Historical French fiction
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
The frustrations of the times may have added to the attraction of the historical novel, which
remained popular throughout the second half of the century. Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980
became the first woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown that the genre could move
beyond escapism. Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au noir
(1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time. In addition to proffering rich evocations of
the past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden
(1970; Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution, obscenity, and atrocity, set in the
Algerian desert, was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence Delay in her stylish novel
L’Insuccès de la fête (1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially, Nobel Prize-winning
author Claude Simon, many of whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng. trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences of loss and longing but also explore forms
of memory and remembering and questions of subjectivity and historical truth. Historical fiction
was sustained by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of Michel Foucault’s studies of
sexuality and attitudes to death, and the narrative and materialist social history associated with
the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography, autobiography, and memoirs. The
novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed
above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish
journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s
recollections of his Provençal childhood met with great success. The vogue would gather
momentum in the last decades of the century, in texts which, increasingly, became technically
innovative, such as Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes), a contradictory,
self-critical portrait; and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood). Genre boundaries
blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by the nouveau roman, had an outstanding
practitioner in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also
turned to autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric
Dard (better known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of Parisian argot, but the chief
attraction of the thriller for more “literary” writers was its form, which they, like a number of
filmmakers, adopted as a framework for the investigation of questions of identity or moral and
political dilemmas. In Patrick Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The Street of Dark
Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person), for example, a detective who has lost his memory looks for
his identity in the darkness of the wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90s
The closing years of the century were a time of adjustment to political, economic, and
social changes. The slow recognition that France was no longer a major player in global politics
was accompanied by a reassessment of the leading part the country still played on the cultural
stage—not least in Europe, where cultural politics became increasingly important in France’s bid
for power in the new European Union. Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a
character remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte
and the Indiscretion”]).
Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the
closing essay to his great project of national cultural commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire
(Realms of Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac tone of the finished work and
commented that a different tone might have emerged if he had invited his contributors to focus
on more marginal groups. Indeed, an important contribution was being made to French cultural
life not only by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean
but by descendants of immigrants in France itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and brought up in France (known as les beurs,
from the word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan) began to find publishers and
audiences from the early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity and the
patterns of life in the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris, Nancy, and Lyon began to
enrich the cultural capital of a mainstream readership that was increasingly learning to see itself
as formed in the crosscurrents of internationalism and the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right
National Front (Front National), as delineated in works such as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle
part (1985; “Zeida from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le temps présent (1995;
“Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to come to
terms with the Algerian conflict, as evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man), an autobiographical novel
based on his father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class European colonist milieu. Assia
Djebar, one of the turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is painfully positioned in terrain
that is both European and transatlantic. Having established—in novels such as L’Amour, la
fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent defender and
critic of her native Algeria, which emerged from colonial oppression with gender repressions still
intact, she divided her working life between Europe and the United States, producing fictions
that look to the Algerian motherland but are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the frontiers
of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
