Les écrivains de France
The Writers
Appreciations of the writers of France — the lives and the work, celebrated and read closely.
Each writer is pinned where they belong on La Carte Littéraire — the literary map of France.
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01
Flaubert and le mot juste
The flagship: Gustave Flaubert's obsessive search for the exact word — the gueuloir, the years over Madame Bovary, and how his devotion to the sentence invented the modern discipline of prose.
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02
Proust and the Recovery of Time
Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time — involuntary memory, the madeleine, and how the longest novel in French made a whole world out of remembering.
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03
Colette and the Senses
Colette's sensory genius — the Burgundy childhood, the music-hall years, the Claudine books and Gigi — and a woman who wrote pleasure and independence better than anyone of her age.
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04
Zola and the Real
Émile Zola and naturalism — the vast Rougon-Macquart cycle, Germinal and the coal mine, and a novelist who put the crowd, the machine and the poor at the centre of French fiction.
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05
Baudelaire and the Invention of the Modern
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal and the birth of modern poetry — the flâneur, the city, and the beauty he found in the ugly and the fleeting.
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06
Rimbaud, the Comet Who Quit
Arthur Rimbaud — the teenage genius of Une saison en enfer and Illuminations who reinvented poetry and then, at twenty, walked away from it for good.