French Literature
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50 free French Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
French writers have given the world some of its best-loved stories: musketeers and masked avengers, hunchbacks and submarine captains, fairy-tale heroines and a boy from a tiny asteroid. Many of the people behind them lived lives as dramatic as their plots, with duels, exiles, obscenity trials and refused prizes along the way. This quiz covers the famous French writers and the books, plays and poems that made their names, from medieval romance and the comedies of the royal court to the great nineteenth-century novels and the philosophers and prize-winners of the modern era. Expect questions on characters, plots, pen names, scandals and the institutions that guard the language. It suits readers, students of French and anyone who fancies a literary round with a continental accent. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still leaves you with a good story.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Paris landmark did Guy de Maupassant supposedly lunch inside daily to avoid seeing it?
Eiffel Tower
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.
Q 02Which Hollywood hit began as a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle, author of The Bridge over the River Kwai?
Planet of the Apes
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.
Q 03In Les Misérables, what does Jean Valjean steal that leads to his nineteen years as a convict?
A loaf of bread
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.
Q 04Which playwright collapsed on stage in 1673 while playing the hypochondriac in his own The Imaginary Invalid?
Molière
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.
Q 05Which French philosopher, the author of Nausea, tried to refuse the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature?
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre said he always declined official honours, because he did not want a writer to become an institution.
Q 06In The Three Musketeers, which young man leaves Gascony for Paris hoping to join the king's guard?
D'Artagnan
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.
Q 07Which tale did Antoine de Saint-Exupéry publish a year before he vanished on a 1944 reconnaissance flight?
The Little Prince
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.
Q 08Which author of Les Misérables spent fifteen years in exile on the Channel island of Guernsey?
Victor Hugo
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.
Q 09Which small cake, dipped in tea, unlocks the narrator's childhood memories in In Search of Lost Time?
Madeleine
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.
Q 10Which Nobel-winning author of The Plague played goalkeeper for a junior football team in Algiers?
Albert Camus
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.
Q 11Which author of The Count of Monte Cristo was the son of a general born to an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue?
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas was reburied among France's honoured dead in 2002, when President Chirac said the ceremony corrected a wrong rooted in racism.
Q 12Which novelist from Nantes sent Phileas Fogg around the world and explorers to the centre of the Earth?
Jules Verne
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.
Q 13What is the name of Captain Nemo's submarine in the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas?
Nautilus
Q 21Which reclusive novelist slept by day and wrote In Search of Lost Time by night in his Paris bedroom?
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust had to pay for the first volume's publication himself, after leading editors who were offered the handwritten manuscript turned it down.
Q 22Which Gustave Flaubert novel about a bored provincial wife put its author on trial for obscenity in 1857?
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary became a bestseller within months of Flaubert's acquittal: the trial had made the serialised story notorious.
Q 23Which novelist's 1898 open letter J'Accuse...! defended Alfred Dreyfus and led to his own conviction for libel?
Émile Zola
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.
Q 14In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which bell-ringer is named after the Sunday on which he was found abandoned?
Quasimodo
Quasimodo takes his name from Quasimodo Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter, when he was left on the cathedral's bed for foundlings.
Q 15Which Enlightenment satirist, born François-Marie Arouet, adopted his famous pen name after a spell in the Bastille?
Voltaire
Voltaire grew rich by joining a consortium that bought up a French government lottery, a scheme that earned him perhaps a million livres.
Q 16Which gentleman thief and master of disguise did French writer Maurice Leblanc create in 1905?
Arsène Lupin
Arsène Lupin was meant to face Sherlock Holmes by name, but after legal objections from Arthur Conan Doyle the detective was renamed Herlock Sholmès.
Q 17Which author's 1697 Tales of Mother Goose included Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Sleeping Beauty?
Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault never tied Mother Goose to a real person: the name has not been identified with anyone and pointed to rural storytelling traditions.
Q 18Which Edmond Rostand play features a big-nosed swordsman who writes love letters to Roxane for another man?
Cyrano de Bergerac
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.
Q 19Which Gaston Leroux novel, first serialised in Le Gaulois, centres on a deformed man called Erik?
The Phantom of the Opera
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.
Q 20Which Georges Bizet opera is based on an 1845 novella by the French writer Prosper Mérimée?
Carmen
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.
Émile Zola fled to England to avoid prison after the verdict and did not return home until June 1899.
Q 24Which novelist, fuelled by endless cups of black coffee, wrote the vast novel sequence La Comédie humaine?
Honoré de Balzac
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.
Q 25Which American writer's stories did the poet Charles Baudelaire spend years translating into French?
Edgar Allan Poe
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.
Q 26Which teenage poet was wounded in the wrist when his lover Paul Verlaine fired two shots at him in Brussels?
Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud was 18 when Verlaine shot him in a drunken rage, and he stopped writing literature altogether at 20 after assembling Illuminations.
Q 27Which 17th-century poet's verse Fables, first published in 1668, became a model for fabulists across Europe?
Jean de La Fontaine
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.
Q 28Which French philosopher wrote The Second Sex, the 1949 study regarded as a founding text of modern feminism?
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir saw the book condemned by the Catholic Church, which added it to the Vatican's list of prohibited books.
Q 29Which novelist, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, took a male pen name and wore men's clothing around Paris?
George Sand
George Sand gave practical reasons for the clothes: male attire was less expensive and far more robust than the dress expected of a noblewoman.
Q 30In The Count of Monte Cristo, which island fortress holds Edmond Dantès prisoner before his daring escape?
Château d'If
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.