French Short Fiction

Introduction

French short fiction includes several genres—the conte, nouvelle, and récit. A conte is a short fiction presented as imaginary that occurs in the past, in faraway, usually exotic places. The author of a conte is not concerned about verisimilitude; reality plays no role in the fiction. Fairy tales and stories for children are classified as contes in French literature. However, a conte may be intended for adult readers to investigate serious topics involving lifestyles and beliefs. Contes usually illustrate a philosophical or moral point or are involved with the macabre or gothic. The nouvelle, in contrast to the conte, is presented as dealing with reality. Its setting and time are often familiar and contemporary, although the nouvelle may also be set in a different period or a foreign place. However, the fantastic and the impossible are excluded, and whether the setting is familiar to the reader, the action and the characters portrayed are part of reality. The récit includes a short narrative of facts, either reality-based or imaginary. In actual practice, conte, nouvelle, and récit are often used interchangeably to refer to a short fiction.

The French short story is a prose genre like the novel and shares many basic elements with the novel. Both are narrative genres, which develop a plot, anchor the novel in a time and place that may be precise or indefinite, and portray characters. The intrigue may be told using a first-person narrator, a third-person narrator who acts as an observer, or an omniscient narrator. The author may use detailed descriptions of the setting and the characters or give minimal details. The story may be told strictly as a narration or may incorporate dialogue. The short story differs from the novel primarily by its brevity and its conciseness of structure. While the novel may intertwine several complex plots, the short story contains only one plot. The short story portrays fewer characters than the novel and usually limits the development of the character because of its brevity. The short story's setting is also more restricted than the novel's. The period is shorter, and the action takes place in a limited space. However, French writers, especially during the twentieth century, wrote much experimental fiction, including the anti-roman, which breaks the novel form so that a narration may fall somewhere between a short story and a novel. In addition, the length of neither the novel nor the short story is precisely set. A narration such as André Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale (1919; The Pastoral Symphony, 1931) may be referred to as a récit or a novel.

The Middle Ages and the Sixteenth Century

The Middle Ages were dominated by an oral literary tradition. Traveling jongleurs and minstrels told stories to entertain those dwelling at court and living in cities. Since these performers had to memorize the tales they told, poetry, with its rhymes and rhythms, was the primary vehicle of expression. In addition, the performers often added episodes and descriptions to the stories. Consequently, the chanson de geste and the Roman courtois were long-rhymed narratives. Then, in the twelfth century, two forms appeared that may be considered the precursors of the short story. Marie de France wrote a collection of Lais, which, although rhymed, were brief and recounted a single adventure of a knight and a lady. At about the same time, the fabliau appeared. The fabliaux were short comic or satirical tales of misdeeds dealing with money or sex. Peopled with lecherous priests, unfaithful wives, cuckolded husbands, and greedy merchants, these tales were short, sometimes as little as three hundred lines, accounts of a single event. Another short narrative form, the dit, appeared in the thirteenth century. The dit, usually about six hundred lines long, recounted a brief incident or story derived from previous stories or invented by the creator. During this same period, the nouvelle became popular. Unlike the other genre, which often retold traditional stories, the nouvelle was presented as recounting a new event that had happened or could have happened. Plausibility and reality were important elements of the medieval nouvelle. In the mid-fifteenth century, a work, Cent nouvelles nouvelles, usually attributed to Antoine de la Sale, appeared. It is the first known collection of short stories written in prose. These stories, written in the fabliau tradition of gauloiserie, portrayed contemporary life and concentrated primarily on the lifestyle and foibles of the bourgeoisie, although many of the stories targeted priests and noblemen as well as unfaithful wives of all classes.

