Documents for "French Literature: Biographies":

• Éluard, Paul 1895-1952, French poet. He was a leading exponent of surrealism. Among his volumes of verse are Mourir de ne pas mourir [to die of not dying] (1924) and L'Immaculée Conception (with André...

• Épinay, Louise Florence Pétronille (de Tardieu d'Esclavelles) La Live d' 1726-83, French woman of letters. Influential in the Enlightenment , she was the friend of many of its leaders, especially Melchior Grimm, her literary heir, and Diderot. She was Rousseau 's benefactress...

• Alain see Chartier, Émile Auguste.

• Alain-Fournier 1886-1914, French novelist, whose real name was Henri Alban Fournier. He was killed in action during World War I. His single full-length work is his poetic novel about a youthful search for the...

• Anouilh, Jean 1910-87, French dramatist. Anouilh's many popular plays range from tragedy to sophisticated comedy. His first play, L'hermine, was published in 1932. During the Nazi regime he wrote plays about resistance to oppression in terms of subjects from classical mythology; Antigone (1944, tr. 1946) is the most celebrated of these. Several of his later plays have contemporary and historical settings. Anouilh's works frequently contrast the worlds of romantic dreams and harsh...

• Apollinaire, Guillaume 1880-1918, French poet. He was christened Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky. Apollinaire was a leader in the restless period of technical innovation and experimentation in the arts during the...

• Aragon, Louis 1897-1982, French writer. One of the founders of surrealism in literature, Aragon abandoned that philosophy for Marxism after a trip to the USSR in 1931. He was a leader of the Resistance during World...

• Arland, Marcel 1899-1986, French writer. Arland was editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française (1953-77). Emphasizing a search for salvation that is both ethical and aesthetic, his work includes the novels L'Ordre...

• Arrabal, Fernando 1932-, French playwright, b. Melilla, Morocco. He studied law in Madrid before moving to Paris in 1954. His plays, which reflect his abhorrence of political repression, bourgeois complacency, and...

• Artaud, Antonin 1896-1948, French poet, actor, and director. During the 1920s and 30s he was associated with various experimental theater groups in Paris, and he cofounded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry. Artaud's...

• Aubigné, Théodore Agrippa d' 1552-1630, French poet and Huguenot soldier. A devoted follower of Henry of Navarre (Henry IV) from 1568, he was later associated with Henri de Rohan in an abortive plot and fled France to live in...

• Augier, Émile (Guillaume Victor Émile Augier) , 1820-89, French dramatist. His plays, early examples of realism, satirize the social foibles of his time and uphold the values of bourgeois family life. His...

• Aymé, Marcel 1902-67, French writer. Aymé's La Table aux crevés (1929), a story of peasant life, typifies the satirical tone of his works. La Jument verte (1933, tr. The Green Mare, 1955) and...

• Béranger, Pierre Jean de 1780-1857, French lyric poet. He was a protégé of Lucien Bonaparte and a friend of some of the most eminent men of his day. His first collection of songs, published in 1815, was immediately...

• Baïf, Jean Antoine de 1532-89, French poet of the Pléiade (see under Pleiad ). He wrote sonnets, didactic and satirical poems, and plays.

• Ballanche, Pierre-Simon 1776-1847, French philosopher. A frequenter of Mme Récamier's salon, he was elected to the Académie française in 1842. He is regarded as the precursor of both liberal Catholicism...

• Balzac, Honoré de 1799-1850, French novelist, b. Tours. Balzac ranks among the great masters of the novel. Of a bourgeois family, he himself later added the "de" to his name. Neglected in childhood, he was sent to a grammar school at Tours and later to a boarding school at Vendôme, where he was a dull student but a voracious reader. In 1816 he began...

• Balzac, Jean Louis Guez de 1597?-1654, French writer. His Lettres (1624, tr. 1634) and other writings were a great influence in reforming French prose. Their style was marked by their orderly, Latinate sentence structure....

• Banville, Théodore de 1823-91, French poet. He was one of the group known as the Parnassians. His many volumes of verse, including Odes funambulesques (1857) and Les Exilés (1866), are characterized by expert...

• Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules Amédée 1808-89, French writer and critic. An aristocrat and monarchist, he supported himself by journalism; his output of critical and polemical articles was enormous. He favored Balzac , early admired Baudelaire...

• Barrès, Maurice 1862-1923, French novelist and nationalist politician. As an advocate of the supremacy of the individual self, he wrote the trilogy of novels Le Culte du moi (1888-91). Finding that cultivation of the ego called for action as well as analysis, Barrès turned to a nationalism that grew into vengeful hatred of Germany, fanned by strong racist feeling and...

• Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste Du see Du Bartas.

