popular around 1660. Called nouvelles historiques by their contemporaries [see Short Fiction], these are often misleadingly seen as the ‘beginning of the French novel’, in particular the one 17th-c. work of fiction to achieve classic status, Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves. This stands out by virtue of its clear-eyed concentration on the problems of love and marriage, but ‘les désordres de l'amour’ are also the central subject of the novellas of Segrais (with the duchesse de Montpensier) and Villedieu, and of the intense Lettres portugaises.
2. Eighteenth Century
The novel, not being a genre vouched for by antiquity, was the object of suspicion and some contempt in the period of classicism. It was a corrupting influence, concerned with love at the expense of more serious matters, and it was guilty of presenting fictions as historical truths. In 1670 Huet had defended it as a poem in prose, but throughout the 18th c., as more and more novels were written [see Bibliothèque Universelle des Romans], novelists continued to worry about the authenticity of their work. It is revealing that the dominant forms were the memoir-novel and the epistolary novel, where fiction can be presented as a ‘real-life’ document (Rousseau deliberately entertained such confusion about his La Nouvelle Héloïse).
There are separate entries for both the memoir-novel (illustrated above all by Lesage, Marivaux, Prévost, Crébillon fils, Duclos, Diderot, Restif, and Sade) and the epistolary novel (practised with varying degrees of success by Montesquieu, Graffigny, Rousseau, Riccoboni, and Laclos, among others). Third-person narratives were unusual at this time, and few if any display the narrative stance of a Fielding or of the major 19th-c. novelists. Diderot's Jacques le fataliste, largely in dialogue form, is a unique exploration of the possibilities of the novel.
Both social and psychological observation characterize the 18th-c. novel. Writers such as Lesage, Diderot, and Marivaux devote themselves to evoking ordinary contemporary life, the life of the city, the road, and the inn, of the different social classes, while the psychological concerns of Lafayette are taken further by Marivaux, Riccoboni, Crébillon, Laclos, and many others. In the last two writers, as in Duclos, Restif, and particularly Sade, there is a libertin element characteristic of this period [see also Dulaurens; Fougeret de Monbron; Louvet de Couvray; Eroticism and Pornography]. Often, as with Diderot and Sade, the libertin strain is allied with the ‘philosophical’, and throughout the century writers use fiction for persuasive purposes, the most striking examples being Fénelon's modern didactic epic, Télémaque, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, Voltaire's stories, and La Nouvelle Héloïse (where a passionate romance grows into a novel of ideas).
3. Nineteenth Century
Sociological and technological changes brought a huge growth in the novel-reading public in this period. Appealing to a wide audience, writers such as Pigault-Lebrun or Ducray-Duminil launched what Sainte-Beuve was to describe superciliously as ‘la littérature industrielle’ (Stendhal, thinking of writers like Madame de Genlis, wrote equally scornfully of the ‘roman de femme de chambre’). New periodicals such as Girardin's La Presse allowed for the rise of the best-selling romans-feuilletons of Sue and others. Then bookseller-publishers (Hetzel, Hachette) improved the marketing of inexpensive novels, using such outlets as the new railway stations (whence the idea of the ‘roman de gare’). Nor was there an unbridgeable gap between popular and literary novels; Madame Bovary was first published serially, Balzac, Dumas père, Zola, and Verne profited from the new system to achieve earnings unthinkable for their 18th-c. predecessors. The 19th and 20th c. saw such a large and varied production of novels in France that it is only possible here to indicate some of the main writers, tendencies, and sub-genres.
The early years of the 19th c. saw several remarkable novels of individual experience, often written in the first person, usually about love (Chateaubriand, Constant, Senancour, Staël); this line was later developed by Musset, Sainte-Beuve, and Fromentin. The dominant type, however, was the novel where a number of powerful figures are seen in a broad social context; the writer's ambition was to be for modern society what Walter Scott was for the past, chronicling its conflicts, diversity, and evolution. This tradition is best represented in the first half of the century by Stendhal and, above all, Balzac, who was the first to conceive of a whole collection of novels forming a unified ‘comédie humaine’. Sand's stories of rural life are likewise contemporary chronicles, but her novels are generally more personal and more idealistic.
