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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Novel, 1856. Translated from French
Provincial Normandy in the 1840s, with its stifling village society, farms and small-town ambitions, shapes Emma's tragic longing.
Books set in France
Six books by writers from France, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Madame Bovary and Les Misérables.
About the literature of France
From Sully Prudhomme in 1901 to Annie Ernaux in 2022, France has produced more Nobel laureates in literature than any other country. Its writing reaches back to the medieval epic poem The Song of Roland, and Frédéric Mistral, who won the prize in 1904, wrote in Provençal rather than French. Revolution, empire and class conflict run through much of the nineteenth-century fiction.
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables travels from Digne to Paris and the 1832 uprising. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary tells of Emma's restless longing in provincial Normandy in the 1840s, while Émile Zola's Germinal sets a miners' strike in the northern coalfields. Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse moves to a summer on the Riviera in the 1950s, among the leisured upper classes of postwar France.
By writers from France
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Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Novel, 1862. Translated from French by Norman Denny
Post-Napoleonic France from Digne to Paris, including the 1832 uprising, the sewers and the harsh justice system.
Germinal
Émile Zola
Novel, 1885. Translated from French by Roger Pearson
Life and strike action in the northern French coalfields under the Second Empire, showing industrial class conflict.
Swann's Way
Marcel Proust
Novel, 1913. Translated from French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Combray's countryside and Parisian salons show the textures of bourgeois and aristocratic life in the Third Republic.
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert
Novel, 1869. Translated from French
A young man's disillusion across Paris and the provinces during the 1848 revolution and the Second Empire.
Bonjour Tristesse
Françoise Sagan
Novel, 1954. Translated from French by Irene Ash
Summer on the Riviera in the 1950s captures the leisured, amoral world of postwar upper-class France.
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