• Barthélemy, Auguste Marseille 1796-1867, French poet. With his friend Joseph Méry he wrote several brilliant and popular political satires, including La Villéliade (1827), Napoléon en Égypte (1828),...

• Barthes, Roland 1915-80, French critic. Barthes was one of the founding figures in the theoretical movement centered around the journal Tel Quel. In his earlier works, such as Writing Degree Zero (tr. 1953) and...

• Bataille, Georges 1897-1962, French writer. Bataille was the founding editor of the journal Critique (1946). Strongly influenced by Nietzsche, he focuses on extreme states of consciousness (violence and eroticism) as forms of mediation between nature and culture. He presents his ideas in his...

• Baudelaire, Charles 1821-67, French poet and critic. His poetry, classical in form, introduced symbolism (see symbolists ) by establishing symbolic correspondences among sensory images (e.g., colors, sounds, scents). The only volume of his poems published in his lifetime, Les Fleurs du mal (1857, enlarged 1861, 1868; several Eng. tr., The Flowers of Evil ), was publicly condemned as obscene, and six of the poems were suppressed. Later recognized as a masterpiece, the volume is especially remarkable for the brilliant phrasing, rhythm, and...

• Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de 1732-99, French dramatist. Originally a watchmaker, he rose to wealth and position among the nobility. His two successful comedies were Le Barbier de Séville (1775), the basis of an opera by Rossini, and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the source of an opera by Mozart. Brilliant in their clever dialogue and intricate plots, they satirize the privileges and foibles of the upper class. Beaumarchais was a famous litigant,...

• Beauvoir, Simone de 1908-86, French author. A leading exponent of the existentialist movement, she is closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir taught philosophy at several colleges until 1943, after which she...

• Beckett, Samuel 1906-89, Anglo-French playwright and novelist, b. Dublin. Beckett studied and taught in Paris before settling there permanently in 1937. He wrote primarily in French, frequently translating his...

• Becque, Henry François 1837-99, French dramatist. His plays, which portrayed Parisian life in realistic detail, influenced French naturalistic drama. Among them are Les Corbeaux (1882) and La Parisienne (1885), translated...

• Belleau, Remy 1528-77, French poet of the Pléiade (see under Pleiad ). His Bergerie (1565), a collection of poems in a framework of prose, celebrates nature in sonnets, odes, eclogues, and hymns.

• Benda, Julien 1867-1956, French novelist and critic. A humanist and rationalist, he led a sustained attack against the romantic philosophy of his time, especially that of Bergson. In The Treason of the Intellectuals...

• Benoît de Sainte-More or Benoît de Sainte-Maure , 1154-73, French trouvère. He was the author of the Roman de Troie, a romance in 30,000 verses. It became a primary source of medieval versions of the Trojan...

• Bergerac, Cyrano de see Cyrano de Bergerac.

• Bernanos, Georges 1888-1948, French novelist and polemicist. Profoundly Catholic, Bernanos attacked modern materialism and advocated a moral and ethical order based on the teachings of the Church. His novels The Star of Satan (1926, tr. 1940) and The Diary of a Country Priest (1936, tr. 1937) are powerful accounts of intense spiritual struggle and reflect his mysticism. Dialogue des Carmelites (1949) was adapted for the stage in 1952. A believer in monarchy, Bernanos was active in Royalist causes until the Spanish civil war. In 1938, after the Munich pact, which he considered a shameful...

• Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri 1737-1814, French naturalist and author. He was a friend of Rousseau, by whom he was strongly influenced. His chief work, Études de la nature (1784), sought to prove the existence of God from the wonders of nature; it is rich in descriptive passages, and it added specific color terms and plant names to the French language. A section of...

• Bertrand de Born or Bertran de Born , c.1140-c.1214. French troubadour of Limousin. Some of his 40 surviving poems (in Provençal) tell of his part in the struggles between Henry II of England and his sons....

• Beyle, Marie Henri see Stendhal.

• Blanchot, Maurice 1907-2003, French novelist and literary critic. One of the first intellectuals in France to be interested in questions of language and meaning, he was an important influence on French...

• Bodel, Jehan b. c.1165, French trouvère of Arras. He is the author of one of the earliest dramas entirely in French, a mystery play entitled Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas (c.1200).

• Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 1636-1711, French literary critic and poet. He was the spokesman of classicism , drawing his principles from his contemporaries, among them his friends Racine, Molière, and La Fontaine. His...

• Bonnefoy, Yves 1923-, French poet and critic. His verse, e.g., On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (1953; tr. 1968, rev. ed. 1992), expresses a struggle to establish a concrete connection with the material world....

