Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) was as influential in the field of fiction as Baudelaire was in poetry. His role in the evolution of the French novel is a subversive one. By shifting the novelist's emphasis from representation to composition, he began to undo the realist novel from within. His two great novels of contemporary life, Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (L'Éducation sentimentale, 1869) adhere to a realist framework. They focus on mundane, antiheroic characters and contain an abundance of seemingly objective descriptions of settings and social milieus. What distinguishes Flaubert from Balzac and the ‘realist’ novelists of his own generation are his stylistic innovations and his self-consciousness as a writer. It is these aspects of his work that situate him on the dividing line between realism and the experimental writing of modernism, and account for his reputation as the creator of the ‘modern’ self-reflexive novel.

‘What I would like to write,’ Flaubert declared with provocative hyperbole, ‘is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the inner strength of its style’ (letter to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852). This statement indicates his ambition to give narrative prose the autonomy of stylization and the expressive qualities of poetry, and thereby to establish the novel as the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century. His narrative method has been called ‘impersonal’, by which is meant a kind of self suppression by the author – an implicit repudiation of the Romantic notions of creative inspiration and intense self-expression. For Flaubert, the presence of the writer in his work should remain elusive. Whereas the narrator of a Balzac novel is overtly (and often ostentatiously) omniscient, Flaubert's stated ideal was a different kind of God-like narrator, one who would be ‘present everywhere but visible nowhere’ (9 Dec. 1852).

The literary precursors of Surrealism include the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), Victor Hugo (1802–85), Gérard de Nerval (1808–55), Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), the Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918). The social origins of the movement lay, first and foremost, in the French experience of the First World War (1914–18). The cataclysm of the ‘Great War’ made the values and culture of the nineteenth century, with its proud belief in progress and reason, God and patriotism, seem meaningless. The very concept of ‘civilization’ was thrown into question; civilization was a sham, and this meant that art could no longer be a celebration of it. The disillusion of the younger generation of artists and intellectuals was reflected in the aggressive antiart antics of the literary movement known as Dada or Dadaism (see above, p. 176). The aim of the Dadaists was to expose the culture of the past for the nonsense the war had proved it to be. The Dadaists' leader, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), chopped up newspaper articles, pasted them in random order and called them poems. When he arrived in Paris in 1919, he was warmly welcomed by a group of young poets: André Breton (1896–1966), Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), Robert Desnos (1900–45), Paul éluard (1895–1952) and others. These young men, some of whom had served in the war, rejected outright the civilization that seemed to have betrayed them. Within a few years Dada had burnt itself out, but its spirit of shock and provocation carried over into the more positive concept of avant-garde art which was to become Surrealism (the word was borrowed from Apollinaire, who coined it in his 1917 programme note for the ballet Parade). Surrealism was arguably the most influential avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, international in scope and extending to every form of artistic practice from poetry and prose narrative to painting, photography, film and theatre.

Molière (1622–73) is universally recognized as France's greatest comic playwright. He was also, by all accounts, the finest comic actor of his generation. He himself performed the leading roles in his plays, and at the same time was a director and manager: a complete man of the theatre. To focus on his plays as written texts, and to ignore questions of performance and stagecraft, would obscure our appreciation of his dramatic virtuosity, his specifically theatrical achievements and the remarkable variety of his work. Moreover, he was a highly self-conscious artist whose work constitutes a reflection, in the context of his times, on the nature and possibilities of comic drama. His achievement, as writer-actor-manager, was to renew comic drama in France and to give it something of the status of tragedy.

Comedy high and low

Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, in Paris, Molière enjoyed a comfortable bourgeois upbringing. His father was a prosperous tapissier (upholsterer and tapestryweaver) attached to the court of Louis XIII. He could have pursued a profitable career in his father's trade or in the law; however, he chose to abandon his studies in 1643 to become an actor, and this at a time when actors were often categorized on official documents with prostitutes and highwaymen and the Church taught that theatres were places of perdition. With Joseph and Madeleine Béjart, among others, Molière founded the Illustre Théâatre. But it went bankrupt in under two years, and the troupe was obliged to leave Paris. They toured the provinces for the next thirteen years, providing private performances for wealthy noblemen in their chateaux and public performances in the towns of southern France. It was during this period that Molière received the theatrical training that provided him with the basis for his later success in Paris.

When Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was arrested in 1970 for distributing seditious political literature in the streets of Paris, President de Gaulle vetoed the move to hold him in prison, reportedly saying: ‘You don't put Voltaire in prison.’ What he was alluding to by his comparison was that both men made themselves the radical consciences of their respective societies. Sartre – at once a philosopher, novelist, dramatist, literary critic, art critic, political theorist, political essayist and political activist – was as versatile and prolific as Voltaire, but more original. He dominated the intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century. He was the public intellectual par excellence.

Early years

The essential theme of Sartre's life and work is liberty. As a child, his rejection of authority was expressed in his rejection of his tyrannical grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, who ran a German school in Paris. He chose to become a writer precisely because his grandfather solemnly warned him against it. Sartre's brilliant account of his childhood, and of his relationship to culture and language, in Words (Les Mots, 1964) sheds much light on his later development. Sartre's father died when his son was fifteen months old, and Sartre and his mother were reintegrated into his grandfather's household, where they were both called ‘the children’ and brought up together almost as brother and sister. In Words he lays bare the forces that worked upon his consciousness a child, especially the bourgeois ideology embodied in his grandfather. The book is the judgement of the man on the child, but it is even more a judgement on a society that bred extreme forms of self-deception. Sartre presents himself as a young boy constrained to fit into an old-fashioned household and describes how he was constantly acting a part to please a dictatorial old man. At the heart of Sartre's work generally is a preoccupation with all forms of hypocrisy; playing roles, pretending to be someone or something one is not, came to represent a major crime in his eyes.

French literature of the Middle Ages is enormously rich and varied. It comprises, among other genres, heroic epics, courtly romances, verse narratives, religious drama, fables and lyric poetry. In recent years study of medieval French literature has been revitalized by innovative critical approaches that encourage the reading of relevant texts in terms of a literary culture built on sophisticated (and often playful) rewriting of traditional stories. Such approaches imply a fluid notion of literary creation untrammelled by restrictive notions of ‘author’ and ‘text’: ‘Medieval writers acknowledge that texts do not derive exclusively from or belong to their authors, that they have multiple origins, that they are indeed “a tissue of quotations” and, above all, that they go on developing and evolving as they are read, reread and rewritten in transmission.’ The lyric poet François Villon (c. 1431 – after 1463) recasts the courtly ideals and conventional pieties of medieval literary tradition, subverting his models by writing in a predominantly ironic mode. Lyric poetry and first-person narratives before Villon are strongly allegorical, and rarely the expression of individualized sentiment; lacking a clear historical dimension, they deal in stock character types (such as the knight-errant, despairing lover, repentant sinner, etc.) and are written in highly stylized poetic language. The greatest impact of Villon's work, as David Georgi argues, is its contribution to the emergence of the intimate first-person voice in European poetry. Villon also created, in his life and work, the figure of the poète maudit (the accursed poet, or poet with endless bad luck), who would become a familiar feature of the French poetic tradition. The poetic persona he developed evokes the experience of a marginal man living in a recognizable social reality: he engages imaginatively with the great themes of the literature and art of his age – death, the vagaries of fate, the ravages of time – in conjunction with poverty and the fragility of existence in fifteenth-century Paris.

Unlike Flaubert, the ‘hermit of Croisset’, who turned away from his age in an attitude of ironic detachment, Émile Zola (1840–1902) embraced his century in away no French writer had done since Balzac. Zola's ambition was to emulate Balzac by writing a comprehensive history of contemporary society. His main achievement was his twenty-volume novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, published between 1871 and 1893. The fortunes of a family, the Rougon-Macquart, are followed over several decades. The various family members spread throughout all levels of society, and through their lives Zola examines methodically the social, sexual and moral landscape of the late nineteenth century. Zola is the quintessential novelist of modernity, understood as a time of tumultuous change. The motor of change was the rapid expansion of capitalism, with all that that entailed in terms of the altered shapes of the city, new forms of social practice and economic organization, and heightened political pressures. Zola was fascinated by change, and specifically by the emergence of a new, mass society.

Zola rejected much of the social and moral content of the bourgeois worldview, but he retained the central epistemological tenet on which it was based: ‘scientific’ objectivity. Converted from a youthful romantic idealism to realism in art and literature, he began promoting a scientific view of literature inspired by the aims and methods of experimental medicine. He called this new form of realism ‘naturalism’. The subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, ‘A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, suggests Zola's two interconnected aims: to use fiction to demonstrate a number of ‘scientific’ notions about the ways in which human behaviour is determined by heredity and environment; and to use the symbolic possibilities of a family whose heredity is tainted to represent a diseased society – the corrupt yet dynamic France of the Second Empire (1852–70).

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) was one of the most challenging and liberating influences on modern French culture – always on the move in his life and in his writing, always on his way to somewhere else, assuming and casting off identities as he went. There was the child prodigy, at fifteen writing poetry that showed a complete mastery of French classical forms and prosody, combined with a stunningly original style. There was the teenage rebel, the filthy, foul-mouthed peasant boy, repudiating family and religion, turning up in Paris and scandalizing the literary establishment with his iconoclastic views on poetry and his amazingly anti-social behaviour. There was the relationship with Verlaine and the vagabond years spent with the older poet in Paris, London and Brussels. Meanwhile, by the age of twenty, Rimbaud had composed a body of work that is widely considered one of the most innovative and significant of the French nineteenth century.

The poet as seer

Rimbaud's early years were spent on a farm at Roche, near the Belgian border, and then in the small nearby town of Charleville. He was brought up by his mother – his father, an army officer, having left her when Rimbaud was six. Vitalie Rimbaud, with her peasant avarice, grim piety, social ambition and iron discipline, cast a long shadow over her son's life. Ironically, Rimbaud got from his mother the toughness and determination he needed to escape from her and from everything she represented for him. He ran away to Paris when he was fifteen. His first views of the city were through the grill in the back of a police wagon, for he was arrested on arrival at the railway station for travelling without a ticket. After a few days, he was released, and made his way circuitously back home. He returned to Paris a few months later, this time with a ticket. Back in Charleville, he was greatly excited when Paris declared itself an independent people's republic, and in the spring of 1871 he decided to return to the capital to witness the dawn of the new age.