French, with the hard part named

French appears on parchment before France exists: the first text is an oath sworn between two grandsons of Charlemagne. For the four centuries that follow, literature is sung rather than read — epics along the pilgrim roads, love poetry in castle courtyards. Spelling is not yet fixed, so one word may be copied five different ways.

• Serments de Strasbourg

  Louis le Germanique & Charles le Chauve · 842

  Not literature but a political oath, and yet the oldest surviving sentence of French.

• La Chanson de Roland

  Anonyme · ~1100

  The oldest French epic. Its hero dies halfway through, and the rest of the poem is the revenge.

• Lais

  Marie de France · ~1170

  The first named woman writer in French. Twelve short verse tales, most of them about love that is not permitted.

• Perceval ou le Conte du Graal

  Chrétien de Troyes · ~1180

  The romance that brought the Grail into European literature, and breaks off unfinished when its author died.

• Le Roman de Renart

  Anonyme · ~1175

  A fox outwitting a court of animals. The modern French word for fox, renard, comes from the character’s name.

• Le Roman de la Rose

  Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meung · 1230–1275

  Two authors forty years apart, the second half arguing against the first. The most copied book of the French Middle Ages.

• Le Livre de la Cité des dames

  Christine de Pizan · 1405

  Its author was the first woman in Europe to live by her pen, and the book answers back to the misogyny of her contemporaries.

• Le Testament

  François Villon · 1461

  Poetry by a thief once sentenced to hang. Its plain, bitter voice is nothing like the court verse of the same years.

This is the century that decides French can do everything Latin does. An ordinance of 1539 requires all administrative documents to be written in French, and ten years later a group of poets publishes a manifesto claiming the language for high literature too. Printing spreads, and for the first time authors write for readers rather than listeners.

• Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts

  François Ier · 1539

  Not a literary work but the document that changed the language’s fortunes: from here the courts and the state wrote in French, not Latin.

• Gargantua

  François Rabelais · 1534

  A tale of giants, written in an unrestrained French full of invented words. Condemned by the Sorbonne, and still read.

• Défense et illustration de la langue française

  Joachim Du Bellay · 1549

  The manifesto demanding that French be used for serious poetry, not only for everyday speech.

• Les Amours

  Pierre de Ronsard · 1552

  The love sequence that brought the Italian sonnet into French and set the music of French verse for two centuries.

• Œuvres

  Louise Labé · 1555

  Love poetry from the woman’s side, published under her own name in Lyon — a rarity at the time.

• L’Heptaméron

  Marguerite de Navarre · 1559

  Seventy-two tales inside a frame story, after Boccaccio. Its author was the sister of the king of France.

• Essais

  Michel de Montaigne · 1580

  The book that invented the essay, and the word for it. Its author kept revising it for the last twenty years of his life.

• Les Regrets

  Joachim Du Bellay · 1558

  Written in Rome and homesick. Its plain, sorrowing voice is the opposite of the same author’s ringing manifesto nine years earlier.

The century of rules: drama obeys the three unities, verse counts twelve syllables, and an academy is founded in 1635 to look after the language. The paradox is that within those tight bounds appear the sharpest plays and the cleanest prose French has produced. Most of it was written for the court, and much of it opened in front of the king.

• Le Cid

  Pierre Corneille · 1637

  A huge success, criticised by the Academy for breaking the rules. The quarrel around it fixed the law of French drama for a century.

• Discours de la méthode

  René Descartes · 1637

  Written in French rather than Latin, deliberately, so that ordinary readers could follow. Startlingly clear for a work of philosophy.

• Tartuffe

  Molière · 1664

  Banned from the stage for five years for touching religious hypocrisy. The character’s name is now a common noun in French.

• Maximes

  François de La Rochefoucauld · 1665

  Over five hundred short maxims arguing that every virtue conceals self-interest. Each stands alone on the page.

• Fables

  Jean de La Fontaine · 1668–1694

  Verse fables that every French schoolchild learns a few of. Animals on the surface, the court underneath.

• Pensées

  Blaise Pascal · 1670

  Loose notes towards a book never written. Published after his death, and strongest precisely where it is unfinished.

• Phèdre

  Jean Racine · 1677

  A tragedy built from about two thousand words, far fewer than his contemporaries used, and still the summit of French verse drama.

• La Princesse de Clèves

  Madame de La Fayette · 1678

  Often called Europe’s first psychological novel. Published anonymously, and its author never publicly claimed it.

Literature becomes an instrument of argument. Censorship pushes books abroad to be printed and smuggled back, or out under false names and invented addresses. At the same time French becomes the diplomatic language of Europe — the courts of Russia, Prussia and Sweden all use it. The Encyclopédie took twenty years and was suppressed more than once.

• Lettres persanes

  Montesquieu · 1721

  Two Persians visit Paris and write home. The outsider’s eye lets the book mock France and still pass the censor.

• Manon Lescaut

  Abbé Prévost · 1731

  A love story that ends in total ruin. Banned on publication, and the most widely read forbidden novel of the century.

• Encyclopédie

  Denis Diderot & Jean le Rond d’Alembert · 1751–1772

  Twenty-eight volumes and more than a hundred contributors. It set out to gather all knowledge, and placed the crafts beside theology.

• Candide

  Voltaire · 1759

  Thirty short chapters, one disaster each, told deadpan. Written in three days, by its author’s account.

• Du contrat social

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762

  Its opening sentence on man being born free is among the most quoted in French. The book was burned in Geneva, its author’s home city.

• Les Liaisons dangereuses

  Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · 1782

  A novel made entirely of letters, each one a move in a game. Its author was an artillery officer who wrote only this.

• Le Mariage de Figaro

  Beaumarchais · 1784

  A comedy in which a servant argues his master down. Louis XVI banned it for three years before relenting; five years later came the revolution.

• Les Confessions

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1782

  The first modern autobiography: it reports the shameful parts not to excuse them but to display them. Published after his death.

The novel becomes the dominant form, partly because newspapers serialised fiction and paid by the line. Writers wrote long, wrote fast, and wrote for a newly literate middle class. Poetry went the other way: shorter, harder, deliberately turning from the public. In 1857 two trials brought a novel and a book of verse before the courts as offences against public morals.

• Le Rouge et le Noir

  Stendhal · 1830

  A poor young man using the church as a ladder. Dry, fast prose, closer to journalism than to the literature of its day.

• Le Père Goriot

  Honoré de Balzac · 1835

  One link in the near-hundred-volume Comédie humaine, where characters move between novels as though through a real city.

• Madame Bovary

  Gustave Flaubert · 1857

  Its author was tried for it and acquitted. He would spend a week on a single page to find one right word.

• Les Fleurs du mal

  Charles Baudelaire · 1857

  Six poems were struck out by court order, a ruling not overturned until 1949. The collection opened the way for all modern French poetry.

• Les Misérables

  Victor Hugo · 1862

  Written largely in exile, its author having opposed Napoleon III. It runs to more than fifteen hundred pages.

• Une saison en enfer

  Arthur Rimbaud · 1873

  Its author finished it at nineteen, then abandoned literature altogether and traded in Africa for the rest of his life.

• Germinal

  Émile Zola · 1885

  Its author went down the pits and took notes before writing. The thirteenth of a twenty-volume cycle following one family.

• Bel-Ami

  Guy de Maupassant · 1885

  A journalist rising through women and rumour. Short, clear sentences make it the easiest way into the nineteenth century.

Two wars and decolonisation break every old convention. The novel drops plot, the theatre drops action, poetry drops rhyme. At the same time French begins to be written by people who are not French — from Martinique, from Senegal, from Algeria — using the language of the ruler to write about being ruled.

• À la recherche du temps perdu

  Marcel Proust · 1913–1927

  Seven volumes, more than three thousand pages, and the longest sentences in French prose. The first volume was turned down by several publishers.

• Manifeste du surréalisme

  André Breton · 1924

  A manifesto calling for automatic writing, letting the unconscious lead the pen. Its reach went far beyond literature, into painting and film.

• Voyage au bout de la nuit

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1932

  It brought slang and the rhythm of street speech into the novel. Its author later wrote antisemitic pamphlets, and his legacy remains bitterly contested.

• Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

  Aimé Césaire · 1939

  A long poem written from Martinique that coined the idea of négritude. One of the founding texts of postcolonial writing in French.

• L’Étranger

  Albert Camus · 1942

  It uses the spoken past tense instead of the literary one, so the written language sits close to speech. Set in French Algiers.

• Le Deuxième Sexe

  Simone de Beauvoir · 1949

  A two-volume study of women’s condition, placed on the Vatican’s index of forbidden books. Its line that one is not born a woman is quoted everywhere.

• En attendant Godot

  Samuel Beckett · 1952

  Its author was Irish and wrote directly in French, to strip himself of the fluency his own language gave him.

• La Vie mode d’emploi

  Georges Perec · 1978

  Ninety-nine chapters describing a Paris building along a knight’s tour of a chessboard. Its author once wrote an entire novel without the letter e.

The centre of gravity moves away from Paris. Over the past forty years the Goncourt has gone to writers born in Morocco, Senegal, Congo and Vietnam, which reflects where French is actually spoken. Within France the characteristic form is autobiography crossed with research: the author treats their own life as social evidence rather than as a private story.

• L’Amant

  Marguerite Duras · 1984

  Set in Sa Đéc and Chợ Lớn in the 1930s. It won the Goncourt, and is the French novel closest to a Vietnamese reader.

• Léon l’Africain

  Amin Maalouf · 1986

  A Lebanese author writing in French about a sixteenth-century traveller moving between the Muslim and Christian worlds.

• Dora Bruder

  Patrick Modiano · 1997

  It reconstructs the life of a Jewish girl who vanished in 1941 from a few lines of a missing-person notice. Its author received the Nobel in 2014.

• Verre Cassé

  Alain Mabanckou · 2005

  The whole book runs without a single full stop, only commas. It is set in a Congolese bar.

• Les Années

  Annie Ernaux · 2008

  A memoir written in on rather than je: one life told as collective memory. Its author received the Nobel in 2022.

• Trois femmes puissantes

  Marie NDiaye · 2009

  Three linked stories moving between France and Senegal. Its author was the first Black woman to win the Goncourt.

• Chanson douce

  Leïla Slimani · 2016

  It opens with the ending and works backwards. Its author was born in Morocco and took the Goncourt that year.

• La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes

  Mohamed Mbougar Sarr · 2021

  A search for a vanished African writer. Its Senegalese author was the first sub-Saharan African to win the Goncourt.