Finch - French literature : a cultural history

Introduction

The body of writing that we call French literature has had a striking impact on the rest of the Western world. Courtly romance spread all across Europe from the mid-twelfth century on, as did French models of chivalric behaviour and love, originating in these romances and the troubadour tradition whose golden age was between about 1160 and 1230. These still shape our ways of thinking, even of feeling. Montaignes essays (157292), translated into English in 1603 and rapidly into other European languages, influenced Shakespeare and have left an indelible impression on European culture. The ideas and even the phrases current in France during the eighteenth century spurred on the American Revolution and contributed to the wording of the American Declaration of Independence (1776); theories of democracy and tolerance either conceived or publicized by the French Enlightenment continue to govern Western liberal political thought. Plays written by French authors have become the libretti of some of Europes greatest operas: Beaumarchais gave us The Marriage of Figaro (the play was first performed in 1784, Mozarts opera in 1786); Hugo gave us the plot of Rigoletto (play, Le Roi samuse , 1832; Verdis opera, 1851). In the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury circle turned to French poetry to embolden it in its experimentation; the mid-twentieth-century New York School poets were francophiles (Kenneth Koch sometimes wrote in French and John Ashbery was a Columbia doctoral student in French). Samuel Beckett preferred to write in French rather than English. Post-Second World War French thinkers such as Lvi-Strauss, Foucault and Derrida have taken the humanities by storm in the universities of anglophone and other nations; while Simone de Beauvoirs Second Sex (1949), translated into English only a few years after publication (1953), led the growth of late twentieth-century feminism in anglophone countries.

Indeed, for centuries the French language itself had unparalleled prestige in Europe. Many English works owed their diffusion in other European countries to the fact that they were translated into French and then from French into another language such as German. All over Europe, French succeeded Latin as the international language: famously, the Academy of Berlin offered a prize in 1782 for the best essay (in French) on this subject: What has made French the universal language of Europe? (Quest-ce qui a fait de la langue franaise la langue universelle de lEurope?) Although the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars would reduce this vogue for French, it remained the language of choice in many parts of Europe: as readers of Tolstoy will know, the Russian aristocracy was still speaking it in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

In other areas, too, French culture has shaped our representation of the world. Monet was the begetter of Impressionism; Paris played a spectacular role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, drawing into its ambit many artists of other nationalities such as Picasso. France has bequeathed to the world its cuisine (a French word), its fairy-tales (such stories as those of Sleeping Beauty and Puss-in-Boots were first collected and written down by Perrault in the seventeenth century), and its films. For despite the current commercial domination of Hollywood, it was in France that cinema was invented, and it continues to influence world cinema in more ways than are widely realized. Such key concepts as film noir, cinaste and auteur cinema are French; Jean Renoirs La Rgle du jeu ( The Rules of the Game , 1939) is still rated among the top ten films ever made, one of the only two non-American films to have had that accolade in every decade for the last fifty years. (The other is Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin , almost always, however, lower on the list than the Renoir. Sight and Sound , the magazine of the British Film Institute, conducts polls of leading film critics every decade to establish the ranking.) The major international film festival is held in Cannes. And Anglo-American cinema owes some unexpected debts to France: for instance, the plot of Hitchcocks best film Vertigo (1958) is based on the French novel Sueurs froides: dentre les morts (1954, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac).