After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philol…
Jean Anouilh was a French dramatist and screenwriter whose career spanned five decades, producing works that ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, though he is best remembered for his 1944 produc…
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu, was a Romanian playwright and dramatist; one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays …
Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).
French humanist François Rabelais wrote satirical attacks, most notably Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), on medieval scholasticism and superstition.
Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later sym…
French critic Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole François Thibault wrote sophisticated, often satirical short stories and novels, including Penguin Island (1908), and won the Nobel Prize …
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (Th…
French writer Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac), a founder of the realist school of fiction, portrayed the panorama of society in a body of works, known collectively as La comédie humaine.
Ahmed Sefrioui (Arabic: أحمد صفروي) was a Moroccan novelist and pioneer of Moroccan literature in the French language. He was born in Fes in 1915 of Berber parents. Sefrioui was founder of the Al Bath…
Né au Liban le 16 octobre 1968, Wajdi Mouawad est contraint d’abandonner sa terre natale à l’âge de huit ans, pour cause de guerre civile. Débute une période d’exil qui le conduit d’abord avec sa fami…
Paul Éluard was the pen name of Eugène Émile Paul Grindel. French poet, a founder of Surrealism with Louis Aragon and André Breton among others, one of the important lyrical poets of the 20th century.…
Pierre Corneille était l'un des trois grands dramaturges français du XVIIe siècle , avec Molière et Racine. Il a été appelé «le fondateur de la tragédie française» et était productive pendant près de …
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment. H…
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French novelist and dramatist. He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing…