Something of the same realistic ambition is present in Flaubert, though he repudiated the label of Realism adopted by Champfleury and Duranty, and has been most influential as the precursor of the modern art novel, concerned above all with the language and the difficulties of representation. His disciple Maupassant and other Naturalists (the Goncourt brothers, A. Daudet, Huysmans, and, by far the greatest, Zola) concentrated on the depressing side of contemporary life, depicting victims rather than heroes. At the same time, following
History was a prime source of colour and excitement. Many writers used the novel to explore the national past (Vigny, Mérimée, Balzac, Dumas, Erckmann-Chatrian). Hugo in particular spans French history from the Middle Ages ( Notre-Dame de Paris) to the early 19th c. ( Les Misérables, one of the greatest of French novels). The political commitment of much of Hugo's work is found in very different forms in the work of Sand, Vallès, and Darien.
4. Twentieth Century
In the 20th c. classification becomes very difficult, and the placing of writers in what follows could easily be challenged. Certain popular sub-genres are easily identified, including detective fiction, whether in the French or American mode, the roman noir, and science fiction. The roman d'aventure is a more composite category; in the novels of Malraux or Saint-Exupéry it becomes something more ambitious than a story of heroic action.
Historical fiction has been less important than in the 19th c., though one can cite the work of France and Yourcenar, among others. The chronicle of more or less contemporary life continues to attract writers and readers. A special development was the roman-fleuve practised in the early 20th c. by Martin du Gard, Rolland, and Duhamel. Other novels with a strong element of social or political observation include those of J. Renard, Aragon, Dabit, Nizan, Guilloux, and Curtis—and in a more fantastic vein the early work of Céline, who in spite of political opprobrium has emerged as one of the most important novelists of the century. A particular place is occupied by the ‘regional’ novel; see e.g. the fiction of Pergaud, Aymé, Pourrat, Clancier, Bosco, to whom one might add Mauriac and Giono, if the label did not seem too limiting for their work.
The figure who dominates the landscape of the 20th-c. novel is Proust, though his solitary eminence was not immediately apparent. Though A la recherche du temps perdu found no direct imitators, it was to be crucially important for the Nouveau Roman. At first, however, it was seen as belonging to the tradition of social observation and psychological analysis. A concentration on individual psychology is also evident in such different writers as Bourget, Colette, Radiguet, Mauriac, Green, and Drieu la Rochelle. In some cases the exploration of inner worlds leads into a more fantastic, poetic world. Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes is an influential novel of this kind, as are the very dis-similar works of Giraudoux, Gracq, Cocteau, Breton, Mandiargues, Des Forets, and Vian.
A feature of much 20th-c. fiction, including some of that already mentioned, is its philosophical or ideological nature. This is already evident in Barrès and Gide, both crucial figures for many writers in the first half of the century. From 1920 novelists including Malraux, Drieu, Mauriac, Bernanos, Saint-Exupéry, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus used the genre to raise metaphysical, moral, and political questions, and sometimes to suggest answers. Sartre and his allies proposed a politically committed novel [see Engagement], usually on the side of the Left [see e.g. Vailland]; against this, writers such as the Hussards group defended a ‘non-aligned’ (often right-wing) stance.
Against both of these, the 1950s saw the rise of the apolitical Nouveau Roman. Rejecting a caricatural ‘roman balzacien’, the writers grouped under this label followed the self-reflexive, experimental line which springs from masters including Flaubert, Proust,
The Nouveau Roman was the last great movement to affect French fiction; with its critical approach to traditional story-telling, it seemed to some to portend the ‘death of the novel’—a recurring phrase in recent decades. But the novel has not died; indeed, it continues to dominate the literary scene to excess, and captures almost all the important prizes. In recent decades francophone novels from abroad have been at least as interesting as those produced in France. In France itself, the novelists who have attracted most critical attention since about 1960 include Cixous, Echenoz, Ernaux, Hervé Guibert, Le Clézio, Modiano, Christiane Rochefort, Tournier, and Wittig. Such a list is bound to be invidious, but it suggests something of the continuing variety and vitality of the genre.
[Peter France]
Bibliography
- H. Coulet, Le Roman jusqu'à la Révolution, 2 vols. (1967)
- M. Raimond, Le Roman depuis la Révolution (1967)
- M. Robert, Roman des origines, origines du roman (1972)
