Insights
Joachim du Bellay stands at a turning point in French literary history. Writing in the sixteenth century, he helped transform French poetry from a largely…
Few short novels have made romantic obsession feel as immediate as Manon Lescaut. Published in the eighteenth century as part of Abbé Prévost’s wider fictional…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions is one of the most revealing autobiographies in European literary history. Written in the late eighteenth century, it…
Madame de Sévigné’s letters offer an unusually lively route into seventeenth-century France. Written between family members, friends and acquaintances, they…
Voltaire remains one of the sharpest voices in European literature, especially when he turns ridicule against dogma, inherited privilege and political cruelty.…
Jean de La Fontaine’s animal stories have survived because they are easy to remember, difficult to exhaust, and sharp enough to speak across centuries. A fox,…
Charles Perrault’s fairy tales have travelled remarkably far from the salons and publishing houses of seventeenth-century France. Stories such as Cinderella,…
Ernest Renan remains one of the most intriguing French writers for readers interested in religion, history, philosophy, and literature. Born in 1823 and raised…
Hippolyte Taine remains one of the most influential and controversial French critics of the nineteenth century. His essays brought literature, art, history,…
Jules Michelet’s Histoire de la Révolution française is a sweeping account of the events that transformed France between 1789 and the fall of Robespierre.…