50 Fun Facts About French Literature

Which Paris landmark did Guy de Maupassant supposedly lunch inside daily to avoid seeing it?

Eiffel Tower opponents organised before it rose: a Committee of Three Hundred artists, one for each metre of its height and with Maupassant among them, campaigned against it.

Which Hollywood hit began as a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle, author of The Bridge over the River Kwai?

Planet of the Apes reached British readers under a different name: the translation of Boulle's La Planète des singes was sold there as Monkey Planet.

In Les Misérables, what does Jean Valjean steal that leads to his nineteen years as a convict?

A loaf of bread, taken to feed his sister's seven starving children, earned Valjean five years; failed escape attempts stretched the sentence to nineteen.

Which playwright collapsed on stage in 1673 while playing the hypochondriac in his own The Imaginary Invalid?

Molière finished the performance despite a coughing fit and a haemorrhage, then died at home a few hours later; the comedy was the last play he wrote.

Which French philosopher, the author of Nausea, tried to refuse the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Jean-Paul Sartre said he always declined official honours, because he did not want a writer to become an institution.

In The Three Musketeers, which young man leaves Gascony for Paris hoping to join the king's guard?

D'Artagnan is not one of the three of the title: he befriends Athos, Porthos and Aramis only after offending each of them and agreeing to three duels in one afternoon.

Which tale did Antoine de Saint-Exupéry publish a year before he vanished on a 1944 reconnaissance flight?

The Little Prince first appeared in New York in 1943, in English and French; France got its edition only after liberation, because the Vichy regime had banned its author's works.

Which author of Les Misérables spent fifteen years in exile on the Channel island of Guernsey?

Victor Hugo gave French a word from Guernsey: pieuvre, the islanders' name for an octopus, entered the language through his novel Toilers of the Sea.

Which small cake, dipped in tea, unlocks the narrator's childhood memories in In Search of Lost Time?

Madeleine and tea set off what the novel calls involuntary memory: until that taste, the narrator can recall almost nothing of his childhood in Combray.

Which Nobel-winning author of The Plague played goalkeeper for a junior football team in Algiers?

Albert Camus saw his football hopes end at 17, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis; he went on to become the first literature Nobel laureate born in Africa.

Which author of The Count of Monte Cristo was the son of a general born to an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue?

Alexandre Dumas was reburied among France's honoured dead in 2002, when President Chirac said the ceremony corrected a wrong rooted in racism.

Which novelist from Nantes sent Phileas Fogg around the world and explorers to the centre of the Earth?

Jules Verne, legend has it, slipped aboard a three-masted ship at 11 as a cabin boy, hoping to bring a coral necklace back from the Indies for his cousin.

What is the name of Captain Nemo's submarine in the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas?

Nautilus is regarded as ahead of its time: the novel accurately describes many features of modern submarines, though the real vessels of the 1860s were primitive.

In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which bell-ringer is named after the Sunday on which he was found abandoned?

Quasimodo takes his name from Quasimodo Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter, when he was left on the cathedral's bed for foundlings.

Which Enlightenment satirist, born François-Marie Arouet, adopted his famous pen name after a spell in the Bastille?

Voltaire grew rich by joining a consortium that bought up a French government lottery, a scheme that earned him perhaps a million livres.

Which gentleman thief and master of disguise did French writer Maurice Leblanc create in 1905?

Arsène Lupin was meant to face Sherlock Holmes by name, but after legal objections from Arthur Conan Doyle the detective was renamed Herlock Sholmès.

Which author's 1697 Tales of Mother Goose included Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Sleeping Beauty?

Charles Perrault never tied Mother Goose to a real person: the name has not been identified with anyone and pointed to rural storytelling traditions.

Which Edmond Rostand play features a big-nosed swordsman who writes love letters to Roxane for another man?

Cyrano de Bergerac gave English the swagger sense of panache, a word that had meant only a plume of feathers: the dying hero claims it as the one thing he keeps.

Which Gaston Leroux novel, first serialised in Le Gaulois, centres on a deformed man called Erik?

The Phantom of the Opera borrowed real details: the lake beneath the Paris opera house is an enormous cistern, still used to train firefighters to swim in the dark.

Which Georges Bizet opera is based on an 1845 novella by the French writer Prosper Mérimée?

Carmen grew from a story the Countess of Montijo told Mérimée on his visit to Spain in 1830, as he later recalled in a letter to her.

Which reclusive novelist slept by day and wrote In Search of Lost Time by night in his Paris bedroom?

Marcel Proust had to pay for the first volume's publication himself, after leading editors who were offered the handwritten manuscript turned it down.

Which Gustave Flaubert novel about a bored provincial wife put its author on trial for obscenity in 1857?

Madame Bovary became a bestseller within months of Flaubert's acquittal: the trial had made the serialised story notorious.

Which novelist's 1898 open letter J'Accuse...! defended Alfred Dreyfus and led to his own conviction for libel?

Émile Zola fled to England to avoid prison after the verdict and did not return home until June 1899.

Which novelist, fuelled by endless cups of black coffee, wrote the vast novel sequence La Comédie humaine?

Honoré de Balzac reportedly drank more than 50 cups a day, and some researchers have suggested caffeine played a part in his death, though that is unproven.

Which American writer's stories did the poet Charles Baudelaire spend years translating into French?

Edgar Allan Poe owes much of his standing in France to Baudelaire, who was largely occupied with translating his works until 1865 and was widely praised for the results.

Which teenage poet was wounded in the wrist when his lover Paul Verlaine fired two shots at him in Brussels?

Arthur Rimbaud was 18 when Verlaine shot him in a drunken rage, and he stopped writing literature altogether at 20 after assembling Illuminations.

Which 17th-century poet's verse Fables, first published in 1668, became a model for fabulists across Europe?

Jean de La Fontaine took most stories in his first six books from Aesop and other ancient fabulists, retelling them in free verse that is easily memorised.

Which French philosopher wrote The Second Sex, the 1949 study regarded as a founding text of modern feminism?

Simone de Beauvoir saw the book condemned by the Catholic Church, which added it to the Vatican's list of prohibited books.

Which novelist, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, took a male pen name and wore men's clothing around Paris?

George Sand gave practical reasons for the clothes: male attire was less expensive and far more robust than the dress expected of a noblewoman.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, which island fortress holds Edmond Dantès prisoner before his daring escape?

Château d'If was a real prison off Marseille: its isolation and dangerous offshore currents made it escape-proof, much as Alcatraz was in later times.

Which author of the novella Gigi was the first French woman of letters to be given a state funeral?

Colette was refused a religious funeral by the Catholic Church because of her divorces, so the state honoured her instead.

Which novelist, born Marie-Henri Beyle, wrote The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma?

Stendhal was reportedly so overcome by the cultural riches of Florence on an 1817 visit that the reaction is now known as Stendhal syndrome.

Which 1942 novel follows Meursault, who kills a man in Algiers weeks after his mother's funeral?

The Stranger has since been answered from the other side: Kamel Daoud's 2013 novel The Meursault Investigation is told by the brother of the unnamed victim.

Which novel of the Rougon-Macquart series depicts a coal miners' strike in northern France in the 1860s?

Germinal became a rallying cry: at its author's funeral, crowds of workers cheered the procession by shouting the novel's title.

Which 1664 comedy about a pious fraud was suppressed by Louis XIV after the Archbishop of Paris condemned it?

Tartuffe was first staged at Versailles in three acts, but that original text has been lost; a toned-down rewrite was allowed back on stage only in 1669.

Which 1759 satire follows a sheltered young man taught by Professor Pangloss that all is for the best?

Candide was published in secret and at once widely banned for blasphemy and sedition, yet an English translation appeared the same year.

Which Irish writer composed Waiting for Godot in French before adapting it into English himself?

Samuel Beckett wrote the original French text in under four months, between October 1948 and January 1949, and the play was first staged in French in 1953.

Which French literary prize, the country's most prestigious, pays its winner a symbolic sum of only 10 euros?

Prix Goncourt winners hardly need the cheque: the award drives such tremendous book sales that the laureate is said to become an instant millionaire.

Which body, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, has forty members known as the immortals?

Académie française members owe the nickname to the body's motto, To Immortality, which is inscribed on the seal of the charter Richelieu granted.

Which movement did the poet André Breton set out in a manifesto published in October 1924?

Surrealism had two rival manifestos that month: Yvan Goll and Breton led competing groups, each claiming the legacy of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Which author of the memoir The Years became the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Annie Ernaux won in 2022 as the 16th French laureate, which means fifteen of her compatriots had been honoured before the first Frenchwoman.

Which Renaissance physician and priest wrote the satirical tales of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel?

François Rabelais published the first book under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram of his own name, mainly to supplement his income at a hospital.

Which 16th-century French writer popularised the essay as a literary genre with his digressive, personal Essais?

Michel de Montaigne was raised with Latin as his first language: his father hired only servants who could speak it and ordered them to use it with the boy.

Which teenage author was just 18 years old when the novel Bonjour Tristesse was published in 1954?

Françoise Sagan was a pen name: born Françoise Quoirez, she borrowed it from a character in the novel In Search of Lost Time.

Which 1782 novel, told entirely in letters, follows the scheming Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont?

Les Liaisons dangereuses has no winner: its two amoral lovers turned rivals amuse themselves by ruining others and in the end destroy each other.

Which Romanian-born playwright imagined the people of a French town turning into rhinoceroses?

Eugène Ionesco did not write his first play, The Bald Soprano, until 1948; it helped start what became known as the Theatre of the Absurd.

Which Paris mausoleum, where France honours its greatest writers, was first built as a church to Saint Genevieve?

The Panthéon was ordered by Louis XV to house the relics of the city's patron saint, but neither the king nor his architect Soufflot lived to see it completed.

Which French poet, trained as an engineer, won the very first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901?

Sully Prudhomme gave away the bulk of the prize money, using it to create a poetry prize awarded by the Société des gens de lettres.

Which letter never appears in La Disparition, the 300-page novel Georges Perec published in 1969?

E was banished from every page under the constraints of the Oulipo group; Gilbert Adair's English translation, A Void, won the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1995.

Which knight's love for Guinevere is the subject of The Knight of the Cart, a 12th-century poem by Chrétien de Troyes?

Lancelot gained his now-familiar legend as later writers expanded that poem into the vast Lancelot-Grail prose cycle, itself abridged in Le Morte d'Arthur.