• Borel, Petrus pseud. of Joseph-Pierre Borel D'Hauterive, 1809-59, French novelist, poet, and translator. Although trained as an architect, he soon turned to writing. Borel was the most extreme of the bousingos,...

• Born, Bertrand de see Bertrand de Born.

• Bourget, Paul 1852-1935, French novelist. His early novels were naturalistic, but Le Disciple (1889, tr. 1901), a tale of the destruction of a pupil who applies his master's naturalistic literary theories to life, marked a change. Bourget thereafter wrote in a Catholic and strongly...

• Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de 1540?-1614, French courtier, soldier, and author of memoirs. He accompanied Mary Stuart to Scotland, served in the Spanish army in Africa, and joined the expedition of the Knights of St. John...

• Breton, André 1896-1966, French writer, founder and theorist of the surrealist movement. He studied neuropsychology and was one of the first in France to publicize the work of Freud. At first a Dadaist, he...

• Brunetière, Ferdinand 1849-1906, French literary critic. An opponent of naturalism, he believed that literature should reflect a moral order. His vast learning is evident in the masterly Manuel de l'histoire de la littérature...

• Brunhoff, Jean de 1899-1937, French author and illustrator of children's books, b. Paris. He wrote and illustrated The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant (1932), the tale of a kind, gentle, elegantly attired elephant king in the Edwardian mold. Babar, in fear for himself and his family, flees the jungle and comes to live in Paris. The book was a...

• Butor, Michel 1926-, French novelist and critic. As one of the chief exponents of the nouveau roman [new novel] (see French literature ), Butor is less interested in the outcome of action in his novels than he is in the action itself. His technique involves the use of shifting time sequences, strong visual images, and the interior...

• Céline, Louis Ferdinand 1894-1961, French author, whose real name was Louis Ferdinand Destouches. Céline wrote grim, scatological, and blackly funny novels. His first and best-known work, Journey to the End of Night (1932, tr. 1934) is based on his service at the front in World War I, his travels through Africa, and his service as a League of Nations doctor. Looking back on his Paris childhood, Death on the Installment Plan (1936, tr. 1938) introduced Céline's stylistic innovation, which was the regular use of ellipses and apostrophes to capture the rhythm of everyday speech. Céline was a virulent anti-Semite,...

• Camus, Albert 1913-60, French writer, b. Algiers. Camus was one of the most important authors and thinkers of the 20th cent. While a student at the Univ. of Algiers, he formed a theater group and adapted,...

• Carco, Francis 1886-1958, French poet and novelist, b. New Caledonia of Corsican parents. His real name was François Carcopino. The bohemian Parisian life he cherished is portrayed in several of his novels,...

• Caylus, Marie Marguerite, comtesse de 1673-1729, French writer and actress. A noted beauty and wit, she was lauded for her performance at Saint-Cyr in Racine's Esther. Her Souvenirs (1770), edited by Voltaire, describe the court of...

• Cendrars, Blaise 1887-1961, Swiss-born French writer whose real name was Frédéric Sauser. He was at various times an art critic, a journalist, and a film director, and he traveled widely, notably in China and...

• Chénier, André 1762-94, French poet, by some critics considered the greatest in 18th-century France. He was born in Constantinople, where his father was consul general, and was educated in France. From 1787 to...

• Chénier, Marie Joseph 1764-1811, French poet and dramatist, b. Constantinople; brother of André Chénier. A member of the Convention, the Council of Five Hundred, and the Tribunate during the French Revolution, he wrote...

• Chamfort, Sébastien Roch Nicolas 1740-94, French writer. He is remembered only for his maxims and epigrams. His acute observations on literature, morals, and politics made him popular at court, despite his republican beliefs. In...

• Champfleury see Husson, Jules.

• Chapelain, Jean 1595-1674, French critic and poet. His works include La Pucelle (1656), an epic poem about Joan of Arc. Chapelain was a founding member of the French Academy, for which he composed a celebrated attack...

• Char, René 1907-88, French poet. His writing reflects both his Provençal origins and his years of active participation in the French resistance. At first attracted to surrealism, Char soon went his own way,...

• Chartier, Émile Auguste 1868-1951, French essayist and philosopher who wrote under the pseudonym Alain. He is best known for thousands of aphoristic essays, called propos, which he contributed to his own weekly Libres Propos and other journals. These essays cover a variety of literary and political topics, many of them expressing Chartier's commitment to pacifism and distrust of official power. His many other works...

• Chartier, Alain b. c.1385, d. c.1433, French writer, secretary to Charles VII. His most popular work was the love poem La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424), which provided Keats with a title. Le Quadrilogue invectif...

• Chateaubriand, François René, vicomte de 1768-1848, French writer. Chateaubriand was a founder of romanticism in French literature. Of noble birth, he grew up in his family's isolated castle of Combourg. In 1791 he visited the United States, supposedly to search for the Northwest Passage, although he...

• Choderlos de Laclos see Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de.

• Chrétien de Troyes or Chrestien de Troyes , fl. 1170, French poet, author of the first great literary treatments of the Arthurian legend. His narrative romances, composed c.1170-c.1185 in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, include Érec et Énide; Cligès; Lancelot, le chevalier de la charette; Yvain, le chevalier au lion; and Perceval, le conte del Graal, unfinished (see Parsifal ). Chrétien drew on popular legend and history, and imbued his romances with the ideals of chivalry current at the 12th-century court of Marie de Champagne, to which he was attached. His other...

• Christine de Pisan see Pisan, Christine de.

• Claudel, Paul 1868-1955, French dramatist, poet, and diplomat. He was ambassador to Tokyo (1921-27), Washington, D.C. (1927-33), and Brussels (1933-35). Claudel's writings deal largely with man's inner spirit,...

• Cocteau, Jean 1889-1963, French writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. He experimented audaciously in almost every artistic medium, becoming a leader of the French avant-garde in the 1920s. His first great...

• Colette (Sidonie Gabrielle Colette) , 1873-1954, French novelist. Colette achieved popularity with numerous novels, characterized by sensitive observations—particularly of women—and an intimate, semiautobiographical style. Her early...

• Coppée, François 1842-1908, French poet and dramatist. He won fame with the one-act comedy Le Passant (1869, tr. 1881), in which Sarah Bernhardt made her first successful appearance. His early verse, as in Le Reliquaire...

• Corbière, Tristan 1845-75, French poet, born Édouard Joachim Corbière. He spent most of his life on the coast of Brittany, living a Bohemian existence and suffering chronic illness. His passion for the sea is...

• Corneille, Pierre 1606-84, French dramatist, ranking with Racine as a master of French classical tragedy. Educated by Jesuits, he practiced law briefly in his native Rouen and moved to Paris after the favorable...

• Courteline, Georges 1858-1929, French writer. His prolific humorous and satiric works include sketches, plays, tales, and novels. Bourgeois attitudes are ridiculed in his comedy Boubouroche (1892, tr. 1961); official...

• Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot de 1674-1762, French dramatist. His tragic melodramas, marked by violent plots, include Idoménée (1705), Électre (1708), and Rhadamiste et Zénobie (1711), which is considered...

• Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien 1619-55, French novelist. Satirizing the customs and beliefs of his time, he wrote two fantastic romances about visits to the moon and sun— L' Autre Monde; ou, Les Estats et empires de la lune...

• Daudet, Alphonse 1840-97, French writer, b. Nîmes (Provence). Daudet made his mark with gentle naturalistic stories and novels portraying French life both in the provinces and in Paris. At the age of 16, after his...

• Daudet, Léon 1867-1942, French author, most famous for his biting criticism of the Third Republic, and of democracy in general as editor of the right-wing daily Action Française with Charles Maurras. He...

• Deffand, marquise du see Du Deffand.

• Delavigne, Casimir 1793-1843, French dramatist, poet, and satirist. His first publication, a verse diatribe against the Restoration, Les Messéniennes (1818), brought him recognition. His successful plays included...

• Des Périers, Bonaventure c.1510-1544, French humanist and poet; protégé of Margaret of Navarre. His chief work, Cymbalum mundi (1537), a series of four skeptical prose dialogues in the manner of Lucian, was...

• Deschanel, Émile 1819-1904, French author and politician. Of his numerous works the best known are such critical studies as Études sur Aristophane (1867) and Le Romantisme des classiques (1882). His Catholicisme...

• Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean 1595-1676, French poet and dramatist. A protégé of Richelieu, he was a founding member of the French Academy. In 1670 he precipitated a controversy over the literary merits of the ancients that...

• Desnos, Robert 1900-1945, French poet. Among the best-known surrealist poets, he was one of the chief proponents of so-called automatic writing. He put himself in a trance before writing many of his works. They...

• Destouches, Philippe Néricault 1680-1754, French dramatist. He was known for his moralistic comedies. Le Glorieux (1732, tr. 1791), his masterpiece, treats the conflict between the old nobility and the rising bourgeoisie.

• Dib, Mohammed 1920-2003, Algerian novelist and poet, b. Tlemcen. From 1959 on he lived most of his life in France. In a vigorous, forthright style, he wrote in French about life in his native land. His novel Dieu en barbarie [god in barbarity] (1970) takes place immediately after Algeria gained independence from France. Dib, an extremely prolific writer, is considered one of modern Algeria's most important...

