Insights
Madame de Staël remains one of the most compelling voices of post-Revolutionary France because her life unfolded at the meeting point of literature, politics…
Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe is a short, intense novel about desire, indecision and the damage caused when affection is weaker than obligation. First published…
Alfred de Musset occupies a distinctive place in French Romantic literature. His poems move between passionate confession, elegant melancholy, playful irony…
Madame de La Fayette occupies a distinctive place in French literary history. Writing in the seventeenth century, she transformed the conventions of romance,…
Michel de Montaigne’s Essays occupy a singular place in literary history. Written in sixteenth-century France, they move between philosophy, personal…
Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, commonly known in English as The Persian Letters, is a witty and unsettling work of early Enlightenment literature. Published…
Jean de La Bruyère’s Les Caractères is a gallery of human behaviour: proud courtiers, calculating social climbers, foolish talkers, anxious misers, fashionable…
François de La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes remains one of the sharpest books of moral observation in French literature. First published in the seventeenth century…
Blaise Pascal occupies a distinctive place in European intellectual history. He was a mathematician, physicist, inventor, religious thinker, and moral…
The memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon, offer one of the most vivid portraits of the French court under Louis XIV and the early Regency. Written…