Collections of short stories enjoyed considerable popularity in the sixteenth century. The French populace was mostly illiterate. Only a small segment of the upper bourgeoisie and the nobility were literate, and collections of short stories adapted well to being read aloud. Since each story was self-contained, a volume of short fiction could provide several evenings of entertainment without requiring the listener’s presence each evening or could be read with lengthy intervals in between. Some thirty volumes were published during the century; copies of most of these are still in existence. The L’Heptaméron (1559; The Heptameron, 1597), written by Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François Ier, is the best known of these volumes. Modeled on the Decameron: O, Prencipe Galeotto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620) of Giovanni Boccaccio, Heptameron was originally to contain one hundred stories, but Marguerite de Navarre had finished only seventy-two of the stories at the time of her death. The work is a series of short stories connected by themes of love, adultery, deception, and women’s virtue. In addition to the stories, the book contains discussions of the stories by the five men and five women who are telling the tales. The narrators insist that the stories are true, and some of them have been verified as such. This insistence on both novels and short fiction as recounting events that happened became more and more important in the eighteenth century, as fiction writers attempted to establish their work as a literary genre equal to poetry and drama.

The Seventeenth Century and the Eighteenth Century

The seventeenth century, the age of classicism, was dominated by poetry and drama, both the classical tragedy of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine and the classical comedy of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. With a better-educated, more refined aristocratic society enjoying more leisure time, reading became a private activity, and sentimentality replaced reality in fiction. Novels told stories that required multivolumes. After 1660, the popularity of the long sentimental novel waned because of its lack of realism. It was replaced by a shorter realistic novel, still using the novel's theme but setting the intrigue in contemporary society and addressing social and moral problems. Madame de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, (1678, published anonymously; The Princess of Clèves, 1679) represents these novels. Short fiction in the form of a short story or conte survived primarily in the comic story. Collections of short comic stories were very popular during the first quarter of the century. In 1612, François de Souhait published a collection of short stories, Histoires comiques, and Charles Sorel’s Nouvelles françoises appeared in 1623. Nouvelles françoises is a collection of comic stories that treat the theme of master and servant; some of the stories deal with valets and their masters, and others deal with kings and courtiers. However, it was more common for short stories to be embedded in comic novels such as Sorel’s own Histoire comique de Francion (1623, 1632; The Comical History of Francion, 1655) and Paul Scarron’s Le Roman comique (1651, 1657; English translation, 1651, 1657; also known as The Comical Romance, 1665), which appeared between 1651 and 1657.

In the eighteenth century, short fiction became a minor genre. It did, however, become an important vehicle for disseminating philosophical ideas in the works of Voltaire and Denis Diderot. Voltaire published his first conte, Le Micromégas (1752; Micromegas, 1753), in 1752 and his last one, Le Taureau blanc, in 1774. Fiction is always secondary to the ideas expressed in his short stories. His goal in writing them was to satirize his century's mores and social injustices. Presenting his ideas in stories filled with fantasy enabled him to offer his philosophical ideas to a broader audience and provided him with a certain degree of safety from censorship. Primarily interested in composing tragedies and poetry, Voltaire never viewed his contes as having real literary significance; he always referred to them as mere trifles. Ironically, Voltaire’s philosophical contes have earned him a reputation as a literary author. His short fiction continues to be read and appreciated by a wide public. Unlike Voltaire, Diderot was highly interested in prose fiction as a genre of writing. Structure, the creation of characters, and the setting were as crucial to Diderot as the content of his fictional work. Diderot wrote three major novels and six short stories. In his short stories, as in his books, Diderot addresses philosophical concepts of fatalism and materialism and questions the social morality of his time. One of the major themes of his short fiction is the problem of making moral judgments. He explores the theme in “Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne” (1773; “The Two Friends from Bourbonne,” 1964) and in the story of Madame de la Pommeraye, which is included in the stories told in his novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître (wr. c. 1771, pb. 1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, 1797).

During the first half of the eighteenth century, the aristocracy and its lifestyle were the subject of fictional works. Then, in the midcentury, with the increasing importance of the bourgeoisie in both the financial and the governmental milieu, a new form of fiction appeared, which portrayed the virtuous lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s long novel Julie: Ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Eloise: Or, A Series of Original Letters, 1761) is the best known of these works. In short fiction, Jean-François Marmontel most successfully depicted an idealized bourgeoisie with its marital fidelity, the importance of family, conservatism, and strict moral virtue. He published the first of his contes moraux in LeMercure. His moralistic and didactic short fiction was so well received that he published a collection, Contes moraux, in 1761 and an expanded edition in 1792. The writers of the eighteenth century did much to achieve acceptance of both long and short fiction as a literary genre and thus opened the way for the popularity of both the novel and the short story in the following century.

The Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century was an extremely prolific period for short fiction in France. The increase in printed newspapers and magazines provided a large opportunity for the publication of short stories. Le Gaulois, Le Figaro, Gil Blas, and the Revue de Paris consistently made short fiction available to a large reading public. Many different types of short stories developed during the century, and several writers were equally successful in crafting stories of various types. Romanticism, the fiction of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann translated from German in 1829 by Honoré de Balzac, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, new theories of realism, and later naturalism in fiction all contributed to the development of a varied and rich body of short fiction. In the 1820s and 1830s, Charles Nodier wrote several collections of contes fantastiques, in which vampires and the supernatural were the main elements. Writing during the Romantic period, his stories reflect the influence of this literary school. Smarra, ou les démonsde la nuit (1821) and La Fée aux miettes (1832) are two of his best-known collections. Prospère Mérimée is the best-known short story writer of the first half of the nineteenth century. He published most of his early stories in the Revue de Paris. In 1833, he published a collection that included “Mateo Falcone.” Initially published in 1829 in the Revue de Paris, this story is an excellent example of the impersonal, unemotional style of Mérimée. He recounts the harsh code of justice of the Corsicans, which results in the death of the child Mateo Falcone in an objective, detached manner. In 1837, Mérimée published his horror story “La Vénus d’Ille” (“The Venus of Ille,” 1905),” about a statue that comes to life. His best-known story is Carmen (1845, revised 1847; English translation, 1878), in which he again presents a story of passion and death in an objective style, letting the reader derive the psychology of his characters from their actions.

Considered one of the creators of the modern short story, Guy de Maupassant is the most significant short fiction writer of the nineteenth century. He wrote more than three hundred short stories. Early in his career, he met Gustave Flaubert, who served as a mentor to Maupassant. Through Flaubert, Maupassant met Émile Zola and became a member of a group of writers who met at Zola’s house at Médan. In 1880, the six writers published a collection of short stories, Les Soirées de Médan. Maupassant’s contribution to the collection was “Boule de Suif.” This story, set during the Franco-Prussian War, portrays the class-consciousness of French society and the resulting injustice. It is one of his most admired and best-known stories. In 1881, Maupassant published his first collection of short stories, La Maison Tellier (1881; Madame Tellier’s Establishment and Short Stories, 1910). Maupassant wrote many short stories in which he masterfully created a realistic story with a well-turned plot, a conciseness of characterization, and a brevity yet preciseness of description. “Mademoiselle Fifi” (1882) and “La Parure” (1885) are two of his best-known realistic stories. However, Maupassant, like so many writers of his time, was fascinated by the dark fantasy story. His supernatural stories evidence the same craftsmanship as his realistic stories. His short horror story “Le Horla” (1887) deals with a supernatural being that takes control of a man’s thoughts, leading him to hallucinations and suicide. For all of his stories, Maupassant drew heavily upon his own experiences. He set many of his stories during the Franco-Prussian War, in which he fought. Plagued by mental illness through much of his life and subject to hallucinations, Maupassant used his harrowing experiences to create his dark and frightening fantasy stories.

