People have been writing literary works in French for a thousand years, since the eleventh century. What began as a small stream of texts copied by hand has become a vast river of printed poems, dramas, novels, stories, biographies, and autobiographies in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of forms created and enjoyed now not only in Europe but on many continents. French was long the true lingua franca of cultural elites in many countries. Yet, French has also been a language of revolutionary aspirations and of those campaigning for human rights.

This Very Short Introduction is a guide to the most distinctive works from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the Baroque and Enlightenment periods, and then into the explosion of writings and movements from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. The concept of character serves as a guiding thread through these many periods. What kinds of individuals appear as protagonists? What can we infer about the values, the priorities, the social hierarchies, the artistic movements, the dominant emotions, and literary forms typical of the time that produced the works? Are the central characters rulers or rebels? What type of physical world do they inhabit? In the Middle Ages, it was often an aristocratic court or the ascetic cell of a monk or a nun. As Paris grew in importance as a stable capital, people learned to express themselves in refined conversation in salons hosted by literary women or, instead, in the male gathering place, the tavern. With the Enlightenment, the café emerged as a rival to the salon. Still, in a powerful reaction to the artifice of cities, Romanticism exalted the simple life of the countryside and the exotic locales of North America and Africa. All of this constitutes the vast repertory of literature in French, the language of sixteen Nobel Prize winners in literature.