French literature, one of the world's most brilliant, has been for centuries an impressive facet of French civilization, an object of national pride, and a principal focus for feelings of national identity. Because the French are a literate people, passionately interested in questions of language and in the exploration of ideas, the influence of French intellectuals on the course of French history during the last three centuries has been great, and remains so today. A high proportion of European literary trends have originated in France. The continuing prestige of literature in France is evidenced today by the innumerable private societies devoted to individual authors and by the large number of literary prizes awarded each year. A knowledge of French literature, in short, is the key to an understanding of the French people. THE MIDDLE AGES French literature began when writers started using the dialects that had evolved from the Latin spoken in the parts of the Roman Empire that would become France. 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 \Tchansons de geste\t. 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 \TChanson de Roland\t (12th century), which narrates the death of Charlemagne's nephew, Roland, in a rearguard action against the Saracens at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees. Exhibiting great skill in the differentiation of characters, this poem contributed to the awakening of a French national consciousness. The chansons were followed in the second half of the 12th century by the romans courtois, or tales of \Tcourtly love\t, which were written in verse in the Romance tongue and were intended to be read aloud before aristocratic audiences. Celebrating the heroism of knights fighting in honor of their ladies, many of these poems are set at King Arthur's court and are steeped in the Celtic mythology of Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales. Of particular importance was the Tristan and Iseult cycle, which, in its powerful, semimystical evocation of a love as strong as death, inspired poets in every part of Europe. Eventually, it served as the basis for Richard Wagner's great opera Tristan und Isolde (1865). The greatest poet in this tradition was \TChretien de Troyes\t, author of Erec, Lancelot, and Perceval. The lais were very short romans courtois, a genre to which \TMarie de France\t contributed many delightful examples. The single most significant medieval poem was the \TRoman de la Rose\t, whose first 4,000 lines were written about 1230 by \TGuillaume de Lorris\t in the courtly tradition; about 40 years later, Jean de Meung added 18,000 lines in a realistic, satirical vein. The allegorical quest of the Rose (the Lady) was to remain influential until the 17th century. Outside aristocratic circles a very different type of literature flourished. The FABLIAUX were short narratives in verse, simple, earthy, and bantering in tone, sparing no one, least of all women or clergy. \Lfable\ls, allegorical stories in which animals were used to satirize human characteristics or to point to a moral, were equally popular, the most celebrated of this type being \TReynard the Fox\t. The greatest French poet of the late medieval period was Francois \TVillon\t--thief, murderer, and prison inmate--whose alternately bitter, amusing, and deeply moving Testament (1461; Eng. trans., 1924) sounds a strangely modern note. In it are many examples of the \Tballade\t and the RONDEAU, forms in which Villon demonstrated his mastery. The Middle Ages also saw the development of history as a prose genre. Geoffroi de \TVillehardouin\t, in his Conquest of Constantinople (c.1207; Eng. trans., 1829), gave an eyewitness account of the sacking of the Byzantine capital in 1204 by western crusaders en route to the Holy Land. Jean Sire de \TJoinville\t acted as memorialist of Louis IX's disastrous crusade (1248-52) in Egypt, completing his entertaining Histoire de Saint Louis in 1309 (Eng. trans., 1807). Jean \TFroissart\t's Chronicles (Eng. trans., 1523-25) vividly evoke the barbarities of the Hundred Years' War as it was fought between 1325 and 1400. The Memoirs (1489-90, 1497-98; Eng. trans., 1596) of Philippe de COMMYNES, dealing with the reigns of Louis XI and Charles VIII, reveal a truer historian, one more concerned with the hidden causes of events than with mere chronicling. THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE A third of the way into the 16th century, Francois \TRabelais\t, 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's contemporaries (see \TGargantua and Pantagruel\t). 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 \TCalvin\t. 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 \TMontaigne\t, who in the second half of the 16th century invented a genre, the familiar \Tessay\t, 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 \Tdu Bellay\t 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 \TRonsard\t, the uncontested leader of the constellation of poets called the \TPleiade\t. 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 \TAcademie Francaise\t 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 \Tclassicism\t by 1660. The components of this creed would be codified by Nicolas \TBoileau-Despreaux\t, 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 \TCorneille\t, 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 \TRacine\t, 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, \TMoliere\t, 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 Cleves (1678; Eng. trans., 1925), a concise psychological analysis of a moral problem in married life, the Comtesse de \TLa Fayette\t 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 \TSevigne\t, who in her correspondence created definitive models of letter writing; the Duc de \TLa Rochefoucauld\t, whose Maxims (1665; Eng. trans., 1694) wittily analyzed human motives in terms of self-interest; and Jean de \TLa Bruyere\t, 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 \TLa Fontaine\t 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 \TSaint-Simon\t, La Rochefoucauld, and Cardinal de Retz. The enormously influential \TDiscourse on Method\t (1637) not only established its author, Rene \TDescartes\t, 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 \TPascal\t. His Lettres provinciales (1656-57; Eng. trans., 1816) demonstrated the devastating effectiveness of a simplicity informed by intelligence and wit, whereas the Pensees (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 \TBossuet\t. His Quietist opponent, Francois \TFenelon\t, 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 \Tphilosophes\t. Probably no other country or century has witnessed such a concentration of intellectual talent as that represented by the French \TEnlightenment\t. Pierre \TBayle\t, 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 \TVoltaire\t 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. \TMontesquieu\t 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 \TDiderot\t to which the best minds of the age contributed: Jean d'\TAlembert\t, Baron d'\THolbach\t, Etienne de \TCondillac\t, Anne Robert Jacques \TTurgot\t, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Jean Jacques \TRousseau\t, 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 \Tromanticism\t 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 \TLesage\t'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 \TSmollett\t and Henry \TFielding\t. In Manon Lescaut (1731; Eng. trans., 1738), the Abbe \TPrevost\t 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 \TMarivaux\t 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 \TBeaumarchais\t 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. Andre \TChenier\t, 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 \TChateaubriand\t 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 \TStael\t, 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 \Tconstant\t'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 \TLamartine\t, 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 \TVigny\t, who came to prominence with his Poemes antiques et modernes (1826); Alfred de \TMusset\t, known alike for his Byronic poetry--alternately impish and moving--and his affair with George \Tsand\t, herself a romantic novelist and early feminist; and the giant among them, Victor \THugo\t, 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 Theophile \TGautier\t, a onetime enthusiast whose art-for-art's-sake credo announced the arrival of the \TParnassians\t, a group of poets infatuated with formal perfection and objectivity and hostile to the romantics' subjective effusions. Led by Charles Marie \TLeconte de Lisle\t in the 1860s, the Parnassians saw their ideals best realized in the sonnet collection Les Trophees (1893; Eng. trans., 1897) of Jose Maria de \THeredia\t. Influenced by the Parnassians but determined to create beauty even out of the horrors of life, Charles \TBaudelaire\t 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 \TRimbaud\t, 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 \TVerlaine\t 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). Stephane \TMallarme\t, 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 (see \Tsymbolism\t, literature) 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. \TStendhal\t, 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 \TDumas\t pere, 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 Miserables (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 Honore de \TBalzac\t, 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 \Trealism\t that won the day in the second half of the century. This was most triumphantly realized in Gustave \TFlaubert\t'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 \TMaupassant\t, 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, Emile \TZola\t 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 \Tnaturalism\t whose influence as a movement it spanned. History and criticism also came to maturity during the 19th century. Jules \TMichelet\t, 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 \TTocqueville\t, 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 \TSainte-Beuve\t, 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 \TRenan\t established modern critical methods in France. Simultaneously, the philosopher and historian Hippolyte \TTaine\t, 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 pere. These were followed in popularity by the \Lwell-made play\ls of Eugene \TScribe\t, Victorien \TSardou\t, and Alexandre \TDumas\t fils, who also defended social theses. THE 20TH CENTURY The 20th century in France has been characterized by a tremendous expansion in literary output and the ever-faster pace of experimentation with new means of expression. Both Marxism and Freudianism have left a deep imprint on literature, as on all the arts. Two world wars have tried France sorely, while the technological revolution confronts the current generation with an altogether new world. The result of such profound socioeconomic and political change has been a continuous questioning of all moral, intellectual, and artistic traditions. In poetry, symbolism continued to serve as an inspiration without stifling new departures. Paul \TClaudel\t, notable as both dramatist and poet, injected a mystical Catholicism into his masterpiece, Five Great Odes (1904-10; Eng. trans., 1967). Paul \TValery\t became famous for delicate poems that were at once meditative, musical, and rich in imagery. Guillaume \TApollinaire\t deliberately aimed for modernity in his poetry, which was full of whimsical surprises. He not only coined the term surrealist but in The Breasts of Tiresias (1918; Eng. trans., 1961) produced the first surrealist play. Under the leadership of Andre \TBreton\t, the movement's theorist, \Tsurrealism\t aimed for a complete revolution in poetry and the visual arts to be achieved through an exploration of the subconscious, considered as poetry's deepest source. A rejuvenator of poetic imagination, surrealism launched, among others, the poet and novelist Louis \TAragon\t, although Aragon after 1930 found inspiration in his Marxist beliefs. The novel thrived especially during the first half of the century. Anatole \TFrance\t kept the tradition of political satire alive with his allegorical spoof, Penguin Island (1908; Eng. trans., 1909). Romain \TRolland\t, with his 10-volume Jean-Christophe (1904-12; Eng. trans., 1910-13), followed later by Jules \TRomains\t with his even larger Men of Good Will series (27 vols., 1932-47; Eng. trans. in 14 vols., 1933-46), demonstrated the continuing popularity of the roman-fleuve, or cyclical novel, in France. Andre \TGide\t, from The Immoralist (1902; Eng. trans., 1930) through The Counterfeiters (1926; Eng. trans., 1927), novels that are still compelling, championed the individual at war with conventional morality. France's greatest 20th-century novelist, however, was Marcel \TProust\t, the extent of whose contributions to the genre can be compared only with those of James Joyce. In the multivolume, multilevel Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27; Eng. trans., 1922-31), Proust sought to recapture the essence of lost time, for him a spiritual reality, through reconstructing the external shape or sensations of the past; the whole was narrated chiefly by means of an interior monologue. Working on a smaller canvas, \TColette\t produced short novels that shrewdly analyzed the complexities of intimate relations, while Francois \TMauriac\t took as his special preserve, in a series of novels influenced by his Catholicism, the eternal battle between spirit and flesh. Two of the freshest voices in the decade before World War II belonged to Louis Ferdinand \TCeline\t, whose cynical, often scurrilous Journey to the End of Night (1932; Eng. trans., 1934) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936; Eng. trans., 1938) spoke for the fascism to come, and to the then politically radical adventurer-writer Andre \TMalraux\t in Man's Fate (1933; Eng. trans., 1934) and Man's Hope (1937; Eng. trans., 1938). Philosophical \Texistentialism\t dominated literature in postwar France, spilling over into the novel as onto the stage. Jean Paul \TSartre\t, leader of the movement, had previously explained its tenets (namely, the human freedom to choose and to forge one's own values) in the novel Nausea (1938; Eng. trans., 1949), the play No Exit (1944; Eng. trans., 1946), and a trilogy of novels dealing with World War II. Its themes would be echoed by others, most notably by Albert \TCamus\t in The Stranger (1942; Eng. trans., 1946) and The Plague (1947; Eng. trans., 1948), in which the absurdity, or meaninglessness, of life is stressed. Simone de \TBeauvoir\t, Sartre's lifelong friend and disciple, also dealt with existentialist problems in her novels but is probably best known for her massive treatise on the status of women, The Second Sex (1949; Eng. trans., 1952), and a series of distinguished memoirs. From the 1950s, the dominant trend was the \Tnew novel\t, or antinovel, as represented by Nathalie \TSarraute\t, Michel \TButor\t, and Alain \TRobbe-Grillet\t. Although these authors have no common doctrine, all reject plot and verisimilitude as traditionally understood. Their work, allied with new insights provided initially by the adherents of \Tstructuralism\t, has had a marked effect on literary expression, analysis, and criticism (as for example, in the work of Roland \TBarthes\t and Jacques \TDerrida\t. The French theater, perhaps more than any other form, illustrates the profound literary revolution that has swept France since the days of Edmond \TRostand\t's flamboyant Cyrano de Bergerac (1897; Eng. trans., 1937). The poetical plays of Jean \TGiraudoux\t, especially the astringent Madwoman of Chaillot (1945; Eng. trans., 1947), continued to appeal to postwar audiences, as did the productions of Jean \TAnouilh\t, some smiling, some ferocious. But with Eugene \TIonesco\t's The Bald Soprano (1950; Eng. trans., 1958), an altogether new drama, called the \Ttheater of the absurd\t, came into being, marking a sharp break with the past. Samuel \TBeckett\t best exemplified both the strengths and limits of this theater in Waiting for Godot (1953; Eng. trans., 1954) and Endgame (1957; Eng. trans., 1958). In these two plays the sets, the characters, and language itself disintegrate into an awesome void. The plays of Jean \TGenet\t, such as The Balcony (1956; Eng. trans., 1958) and The Blacks (1958; Eng. trans., 1960), also aim at destruction, but in a fuller, more theatrical, sacramental way. Yet however baffling and depressing these productions are, there can be no doubt that they powerfully illuminate the underlying somber concerns of the present era. Above all, they testify to the ever-present originality and vitality of French literature and confirm its enviable avant-garde role. Jean Boorsch Bibliography: Atkinson, Geoffrey, and Keller, Abraham C., Prelude to the Enlightenment: French Literature 1690-1740 (1971); Atkinson, Geoffrey, The Sentimental Revolution: French Writers of 1690-1740 (1966); Balakian, Anna, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (1959; rev. ed. 1970); Becker, Lucille F., 20th Century French Women Novelists (1989); Birkett, Jennifer, Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France, 1870-1914 (1987); Bree, Germaine, 20th Century French Literature, 1920-70 (1983); Brereton, Geoffrey, A Short History of French Literature, 2d ed. (1976); Brombert, Victor: The Hidden Reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert (1988); Broome, Peter, and Chesters, Graham, The Appreciation of Modern French Poetry, 1850-1950 (1976); Cazamian, L. F., A History of French Literature (1955; repr. 1967); Crocker, Lester G., ed., The Age of Enlightenment (1969); Crosland, Jesse, Medieval French Literature (1956); Cruickshank, John, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (1959); Engler, Winfried, The French Novel, from 1800 to the Present, trans. by Alexander Gode (1969); Esslin, Martin, The Theater of the Absurd (1961; rev. ed. 1973); Fowlie, Wallace, Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to Contemporary French Theater (1960), French Literature: Its History and Its Meaning (1973) and Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism (1990); France, Peter, Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to Diderot (1972); Frank, Grace, The Medieval French Drama (1972); Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (1966-69); Guicharnaud, Jacques and June, Modern French Theater (1967); Hollier, Denis, ed., A New History of French Literature (1989); LeGoff, Jacques, The Medieval Imagination (1988); Lough, John, An Introduction to 17th Century France (1954; rev. ed. 1969); Maurois, Andre, From Proust to Camus, trans. by Carl Morse and Renaud Bruce (1968); Moore, W. G., French Achievement in Literature (1969) and French Classical Literature (1965); Mornet, Daniel, French Thought in the 18th Century, trans. by Lawrence M. Levin (1929; repr. 1969); Mylne, Vivienne, The Eighteenth Century French Novel (1965); Peyre, Henri, French Novelists of Today (1967) and What is Romanticism? (1977); Picon, Gaetan, Contemporary French Literature: 1945 and After (1974); Robinson, Christopher, French Literature in the 20th Century (1980); Stone, Donald, France in the 16th Century (1969); Waelti-Walters, Jennifer, Feminist Novelists of the Belle Epoque (1990).