Among the many other writers of short stories during the century, some of the most notable are Théophile Gautier, Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, Phillipe-Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and Alphonse Daudet. Gautier wrote some thirty short stories. Most of these deal with fantasy or the supernatural, such as “La Morte Amoureuse” (1852), a vampire story. Barbey d’Aurevilly published Les Diaboliques in 1874. The stories recount acts of violence and crimes motivated by a curious combination of passion and boredom. The perpetrators of the crimes are all women. Although the collection is considered Barbey d’Aurevilly’s masterpiece, at the time of its publication, there was a strong reaction against it as a danger to public morals. Phillipe-Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam wrote twenty-nine short stories, collected in 1883 in a volume entitled Contes cruels, in which he portrays the inherent cruelty of the masses and the dullness of the bourgeoisie. Elements of fantasy appear in several of the stories. The language of the stories reflects the author’s participation in the Symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century. Like the other writers of the period, Daudet began publishing his short stories in newspapers and journals. Then, in 1869, he published Lettres de mon moulin (1869; Letters from My Mill, 1880), short stories narrated in the first person that primarily recounts episodes from country life in Provence. The stories are amusing and contrast sharply with his later volume, Contes du lundi (1873, 1876; Monday Tales, 1927), written in 1873. The Contes du lundi treats the Franco-Prussian War and the difficulties for average citizens living in wartime. The stories are realistic, and some evidence of the pessimism of naturalism.

The Twentieth Century and the Twenty-First Century

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the focus of fictional writing began to change. Fiction in which the main element was plot was highly perfected during the nineteenth century. For fictional writers, expressing philosophical concepts and character analysis became more important than the plot. By the mid-century, writers were rejecting the traditional criteria for fictional writing and were involved in creating a new novel form (nouveau roman). Plot and chronological order of events were banished from their fiction. The novel was the form best suited to accomplish the writers' goals and became the preferred genre of most fictional writers. Nevertheless, collections of short stories did appear during the twentieth century and were well-received by critics and the reading public.

In the early twentieth century, newspapers and magazines regularly published fictional stories. In 1910, Louis Pergaud published De Goupil à Margot in Le Mercure de France. It won a Prix Goncourt for him. In 1911, he published another collection, La Revanche du corbeau. His stories set in the Franche-Comté and often using animals as the main characters enjoyed considerable popularity. During the 1920s, Paul Morand enjoyed enormous success with his collections of short stories Tendres stocks (Fancy Goods) and Ouvert la nuit (Open All Night). The stories depict the problems faced by women in Europe, which was wrecked by social and political problems. Another important short-story writer of the first half of the twentieth century is Irène Némirovsky, a Russian Jewish immigrant to France who died at Auschwitz in 1942. Written between 1934 and the time of her death, the realistic stories vividly portray France during that period. The stories depict the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, the problems caused by male infidelity, and the devastating effect of the Nazi invasion of France on the lives of people of all classes. The stories were published posthumously in France in 2004 as Suite Française (English translation, 2006).

The best-known and one of the most entertaining French short-story writers of the twentieth century is Marcel Aymé. He uses settings in the French countryside or Montmartre. His short stories combine realism, fantasy, and an attitude lightly tinged with disappointment at how the world is. Aymé is one of those authors who convince the reader to believe the fantasy that he creates. The stories appear in three collections Derrière chez Martin (Behind Martin’s Place), published in 1938, Le Passe-Muraille (The Man Who Walked Through Walls), published in 1943, and La Fille du shérif (The Sheriff’s Daughter) posthumously published in 1987. J. M. G. Le Clézio is one of the most interesting and innovative contemporary short fiction writers. As an author of novels, essays, children’s literature, and travel pieces and a short-fiction writer, Le Clézio was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. He published eight collections of short stories between 1965 and 2008. Throughout his career as a writer, Le Clézio has experimented with various approaches to literature; his short stories reflect his ongoing adventure with the written word. The themes of his stories vary greatly from collection to collection. His first collection La Fièvre (1965; The Fever, 1966), and his 1982 collection La Ronde et d’autres faits divers (The Round and Other Hard Cold Facts, 2002), deal with dark themes of fear and suffering. The 1978 collection Mondo et autres histoires tells stories of simple discoveries and concentrates on descriptions of nature and landscapes. In Printemps et autres saisons (1989), he uses stories about different women to develop his theme that civilization destroys both truth and freedom. Le Clézio's later short works include Tempête: deux novellas (2014), Chanson bretonne, suivi de L'Enfant et la Guerre (2020), and Avers (2023). Le Clézio successfully adapts the short story form to several very different theories of writing and how words can be used.

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