• Diderot, Denis 1713-84, French encyclopedist, philosopher of materialism, and critic of art and literature, b. Langres. He was also a novelist, satirist, and dramatist. Diderot was enormously influential in...

• Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste 1544-90, French poet. A Huguenot soldier under Henry IV, Du Bartas is known chiefly for his epic poems La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578) and the unfinished La Seconde Sepmaine (1584). In...

• Du Bellay, Joachim 1522?-1560, French poet of the Pléiade (see under Pleiad ). He wrote their manifesto, La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549), which urges the study and emulation of the classics and the use of French as the literary language. His poetic works, broadly imitative of Latin and Italian works, include a collection of...

• Du Deffand, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise 1697-1780, French woman of letters, whose salon was frequented (1753-80) by the leaders of the Enlightenment. She is widely considered the most brilliant woman of her era. Her letters (1766-80) to...

• Du Gard, Roger Martin see Martin du Gard.

• Ducasse, Isidore 1846-70, French poet who wrote under the name Comte de Lautréamont, or simply Lautréamont. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he moved to Paris in 1867, where he lived like a hermit until his death at...

• Dudevant, Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, baronne see Sand, George.

• Duhamel, Georges 1884-1966, French novelist and playwright. From Duhamel's experience as a surgeon during World War I came Vie des martyrs (1917, tr. The New Book of Martyrs, 1918) and Civilisation (1918, tr....

• Dumas fils see Dumas, Alexandre (1824-95).

• Dumas père see Dumas, Alexandre (1802-70).

• Dumas, Alexandre known as Dumas père , 1802-70, French novelist and dramatist. His father (an illegitimate son of the marquis de la Pailleterie and a black woman, Louise Cosette Dumas), was a general in the Revolution. Dumas delighted...

• Dumas, Alexandre known as Dumas fils , 1824-95, French dramatist and novelist, illegitimate son of Dumas Père. He was the chief creator of the 19th-century comedy of manners. His first important play, La Dame aux camélias (1852, tr. 1856), known in English as Camille, was a sensation. It was based on a partly autobiographical novel of the same title, which he had published in 1848. Portraying a love affair of a courtesan, the play became the vehicle of many...

• Duras, Marguerite 1914-96, French author, b. Gia Dinh, Indochina (now Vietnam). Usually grouped with the exponents of the nouveau roman [new novel] (see French literature ), Duras abandoned many of the conventions of the novel form. Her novels usually mix themes of eroticism and death, often treating existential moments in people's lives. Avoiding the use of...

• Fabre d'Églantine, Philippe François Nazaire 1755-94, French dramatist and revolutionist. His chief work, Le Philinte de Molière (1790), was a sequel to Molière's Misanthrope. A member of the Convention, he was selected to devise...

• Faguet, Émile 1847-1916, French literary critic and historian. His prolific studies stimulated interest in French intellectual history of the 17th, 18th, and 19th cent. His major work is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (5...

• Favart, Charles Simon 1710-92, French dramatist and theatrical manager, for a time director of the Opéra-Comique. He was the originator of the modern light opera and wrote, largely in collaboration with his wife, about...

• Flaubert, Gustave 1821-80, French novelist, regarded as one of the supreme masters of the realistic novel. He was a scrupulous, slow writer, intent on the exact word ( le mot juste ) and complete objectivity. The son of a surgeon, he studied law unsuccessfully in Paris and returned home to devote himself to writing. Because of a severe nervous malady, probably epilepsy, he...

• Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 1657-1757, French writer; nephew of Corneille. His forte was the interpretation of science. His works include Dialogues des morts (1683), observations on man; Histoire des oracles (1687), attacking...

• Fournier, Alain- see Alain-Fournier.

• Fréron, Élie 1718-76, French critic and journalist. His critical journal, Année littéraire, virulently attacked the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Voltaire made him a butt of his ridicule in several...

• France, Anatole pseud. of Jacques Anatole Thibault , 1844-1924, French writer. He was probably the most prominent French man of letters of his time. Among his best-remembered works is L'Île des pingouins (1908, tr. Penguin Island, 1909), an allegorical novel satirizing French history. His early fiction was characterized by a somewhat sentimental charm—e.g., Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881, tr. 1906), his first successful novel, and Le Livre de mon ami (1885, tr. My Friend's Book, 1913), the first of a series of autobiographical novels. Half his work appeared in periodicals and newspapers. After the Dreyfus Affair (in which he supported Zola) his work was slanted more to...

• Garnier, Robert 1534?-1590, French dramatic poet. He wrote mainly closet dramas in the classical manner of Seneca. Les Juives [the Jewish women] (1583), based on the Bible, is perhaps the best of his tragedies. He...

• Gary, Romain 1914-80, French novelist, b. Vilna, of Russian parentage. Gary's original name was Romain Kacev. In France after 1928, he fought in World War II and later entered the diplomatic service. He won...

• Gautier, Théophile 1811-72, French poet, novelist, and critic. He was a leading exponent of art for art's sake—the belief that formal, aesthetic beauty is the sole purpose of a work of art. An important manifesto of...

• Gay, Delphine see Girardin, Delphine Gay de.

• Genet, Jean 1910-86, French dramatist. Deserted by his parents as an infant, Genet spent much of his early life in reformatories and prisons. Between 1940 and 1948 he wrote several autobiographical prose...

• Gide, André 1869-1951, French writer. He established a reputation as an unconventional novelist with The Immoralist (1902, tr. 1930), a partly autobiographical work in which he portrays a young man contravening ordinary moral standards in his search for self-fulfillment. In this and other major novels, including Strait Is the Gate (1909, tr. 1924), Lafcadio's Adventures (1914, tr. 1927), and The Counterfeiters (1926, tr. 1927), Gide shows individuals seeking out their own natures, which may be at conflict with prevailing ethical concepts. Raised as a Protestant, Gide became a leader of French liberal...

• Giono, Jean 1895-1970, French novelist, b. Provence. His semiautobiographical novel, Jean le bleu (1932, tr. Blue Boy, 1946) concerns his childhood. His pastoral trilogy— Colline (1920, tr. Hill of...

• Girardin, Émile de 1806-81, French journalist. He was editor of La Presse (1836-56, 1862-66), La Liberté (1866-70), and La France (1874). Actively interested in politics and social betterment, he served for...

• Girardin, Delphine Gay de 1804-55, French writer; wife of Émile de Girardin. She wrote patriotic poems and, under the pseudonym Vicomte Charles de Launay, was the author of comedies, stories, and a series of sketches of...

• Giraudoux, Jean 1882-1944, French novelist and dramatist. He was a prolific writer and combined his literary work with a long and successful diplomatic career. His early novels, which display his impressionistic,...

• Goncourt, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de 1822-96, and Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt , 1830-70, French authors. Brothers, they were known, for their close association in art and literature, as "les deux Goncourt." They began as artists, touring France in 1849 and keeping notes that were soon to turn them toward literature. They became art critics and historians of art, unsuccessful dramatists, promoters of...

• Gourmont, Remy de 1858-1915, French critic and novelist, leading critical apologist for the symbolists. Although his views were seemingly contradictory, he was consistent in opposing traditionalism and defending new...

• Gracq, Julien 1910-, French novelist, whose real name is Louis Poirier. Strongly influenced by surrealism and German Romanticism, Gracq's novels are highly allusive and syntactically complex treatments of evil...

• Green, Julian 1900-1998, French writer, b. Paris, of American parentage. Except for the years from 1918 to 1922 and from 1940 to 1945, Green lived in France. His 18 novels, written in French, are somber...

• Gresset, Jean Baptiste Louis 1709-77, French poet and dramatist. He was the author of a mock epic, Vairvert (1734), and of a successful comedy, Le Méchant (1747), satirizing the society of his period.

• Gringore, Pierre c.1475-c.1539, French dramatist and poet. He produced ceremonial pageants and mystery plays and wrote the Jeu du prince des sots (1512), a dramatic tetralogy on contemporary politics, as well as a...

• Guérin, Maurice de (Georges Maurice de Guérin) , 1810-39, French writer. At his early death he left two fragmentary prose poems, Le Centaure and La Bacchante, a handful of other poems, letters, journals, and scraps of prose. His works, infused with a mingling of pantheism and Christian mysticism, are classical in form. They were collected and edited by...

• Guillaume de Lorris c.1215-c.1278, French poet, author of the first part of the Roman de la Rose. He handled the chivalric conventions with subtlety and charm, and his work shows taste, psychological perception, and...

• Hamilton, Anthony 1646?-1720, French author of Scottish descent, b. Ireland. He spent much time in France, where he became a master of the French language. He fought in the Dutch Wars for Louis XIV and commanded an...

• Hardy, Alexandre b. between 1569 and 1575, d. 1631 or 1632, French dramatist. His more than 600 plays are unexceptional, but he played a transitional role as innovator of the less lyrical, more dramatic theater...

• Heredia, José María de 1842-1905, French poet, a leading exponent of the poetic ideals of the Parnassians , b. Cuba. His reputation rests on Les Trophées (1893), containing 118 masterful sonnets in the Petrarchan...

• Hugo, Victor Marie, Vicomte 1802-85, French poet, dramatist, and novelist, b. Besançon. His father was a general under Napoleon. As a child he was taken to Italy and Spain and at a very early age had published his first book...

• Husson, Jules 1821-89, French novelist who wrote under the name Champfleury . Considered a pioneer of French realism, Champfleury was an avid collector of French art and artifacts and conducted extensive research...

• Huysmans, Joris Karl 1848-1907, French novelist and art critic of Dutch family. He was at first a disciple of Zola; typical of his early, naturalistic novels is Marthe (1876). His later, somewhat autobiographical novels...

• Ionesco, Eugène 1912-94, French playwright, b. Romania. Settling in France in 1938, he contributed to Cahiers du Sud and began writing avant-garde plays. His works stress the absurdity both of bourgeois values and of the way of life that they dictate. They express the futility of human endeavor in a universe...

• Jacob, Max 1876-1944, French writer and painter, b. Brittany. His dream-inspired verse, plays, novels, and paintings bridged and gave impetus to the symbolist and surrealist schools. His conversion (1914)...

• Jammes, Francis 1868-1938, French poet. He lived most of his life in the Pyrenees. Jammes is usually grouped with the symbolists, but he is distinguished from them by the simplicity and artlessness of his...

• Jarry, Alfred 1873-1907, French author. He was well known in Paris for his eccentric and dissolute behavior and for his insistence on the superiority of hallucinations over rational intelligence. His most...

• Jean de Meun d. 1305, French poet, also known as Jean Chopinel (or Clopinel) of Meung-sur-Loire. He wrote the second part of the Roman de la Rose and made translations from Latin, including the letters of Abelard to Heloise. Called by some the Voltaire of the Middle Ages, Jean de Meun was a man of encyclopedic knowledge, a fearless thinker,...

• Jodelle, Estienne 1532-73, French poet of the Pléiade (see under Pleiad ). He was the author of Cléopatre captive (1553), the first French tragedy that departed from medieval drama. His other plays were...

• Kristeva, Julia 1941-, French critic, psychoanalyst, semiotician, and writer, b. Sliven, Bulgaria. Writing in French, she has explored many subjects including structuralist linguistics and semiotics,...

• Léger, Alexis Saint-Legér see Perse, St.-John.

• La Boétie, Étienne de 1530-63, French judge and writer. He served with Montaigne in the Bordeaux parlement and is immortalized in Montaigne's essay on friendship. La Boétie's writings include a few sonnets,...

• La Bruyère, Jean de 1645-96, French writer. He lived (1684-96) as tutor in the house of the prince de Condé. His great work, Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec; avec Les Caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle, appeared in 1688 and subsequently in revised and augmented editions until the ninth (1696). The first, and least, part of this work is a translation of Theophrastus; the balance is a series of...

• La Calprenède, Gautier de Costes, sieur de 1609?-1663, French novelist and dramatist. His best-known works were Cassandre (10 vol., 1642) and Cléopâtre (12 vol., 1647), romances esteemed in their time for their austere morality...

• La Ceppède, Jean de 1550-1622, French poet and magistrate. In 1608 he was appointed president of the Court of the Exchequer of Provence. After centuries of oblivion, he is again receiving recognition for his Théorèmes...

• La Fayette, Marie Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de 1634-92, French novelist of the classical period, whose chief work, La Princesse de Clèves (1678), is the first great French novel. The psychological realism of this story of a woman's renunciation of an illicit love, treated with chaste simplicity and quiet wit, has given the novel...

• La Fontaine, Jean de 1621-95, French poet, whose celebrated fables place him among the masters of world literature. He was born at Château-Thierry to a bourgeois family. A restless dilettante as a youth, he settled at...

• La Harpe, Jean François de 1739-1803, French critic. He was the author of the monumental Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne, lectures he delivered after his appointment (1786) at a lycée in Paris. His judgments on the classical period especially have been borne out by time. He also wrote plays, commentaries (notably on...

• La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de 1613-80, French writer. As head of an ancient family (in his youth he bore the title prince de Marcillac) he opposed Richelieu and was later active in both Frondes. Wounded and disheartened, he made his peace (1652) and retired to his estates in Angoumois. Later he settled (c.1658) in Paris where he moved in the literary circle of Mme de Sablé, which included...

• Labé, Louise c.1520-1566, French poet. She was an active member of the so-called Lyons school of poets headed by Maurice Scève. Labé's elegies and sonnets, in Oeuvres (1555), are love poems notable...

• Labiche, Eugène Marin 1815-88, French playwright. He was a prolific author, often collaborating with other writers, particularly Marc Michel, and 175 plays are attributed to him. Most of his plays are light comedic...

• Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de 1741-1803, French novelist and general, known as Choderlos de Laclos. He is best known for Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; tr. Dangerous Connections, 1784, and Dangerous Acquaintances, 1924),...

• Laforgue, Jules 1860-87, French symbolist poet. He was one of the first French poets to write in free verse. The revolutionary form of Les Complaintes (1885) and Derniers Vers (1890) influenced later French poets...

• Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de 1790-1869, French poet, novelist, and statesman. After a trip to Italy and a brief period in the army, Lamartine began to write and achieved immediate success with his first publication, Méditations poétiques (1820). This group of 24 poems, including the famous "Le Lac," expressed his own feelings—religious, melancholic, or amorous—as he came in contact with nature and the land. He drew from tradition, from Ronsard as well as from the 18th cent., while adding...

• Larbaud, Valery 1881-1957, French novelist, poet, critic, and translator. A wealthy and cosmopolitan scholar and poet, Larbaud learned six languages and produced notable French translations of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the works of such writers as Conrad, Hardy, and Joyce. He was particularly noted for his creation of the fictional character Archibaldo Olson Barnabooth, a wealthy young South American who...

• Launay, vicomte de see Girardin, Delphine Gay de.

• Lautréamont, Comte de see Ducasse, Isidore.

• Le Sage, Alain René 1668-1747, French novelist and dramatist. His masterpiece, Gil Blas de Santillane (1715-35, tr. by Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, 1749), is a rambling story in the style of Spanish picaresque romances, though unlike them in conception. It is instead strongly realistic, especially in its incidents; exact description of...

• Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie 1818-94, French poet. His first two books of poetry, Poèmes antiques (1852) and Poèmes et poésies (1855), were immediately successful. It was, however, Poésies barbares...

• Lenormand, Henri René 1882-1951, French dramatist. His plays, Freudian in tone and theme and often heavily symbolic, include Les Ratés (1918, tr. The Failures, 1923), Time Is a Dream (1919, tr. 1923) and Man...

• Lespinasse, Julie Jeanne Éléonore de 1732-76, French woman of letters. She aided (1754-64) Mme Du Deffand in her salon and organized (1764) one of her own, which superseded that of her patroness after a break came between the women...

• Lorris, Guillaume de see Guillaume de Lorris.

• Loti, Pierre pseud. of Julien Viaud , 1850-1923, French novelist, an officer in the French navy. He achieved popularity with his impressionistic romances of adventure in exotic lands, such as Aziyadé...

• Louÿs, Pierre 1870-1925, French writer of the Parnassian school, whose real name was Pierre Louis. His early poems, collected as Astarté (1891), first appeared in the Conque, a review that he helped to...

• Mérimée, Prosper 1803-70, French author. He first wrote a collection of plays in imitation of Spanish drama, The Plays of Clara Gazul (1825, tr. 1825), and a collection of so-called Illyrian ballads, La Guzla (1827). His important historical novel, The Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX (1829; tr. 1830, 1890), is marked by an objectivity and psychological penetration rare among the romanticists. He was master of a concise and understated style, most fully realized in his nouvelles, or long stories, for which he is best known. Outstanding examples include Colomba (1852, tr. 1853); Carmen (in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1845; as a book, 1846, tr. 1881), which was the basis of Bizet's opera; La Vénus d'Ille (1837); and Letters to an Unknown (in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1873; as a book, 1874, tr. 1874). His short story, "Mateo Falcone" (1876), is a masterpiece of the genre. A cultivated man of the world, Mérimée was a student of archaeology, a linguist who translated Russian authors into French, and a senator under the Empire. He...

• Maeterlinck, Maurice 1862-1949, Belgian author who wrote in French. After practicing law unsuccessfully for several years, he went to Paris in 1897. He had already been touched by the influence of the symbolists and the mystical thought of Novalis and Emerson; his eventual 60-odd volumes can be read as a symbolist manifesto. Their suggestion of universal mystery, their insistence on ennui and impending...

• Maistre, Joseph de 1753-1821, French writer and diplomat. Born in Savoy, he was Sardinian ambassador at St. Petersburg from 1803 to 1817. A passionate Roman Catholic and royalist, he was master of a rigidly logical...

• Maistre, Xavier de 1763-1852, French writer, b. Savoy; brother of Joseph de Maistre. He served in the Russian army and lived most of his life in St. Petersburg. His works are distinguished for their polished wit. Voyage...

• Malherbe, François de 1555-1628, French poet and critic, official poet of Henry IV and Louis XIII. His own poems approach technical perfection but lack verve and fire; the best-known is Consolation à Monsieur du Périer (c.1590). As a critic Malherbe had considerable influence on French literature. He consistently advocated objectivity, precision of language, and seriousness of purpose, ideals which were soon to...