The popularity of cultural activities is also evident, with increasing visits to historic monuments, art galleries, and museums. Especially attractive are interactive exhibitions at museums, such as the Cité de Sciences et de l’Industrie (City of Science and of Industry) at Le Parc de la Villette in Paris or the Futuroscope theme park near Poitiers. Interest also has been revived in local and regional cultures, often as part of new initiatives to develop tourism, and annual national festivals, such as the Fête de la Musique, are extremely successful.
Although French cuisine has a reputation as a grand national feature, regional differences are marked. Some local dishes have achieved international fame, even if they are often poorly imitated. Among these are the seafood soup, bouillabaisse, from Marseille; andouillette, a form of sausage from Lyon; choucroute, pickled cabbage from Alsace; and magret de canard, slices of breast of duck from Bordeaux. France is also renowned for the range and quality of its cheeses. More than 300 varieties are recognized. The majority are produced from cow’s milk, including Camembert (Normandy), Brie (Île-de-France), Comté (Franche-Comté), Saint-Nectaire (Auvergne), and Reblochon (Savoy). Cheese is also made from ewe’s milk, as in the case of Roquefort (Aveyron), as well as from goat’s milk. Perhaps the best-known exports of France are the wines from some of the world’s great vineyards in Burgundy, Bordeaux, and the Rhône valley. However, the reputation of French cuisine has not prevented the proliferation of fast-food outlets in France, especially over the past few decades. French consumption of wine and tobacco has dropped steadily since the mid-20th century, a mark of the nation’s increased attention to health.
Paris is internationally known for its haute couture, exemplified by such houses of high fashion as Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Christian Lacroix. Traditional dress is occasionally seen in many regions, although it is largely reserved for official ceremonies and festivals. Regional differences often reflect local customs of dressmaking and embroidery, the availability of fabrics, and adaptations to local climatic conditions. Headdresses vary greatly, ranging from elaborate lace wimples found in Normandy and Brittany to the more sober beret of southwestern France or the straw hat, worn typically in and around the area of Nice.
In addition to the Roman Catholic holy days, the French celebrate Bastille Day on June 14, commemorating the rise of the French Republic via the fall of the prison fortress of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem and one of the world’s most recognizable national anthems, also memorializes the Revolution. The arts Literature
French literature has a long and rich history. Traditionally it is held to have begun in 842 with the Oath of Strasbourg, a political pact between Louis the German and Charles the Bald, the text of which survives in Old French. The Middle Ages are noted in particular for epic poems such as La Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland), the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and lyric poetry expressing romantic love. In the 16th century the Renaissance flourished, and figures such as the poet Pierre de Ronsard, the satirist and humorist François Rabelais, and the quintessential essayist Michel de Montaigne, were to become internationally acknowledged. French Neoclassical drama reached its apotheosis during the next hundred years in the tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. During the same period, Molière displayed his vast and varied talents in the theatre, particularly as a writer of comedies; Jean de La Fontaine produced moralistic verse in his Fables; and Madame de La Fayette created the classic La Princesse de Clèves (1678), generally considered the first French psychological novel.
Molière, oil painting by Pierre Mignard; in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.Courtesy of the Musée Condé, Chantilly, Fr.; photograph, Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
Gustave Flaubert, detail of a drawing by E.F. von Liphart, 1880; in the Bibliothèque Municipale, Rouen, France.Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Municipale, Rouen; photograph, Ellebe
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide published in London, 1759.The Newberry Library, Louis H. Silver Collection purchase, 1964 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau dominated the 18th century, especially with their philosophical writings, though they made major contributions to all genres, and Voltaire’s novel Candide (1759) is notable for its literary quality and distillation of Enlightenment ideals. Other authors of the period include playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, best known for works such as Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro), and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, remembered for his epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances). The 19th century witnessed the emergence of a series of writers who substantially influenced the development of literature worldwide, including the novelists Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola along with the poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud. Added to these was the Romantic writer Victor Hugo, whose creative energy expressed itself in all literary forms, as well as in painting.
French literature in the 20th century both carried on the earlier traditions and transformed them, and French authors have won a number of Nobel Prizes for Literature. While the complexity of French poetry continued in the work of Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel (also a major dramatist), Saint-John Perse, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, René Char, and Yves Bonnefoy, the art of the novel was given new direction by Marcel Proust, in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past). The first half of the century also produced such notable writers as André Gide, François Mauriac, André Malraux, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the last arguably the chief exponent of existentialist philosophy. Their work was followed in the 1950s by the nouveau roman (“new novel”) and by the emergence of writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Mauriac, Marguerite Duras, and Claude Simon, whose works have entered the canon of literature. Since the 1970s Michel Tournier, Patrick Modiano, Erik Orsenna, and Georges Perec have become leading novelists; feminist writers, including Hélène Cixous, Annie Leclerc, Jeanne Champion, and Marie Cardinal, have also made significant contributions.
The literature of the 20th century was notable for its openness to nonnative writers: the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, for instance, the Czech expatriate Milan Kundera, the Russian emigrant Andreï Makine, and Chinese exile Gao Xingjian have all produced major works in French. Georges Simenon and Marguerite Yourcenar, both born in Belgium in 1903, were considered French writers, though they often lived outside France. The postcolonial literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries offered insights into the tensions of cross-cultural identity by Francophone writers from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean.