Dictionary: France   (frăns)

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France

(Mapping Specialists, Ltd.)

A country of western Europe on the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel. It was settled by the Franks after the retreat of the Romans, who had conquered Celtic Gaul in 58–51 B.C. Charlemagne made it the center of his Empire of the West after A.D. 800. In the Middle Ages France was split into numerous fiefdoms and kingdoms, most of which were incorporated into the royal domain by the time of Louis XI (reigned 1461–1483). Widespread poverty and discontent led to the French Revolution (1789) and the end of the monarchy. The First Republic (1792–1804) was followed by the First Empire (1804–1815) under Napoleon Bonaparte, a period of constitutional monarchy (1814–1848), and a succession of republics broken by the Second Empire (1852–1870) under Louis Napoleon. Much of France was occupied by Germany in World War II. Paris is the capital and the largest city. Population: 63,700,000.

Country, northwestern Europe. It includes the island of Corsica. Area: 210,026 sq mi (543,965 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 60,733,000. Capital: Paris. The people are mainly French. Language: French (official). Religions: Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholic; also Protestant); also Islam, Judaism. Currency: euro. France has extensive plains, rivers, and a number of mountain ranges, including the Pyrenees and the Alps. The climate is generally moderate. More than half of the land is suitable for agriculture, and forests, largely unexploited, cover about one-fourth of the area. France has a developed mixed economy with a preponderance of small firms. Its chief of state is the president, and the head of government is the prime minister. The legislature consists of two houses. France is one of the major economic powers of the world and was a founding member of the European Community (see European Union). Culturally, France has enjoyed a significant role in the world from the early Middle Ages. Archaeological excavations in France indicate continuous settlement from Paleolithic times. By the 5th century BC the Gauls migrated south from the Rhine River valley to the Mediterranean coast of modern France, and in 600 BC Ionian Greeks established several settlements, including one at Marseille. Julius Caesar completed the Roman conquest of Gaul in 50 BC. During the 6th century AD the Salian Franks ruled; by the 8th century power had passed to the Carolingians, so named for the influential reign of Charlemagne. The Hundred Years' War (1337 – 1453) resulted in the return to France of land that had been held by England; by the end of the 15th century, France approximated its modern boundaries. The 16th century was marked by the Wars of Religion between Protestants (Huguenots) and Roman Catholics. Henry IV's Edict of Nantes (1598) granted substantial religious toleration, but this was revoked in 1685 by Louis XIV, who helped to raise monarchical absolutism to new heights. In 1789 the French Revolution proclaimed the rights of the individual and destroyed the ancien régime. Under the rule of Napoleon (1799 – 1814/15), France fought to expand its dominion. It then became a monarchy again until the founding of the Second Republic (1848 – 52), after which Napoleon III ruled as emperor before the creation of the Third Republic in 1871. World War I (1914 – 18) ravaged the northern part of France. After Nazi Germany's invasion of France during World War II, the collaborationist Vichy regime governed. Liberated by Allied and Free French forces in 1944, France restored parliamentary democracy under the Fourth Republic. A costly war in Indochina (see Indochina wars) and rising nationalism in French colonies during the 1950s overwhelmed the Fourth Republic. The Fifth Republic officially began in January 1959 under Charles de Gaulle, who presided over the dissolution of most of France's overseas colonies (see Algerian War; French Equatorial Africa; French West Africa). In 1981 France elected its first socialist president, François Mitterrand. At various times from 1986 through the beginning of the 21st century, France balanced a form of divided government known as "cohabitation," with a president and prime minister of different political parties.

For more information on France, visit Britannica.com.

To 1920

It is clear to historians today that two great nations, France and Britain, dominated photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries: in terms of inventions, numbers of major photographers, influence on the rest of the world, and diversity of the medium's applications. The explanation for this quasi-duopoly clearly derives from the two countries' ascendancy on the world stage. Their economic prosperity and colonial empires, and the fact that London and Paris were both cauldrons of intellectual and artistic activity, are sufficient to explain why photography, like other arts, technologies, industries, and fashionable pursuits, was particularly advanced there. However, this preliminary socio-economic observation does not explain everything: Berlin or Moscow, St Petersburg, Rome, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, or New York, even if not playing leading roles, might nevertheless have become significant centres of activity, as they did in other fields. In photography, however, this became true only to a limited extent. Although from pictorialism onwards the Italian, Belgian, German, Austrian, and American schools began to make major contributions, until the 1880s London and Paris were at the heart of photographic activity; Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot, Poitevin, Brewster, Archer, Le Gray, Maddox, Ducos, Charles Cros (1842-88), Henri Becquerel (1852-1908), the Lumière brothers, and other French and British figures were associated with the birth of photography and most of its key developments until c.1900.

This said, it is necessary to establish what was distinctive about 19th-century French photography. By its agreement with Daguerre, the French government acquired his and Niépce's invention in order to present it to ‘humanity’. For a while, the spectacular announcement in Paris in August 1839 eclipsed Talbot's quiet work in the English provinces. The invention, which became the object of an immediate craze, was almost universally perceived as French. A shock wave radiated outwards from Paris, but also engulfed the city itself. The portrait studios lampooned by wits and cartoonists like Honoré Daumier became a speciality of the French capital. The calotype, as Edmond de Valicourt vividly put it, seemed ‘stifled at birth’. Its resurrection at the end of the 1840s was also strongly linked to Paris; the improvements made by the Lille publisher Blanquart-Évrard and others, though the subject of disputes with Talbot, restored the process to centre stage, as the unique, expensive daguerreotype was beginning to lose its appeal. The ultimate refinements of the paper-negative process by Gustave Le Gray (1849-51), inventor of the waxed-paper process, succeeded in making the calotype completely practicable. From the late 1840s it enjoyed definite success, albeit different from that of the daguerreotype. The overwhelming majority of daguerreotypes were commercial products, studio portraits that rarely had artistic value, and other applications remained marginal. With the calotype, on the other hand, as the works of Talbot, then Hill and Adamson, demonstrated, photography entered the domain of the intellectual and artistic elite. As Eugenia Parry Janis has shown, this was particularly marked in France. In the hands of skilled amateurs and professionals, the calotype pushed forward the frontiers of the medium. Painters such as Delacroix and Courbet made early and considerable use of it, abundantly supplied with purpose-produced work by artists like Vallou de Villeneuve and Durieu.

The development of archaeology, and the study, restoration, and conservation of ancient and historical monuments, also came to rely heavily on photography, to which they offered enormous scope: for example, the project later known as the Mission Héliographique (1851), whose extraordinary results remain one of the jewels of early paper-negative photography in France. Notable too was Maxime Du Camp's visit to Egypt (1849-51), Eugène Piot's to Italy (1851), and Auguste Salzmann's archaeological work in Jerusalem (1854).

Having become a fashionable pursuit by the beginning of the 1850s, photography offered plenty of rewarding activity to rich amateurs. Olympe and Onésipe Aguado, Odet de Montault, Benjamin and Édouard Delessert, Roger du Manoir, the vicomte de Vigier, and many others were trained by Le Gray, whose personality and technical virtuosity gave substance and coherence to this French calotype school. Another, allied group was centred on the Sèvres porcelain works around its director, Henri-Victor Régnault, and the head of its decorative workshops, Louis-Rémy Robert. In the 1850s, photographic technique was discussed in France, as in England, in stately homes, town mansions, academies, museums, and learned societies. The yield was rich, varied, and often innovative, despite its frequent indebtedness to contemporary painting. Blanquart-Évrard, who between 1851 and 1855 published some of it in the form of thematic portfolios or books, helped to bring it to a wider public. The creation of the Société Héliographique in 1851, then the Société Française de Photographie in 1854, and numerous journals such as La Lumière, the Bulletin de la Société Française de Photographie, Le Cosmos, and the Revue photographique, promoted debates and exchanges of ideas outside the confines of commercial practice. Into the 1870s, amateurs coexisted harmoniously with professionals, collectors with technical experts, and devotion to art with business imperatives. Personalities like Nadar, the Bisson brothers, and Le Gray showed that dealing in art did not necessarily kill it.

As the wet-plate process spread like wildfire, adopted by every commercial enterprise in the years following its invention in 1851, the number of Paris studios multiplied still further. The stereo view and the carte de visite portrait in particular boosted the number of customers, whether affluent Parisians or foreign visitors passing through. As in the first years of the daguerreotype, commercial considerations tended to get the better of artistic aspirations. At the beginning of the 1860s figures like Nègre, Le Secq, Nadar, and Le Gray, for various reasons, left the field.

The universal exhibitions that took place in Paris in the second half of the 19th century (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900) were also opportunities to display the richness and variety of French photography and keep abreast of developments abroad.

The wet-plate era in France produced an upsurge of spectacular works like the large editions of views and architectural pictures by firms like Braun, Bisson, and Delmaet & Durandelle, and artists such as Marville and Collard, who kept a close eye on the transformations of the urban scene, demolition, redevelopment, and major engineering projects. Official patronage was plentiful from the outset. After the Mission Héliographique, commissions to Baldus, the Bissons, Le Gray, and Marville produced lavish albums—iconographic splendour in the service of political power. Specific to France throughout the 19th century, though varying in style from one generation to the next, were photographic studies aimed at painters: views, forest studies, animals, and more or less ‘academic’ nudes. Paris, the world's leading art centre, had more resident painters than anywhere else, and photographic production reflected this fact. Vallou, Quinet, Famin, d'Olivier, Marconi, Cuvelier, and many secondary figures, provided them with a wealth of source material for their pictures.

From the beginning of the 1870s, after the fall of the Second Empire, the situation changed. Some large firms, such as Reutlinger, Nadar, Braun, Marville, and Delmaet & Durandelle, continued to flourish. But the aristocratic amateurs had vanished with the empire, as well as some of the artist-photographers. Photography's main energy was flowing in new directions—for example, scientific photography, which developed considerable momentum thanks to technical progress and the emergence of new fields of scientific interest. Marey, Londe, Richer, Hardy, and Montméja applied the medium's new capabilities to medicine and studies of the body in motion.

Amateurism, stimulated by rapid shutters and smaller, more user-friendly cameras, became more diverse and broadly based, to the point where it was no longer possible, as it had been 30 years before, to name its leading practitioners. However, it became feasible to classify amateurs and their pictures in sociological and iconographical terms. Their sources of inspiration, epitomized by the work of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, were fun rather than high culture: cycling, boating, motoring, sea bathing, amusements, gags, amateur theatricals, mostly—with the exception of geniuses like Lartigue—recorded with a degree of banality that persists to this day.

In reaction against this kind of amateur practice, which seemed to distance photography from art, an international movement emerged, pictorialism, whose French variant formed around a body of amateurs, the Photo-Club de Paris, founded in 1888. Among a host of minor talents, a few key figures soon stood out, such as Demachy, Puyo, Dubreuil, and Ferdinand Coste (1861-1932). In addition to subjects common to all the pictorialist schools, especially landscapes, pastoral scenes, and Symbolist portraits, French pictorialism distinguished itself by its images of the female nude, particularly the classically inflected ones of Puyo. This French proclivity was not peculiar to photography, but also common to painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts. The pictorialist style flourished for a number of years, cultivated and replicated in the movement's numerous journals and exhibitions. But it had neither the capacity for self-renewal nor the germ of modernity; and unlike Austrian or, especially, American pictorialism, it lacked the impulse to break with the conventions of the 19th century and engage with the new world emerging in the 20th.

Thus France lost its position in the field of avant-garde photography until the 1930s. The exception, of course, was Eugène Atget, whose work (with hindsight) successfully synthesized the literal recording of reality and the formal innovations of ‘pure’ photography. But Atget was an isolated figure, and did not become a force to be reckoned with until the 1930s, when his work was discovered by the avant-gardes. He had no contact with or influence on the French photographic world of the pre-1914 period, which wore itself out with theoretical debates about the artistic status of the medium.Sylvie AubenasJammes, A., and Janis, E. Parry, The Art of French Calotype (1983). Brettell, R., Flukinger, R., Keeler, N., and Kilgor, S., Paper and Light: The Calotype Process in France and Britain 1839-1870 (1984). Buerger, J. E., French Daguerreotypes (1989). Marbot, B., and Poivert, M., Le Pictorialisme en France (1992). McCauley, E. A., Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (1994). Aubenas, S., and Gunthert, A., La Révolution de la photographie instantanée, 1880-1900 (1996). Bajac, Q., ‘La Photographie à Sèvres sous le Second Empire: du laboratoire au jardin’, 48/14 La Revue du Musée d'Orsay, 5 (1997). L'Art du nu au XIXe siècle: le photographe et son modèle (1997). Bajac, Q., and Font-Réaulx, D. de, Le Daguerréotype français: un objet photographique (2003).

Since 1920

French photography in the 20th century has been strongly marked by two world wars and the social and political upheavals that followed and preceded them. In a broad sense this has led to two types of responses by photographers, one highly formalist, the other more socially responsive. For some of this period, France could still be considered as the cultural centre of the world, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, and the role of photography was both as a major contributor to modern art and the primary visual means of recording social and cultural change. Paris was important as a haven for cultural refugees from Central and Eastern Europe following the 1914-18 war and the Russian Revolution. It also attracted gifted and creative individuals from America and, to a lesser extent, Britain. The cultural melting pot had a corrosive effect on the pictorialist ethos of the pre-war French photography of Puyo, Demachy and their colleagues, which looked increasingly outmoded to a generation marked by the horror of the trenches and the advance of the machine age. Of greater interest to the avant-garde were Atget's documentary images of Paris. J.-H. Lartigue was creating a fascinating oeuvre out of his own somewhat gilded lifestyle, but this work was hardly known at the time outside his own social circle.

In the 1920s, modernist ideas from Germany and Soviet Russia—Dada, Constructivism, Neue Sachlichkeit—were rapidly taken up by the younger generation of French artists and photographers. In 1921, André Breton declared that ‘photography has dealt a fatal blow to the old forms of expression’, and the new medium remained at the heart of cultural innovation until 1939. The influx of foreigners, such as Andre Kertész, Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Germaine Krull, Gisèle Freund, Brassaï, Ergy Landau, Alexander Liberman, Robert Capa, and many others, helped to make of Paris a vibrant centre of photography, though its preeminence began shifting to New York by the end of the 1930s as the shadows of war deepened.

A major factor in the dominance of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s is the emergence and success of a new form of publishing, the mass-circulation photographically illustrated magazine. Although the magazine concept was pioneered in Germany, the appearance of Vu from 1927 defined a new market in France for illustrative photography, one increasingly marked by the use of small portable cameras such as the Leica, Rolleiflex, and Contax, the dramatic compositions pioneered by the Constructivists and the Bauhaus photographers to record what one influential commentator of the era, Pierre Mac Orlan, famously termed the ‘social fantastic of the street’. This new photography—baptized ‘la nouvelle vision’—to the extent that it presented ordinary life to a mass audience, was infused with increasingly humanistic perspectives, strongly influenced by the socialist ideas of the Popular Front. The French Communist Party was especially adept at enrolling young French photographers—such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Willy Ronis—in front organizations such as the Association des Artistes et Écrivains Révolutionnaires, and used their pictures in its magazine Regards, and the daily paper Le Soir. Their work increasingly focused on social themes as political tensions increased towards the end of the 1930s.

The 1930s also witnessed the emergence of small independent picture agencies, distributing photographs to an increasingly international market in the press and publishing industries. Alliance-Photo (founded by Pierre Boucher) and Rapho (founded by the Hungarian Charles Rado) were two of the more successful of the many created during this era, which included Robert Capa's first essay at a forerunner of the photographers' cooperative that would later become Magnum, which briefly (1938-9) distributed his work and that of his friend Ronis.

With only one or two galleries showing photography (notably the Pléiade bookshop in Saint-Germain-des-Près), publication was the main form in which nouvelle vision photographs appeared in the 1930s. Periodicals such as Art et médecine, Arts et métiers graphiques, and Minotaure were notable for showcasing new work. Books or serials were a key outlet for innovative work such as Brassaï's Paris de nuit (1933), or François Kollar's La France travaille (1931-4). There was almost no market for print sales, and major art galleries did not show photography. Commercial photography—fashion, advertising, portraiture—became the primary domains in which nouvelle vision work could be displayed. Some central figures of the era, such as André Vigneau, Laure Albin-Guillot, Florence Henri, Jean Moral, and Remy Duval, were instrumental in exploring new compositional styles, as well as photograms, double exposure, collage, and solarization in their professional work. Perhaps against such tendencies, and certainly with an eye on the American Group f.64 movement, Emmanuel Sougez established the Groupe du Rectangle which opted for ‘photographie pure’. It reformed as the Groupe du XV after 1945, but by then was more of an occasional talking shop than a vibrant art movement.

The Second World War and the Occupation (1940-4) did not bring photography in France to an end, but led to a fundamental shift in its focus, with significant influence on the post-war period. Relatively little has been published about this sombre era. In the occupied zone, the Nazi authorities held a firm grip on the means of visual expression, while Vichy carefully controlled what appeared in the ‘zone libre’. Those photographers who remained in France and were not incarcerated either abandoned their work or were obliged to perform menial and ill-paid tasks—social portraiture, commercial and editorial photography for the heavily censored illustrated media of the period. A number took part in the Resistance from 1941, their skills of practical use in the forging of passes and documents. The liberation of Paris in August 1944 was a key moment in the emergence of a new, post-war style of photography, focused closely on the social and cultural problems faced by the Fourth Republic (1947-59). The humanist ethos was much concerned with contemporary issues of reconstruction and the need to redefine a French identity sullied by memories of war, defeat, occupation, and collaboration.

For the next two decades, French photography was marked by a fascination with a ‘poetic’ and often romantic style of image making, primarily in black-and-white and heavily concentrated on the way of life of ordinary French people—but with an emphasis on Paris. Made on the streets or in the bistro with available light and the ubiquitous small cameras of the day, it was in marked contrast with the ‘art’ photography of the USA. Most of the key works of this period were made by freelance editorial photographers, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Ronis, Izis (Bidermanas), and Brassaï being the bestknown names. Their photographs appeared in the press, but their greatest impact came about through publication in monographs, often with an introductory text by a ‘literary locomotive’. The iconic works remain Doisneau's Banlieue de Paris (1949), Izis's Paris des rêves (1950), Ronis's Belleville-Ménilmontant (1954), Cartier-Bresson's Images à la sauvette (1952; better known by its English title, which defines the photographic orientation of all these photographers, The Decisive Moment). This approach was promoted by some key figures in the French press—Albert Plécy (editor of Point de vue and a keen supporter of humanist photography), Raymond Grosset of Rapho, the printer Braun, whose Mulhouse firm produced an outstanding quality of heliogravure reproduction, the advertising executive and publisher Robert Delpire, and Florence Arthaud (whose eponymous publishing house issued a number of the classic books of this genre). Many photographs by the French humanists appeared in Steichen's global blockbuster exhibition, The Family of Man.

By the late 1950s claims were being made that the photographic image could be a sort of universal language, an idea given credence by a UNESCO conference in 1958. Plécy was instrumental in forming Gens d'Images, which from 1955 awarded the annual Prix Niépce to promising young photographers, including Jeanloup Sieff, Doisneau, and Jean Dieuzaide; and a Prix Nadar for photography books. Several photographers began to devote serious attention in their work to trends in modern art—such as art brut and abstraction. The ‘social’ programme of humanism began to show signs of exhaustion as the conflicts within French society, its growing wealth and technological progress began to erode the consensus of French cultural identity evident in the immediate post-war era. Whereas in the 1930s it had looked eastwards, French photography was now more open to transatlantic influences. The challenge to the dominance of the humanist paradigm began to appear in the form of a more personal and often elliptical or confrontational approach influenced by American photography, made by a younger generation: Robert Frank's The Americans (published by Delpire in 1958) and Klein's New York (the Prix Nadar book of 1957), played important roles in this shift. Their approach was increasingly influential on younger reportage photographers such as Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron.

The 1960s were a watershed for French photography in the era of the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, and a gathering political crisis in the Fifth Republic. By 1968, a new generation was emerging, often highly politicized and unafraid of using photography to show all aspects of the contemporary world. The events of 1968 were hardly covered by the humanists, who left the recording of the street battles to young Turks like Caron and Bruno Barbey. The 1960s and early 1970s also saw the emergence of Paris as global centre of the photojournalism industry, and the appearance of new photo agencies such as Sipa, Sygma, and Gamma which drew the best talent. A significant group of dedicated documentary photographers emerged and included Raymond Laboye, Guy Le Querrec, Claude-Raimond Dityvon (b. 1937), Martine Franck, Patrick Zachmann, and Christian Louis. As in the 1920s and 1930s, Paris was once more the ville lumière of photography. Fashion magazines became the source of much avant-garde work, for French ‘art’ photography—hitherto more or less non-existent, or carried on by minor figures—was increasingly associated with la mode. Magazines such as Vogue, Jardin de la mode, Elle, Marie-Claire all vied to publish photography that explored the limits of the medium. Photographers such as Sieff, Helmut Newton, Frank Horvat, and Guy Bourdin developed distinctive styles that were a foretaste of the obsession with the body and sexuality that marked art photography in the 1990s.

The 1970s and 1980s were a watershed in the wider cultural appreciation of photography. While the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu could devote a book to the subject and get away with calling it ‘a middlebrow art’ (‘un art moyen’) in the 1960s, by the 1980s such an idea was laughable, for photography had moved to centre stage in French cultural policy, with the formation of a number of important institutions, and the increasing presence of the photograph in leading public and private galleries and museums. Photography was both popular and a form of cultural distinction. Public bodies included the Centre National de la Photographie (f. 1982), with its remit to advance contemporary work, and the Patrimoine de la Photographie, which conserves important archives and donations; and a network of regional and local bodies. In addition, the history of photography—a subject largely ignored until the early 1970s—was increasingly well served and promoted by a dedicated group of curators in the Bibliothèque Nationale led by J.-C. Lemagny, and several museums (especially the Musée Carnavalet, Musée d'Orsay, and the pioneering Musée Français de la Photographie at Bièvres), and by the activities of an enlightened group of collectors, of whom the foremost were perhaps M. and Mme André Jammes. The state belatedly realized that its archives were a treasure trove of photographic gems, and there has been significant investment since the 1990s in making this work available in digitized form. It has also become a significant ‘client’ for photography, commissioning projects by leading documentary and art photographers.

The ‘rise’ of photography as a respected art medium since the 1970s has been inseparable from and greatly assisted by the emergence of the market in photographic prints. The first permanent galleries began to appear in the mid-1970s. By the 1990s Paris was probably second only to New York in the number and range of specialist outlets, and the number of regular Parisian cultural events built around photography is ever growing, with a biennial Mois de la Photo and an annual largely commercial festival at the Louvre. The Arles Festival was founded in 1970 and emulated by numerous others, including a Photo de la Mer festival launched at Vannes, Brittany, in 2003. Several important regional centres for photography have also developed over the same period, such as the Centre Régional Photographique Nord-Pas de Calais, despite their regular (and justified) complaint that Paris tends to hog both the limelight and the major part of the resources available.

— Peter Hamilton

Bibliography

• Saint-Cyr, A. de Gouvion, Lemagny, J.-C., and Sayag, A., Art or Nature: 20th-Century French Photography (1988).
• Phillips, C. (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (1989).
• La Photographie: état et culture (1992).
• 160 ans de photographie en Nord-Pas de Calais (2001)

Ballet in France originated from early entertainments at court which were composed of music, dance, and poetry. The seminal production Ballet comique de la reine (commissioned by Catherine de Médicis in Paris, 1581) set an example from which later examples of ballet de cour evolved. Most of the greatest dancers and ballet masters of the 16th and 17th centuries were associated with court ballet in Paris and in the late 17th century a systematic attempt to raise standards of dance was instituted, first with the founding of the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 and secondly with the opening of a dancing school attached to the Académie Royale de Musique in 1672. In the same year Lully was appointed director of the Académie Royale de Musique and, working in close collaboration with Beauchamps, rapidly raised the status of dance. In his ballet Triomphe de l'amour (1681) Mlle de Lafontaine became the first female professional dancer to appear at the Palais Royal. During the 18th century travelling ballet masters like Noverre and Dauberval encouraged the spread of ballet to the provinces. Noverre's Caprices de Galatée (1758), remarkable for being the first ballet to be performed without any spoken text, was danced in Lyons while Dauberval's La Fille mal gardée (1789), the first notable ballet about everyday life and ordinary people, was premiered in Bordeaux. Ballet reached a pitch of popularity during the first half of the 19th century with Romantic classics like La Sylphide (F. Taglioni, 1832) and Coralli-Perrot's Giselle (1841). This was the great age of the ballerina and Taglioni, Elssler, Grisi, and Cerrito were starry rivals for the public's devotion and the critics' favour. This golden era ended with the death of Emma Livry, Taglioni's natural successor, and though fine dancers were still produced by the school, new ballets tended to be stale repetitions of old formulas. The public's enthusiasm was transferred to opera and Paris was no longer regarded as the ballet capital of the world. Saint-Léon's Coppélia (1870) and the premiere of Mérante's Sylvia at the opening of the opulent Palais Garnier theatre in 1876 were only temporary pauses in the decline of the art, the French having lost their greatest native choreographer, Marius, Petipa, to Russia. It was from Russia, though, that Paris received its next injection of energy, with the regular seasons given by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes between 1909 and 1929. Many French composers, painters, and writers collaborated with Diaghilev on new work, and ballet again became a highly fashionable art form. Jacques Rouché, director of the Paris Opera from 1914, was stimulated by the Russian competition and commissioned new ballet scores from composers like Dukas and Ravel as well as inviting Fokine, Pavlova, Spessivtseva, and others to work in his theatre. When Lifar took over direction of the Opera Ballet in 1929 he revitalized the company and enthused a new public (though he alienated the less disinterested balletomanes by closing the Foyer de la danse to the public—hence ending liaisons between dancers and their admirers at the Opera). After 1945 many new, small, adventurous companies emerged both within and outside Paris, such as Ballets des Champs-Elysées, the de Cuevas Ballet, the companies of Petit, Charrat, Babilée, and a few years later those of Béjart and Miskovitch. Lifar was recalled to the Opera in 1947 (after having left in 1944 for political reasons), and worked there until 1959. He was succeeded by a rapid turnover of directors and the Opera went into an artistic decline. During the 1970s it began to look to a younger audience by bringing in work by modern choreographers such as Cunningham and Carlson and between 1983 and 1989 entered a new, if controversial, period under the direction of Nureyev. He brought forward young stars like Guillem, Platel, Hilaire, and Jude and widened the repertoire with works by Forsythe, Tharp, and others. Dupond and his successor Brigitte Lefèvre also continued this trend bringing in works by younger choreographers like Angelin Preljocaj. Outside Paris the proliferation of dance activity has continued under the government's policy of decentralization. In 1966 André Malraux set up the first of the state Maisons de la Culture which provided important bases for all the arts, and the Ballet-Théâtre Contemporain, based first in Amiens (1968-72) and then in Angers (1972-8), led the way in developing an experimental new edge in ballet. Ballet du Rhin was founded in 1972 and in 1972 Petit took over Ballet National de Marseilles. Other regional ballet companies include Ballet du Nord and Ballet-Théâtre Français de Nancy. Although Béjart, France's most prolific contemporary choreographer, left to work in Brussels and later Switzerland, he has continued to maintain a strong presence in his native country. During the 1980s a large number of modern dance choreographers (several profiting from generous funding in regional choreographic centres) emerged, including Dominic Baguouet, Maguy Marin, Angelin Preljocaj, Jean Claude Gallotta, Daniel Larrieu, and Claude Brumachon. Together these have created a powerful international reputation for new French dance. Numerous festivals including those at Avignon, Paris, and Lyons as well as adventurous programming by venues like Paris's Théâtre de la Ville have ensured that a very wide range of international companies are seen in the country every year.

France (17th century to present) has a long, rich, and diverse tradition of literary fairy tales.

Although the ‘conte de fées’ (fairy tale) first appeared so named at the end of the 17th century, what we would now call fairy‐tale motifs are evident from the very beginnings of a written literature in French. Wonder tales and their elements are found throughout the fables and exempla used by the medieval Church. The ‘marvellous’ is also very much in evidence in medieval secular literature such as the Lais of Marie de France, numerous chansons de geste (e.g. ‘Huon de Bordeaux’), chivalric romances (e.g. those by Chrétien de Troyes), and plays, as well as in Renaissance prose fiction (e.g. Rabelais, du Fail, des Périers, Cent nouvelles nouvelles). Like the later literary fairy tales, almost all these precursors adapt motifs found in oral traditions. Yet, if the fairy tales that began to appear in France during the 1690s are part of a long‐standing literary tradition, they were recognized at the time as being something new and different as well: these stories rework (what are presented as) indigenous, ‘popular’ narratives at a time when the dominant literary aesthetic prescribed ancient Greek and Roman models, and they unabashedly offer for adult consumption narratives readily associated with children.

1. birth of a genre: 1690–1715

Although Marie‐Catherine d'Aulnoy holds the distinction of publishing the first literary fairy tale in France (‘L’Île de la félicité (‘The Island of Happiness’), published in her novel L'Histoire d'Hypolite, comte de Duglas, 1690), the flowering of the genre is actually a collective phenomenon. From at least the mid‐17th century, members of Parisian salons and perhaps even the French court had played a society game in which they told stories (supposedly) resembling those of governesses and nurses. Once fairy tales along these lines began to be published, they appeared rapidly in what is best described as a ‘vogue’. After a few more isolated stories (by d'Aulnoy, Catherine Bernard, Marie‐Jeanne Lhéritier de Villandon, and Charles Perrault), between 1697 and 1700 eight collections (by Louise d'Auneuil, d'Aulnoy, Rose de La Force, Jean de Mailly, Henriette‐Julie de Murat, and Perrault) appeared with over 75 tales in all. Women writers dominated the vogue, with two‐thirds of the tales published between 1690 and 1715 to their credit, which suggests that the genre offered them a means of expression and experimentation not available through other established literary forms. It was also women who coined the very expression ‘conte de fées’ (found in the title to d'Aulnoy's 1697–8 collection, Les Contes des fées, and Murat's 1698 Nouveaux contes de fées), which was translated to give the English ‘tales of the fairies’ (1699) and eventually ‘fairy tale’ (1724).

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the vogue was the mythic origin and the aesthetic its initiators created for the genre. Frontispieces and prefaces accompanying d'Aulnoy's, Lhéritier's, and Perrault's tales model the conte de fées on the storytelling by grandmothers, governesses, and nurses to young children. However real such storytelling may have been at the time and however undeniable the resemblance many contes de fées bear to folkloric narratives, the vogue's intertextual sources are diverse and decidedly literary. More than by oral traditions, the fairy tales of the first vogue were influenced directly or indirectly by Italian models, including the tales of Straparola and Basile but also the marvellous characters and episodes in works by Ariosto, Boiardo, and Tasso. The fairies, chivalry, and star‐crossed lovers of these Italian sources provided the material with which to create a (hitherto non‐existent) fairy‐tale aesthetic that exerted considerable influence on subsequent fairy tales. As studied by Raymonde Robert, this aesthetic includes three components, which are found in most French fairy tales of the 17th and 18th centuries: (1) the tales state from the very outset that the hero and heroine will ultimately triumph over their adversaries; (2) they highlight the exemplary moral and social destiny of the heroic couple; and (3) they establish the self‐sufficiency of the marvellous universe.

For writers and readers of late 17th‐century France, both the fairy tale's mythic origin and its aesthetic served a particular ideological function. The archetypal storytelling of lower‐class women assimilated the popular oral tradition into élite literary practice so as to obscure the reality of hierarchical social relations. At the same time, the seemingly fantastical aesthetic of the contes de fées none the less served to celebrate the values of the self‐contained social elite of late 17th‐century France, values which are readily visible in characters and descriptions. Only in tales by Perrault and Eustache Le Noble are the protagonists of this first vogue not royalty, and the other writers frequently incorporate the discovery of noble birth as a plot motif. Throughout these fairy tales, lengthy and tedious descriptions of luxurious settings recall (sometimes directly) the French court at Versailles. Given that French aristocrats and the court were experiencing severe economic difficulties at the time, both the protagonists and the settings of these fairy tales suggest that the genre was at least in part a form of compensation or escape from the pressures of the real.

Paradoxically, this aesthetic is much less evident in the most famous tales of the first vogue, those by Charles Perrault, than in those of his contemporaries. In fact, Perrault's are the most atypical of the first vogue. Unlike the other contes de fées, only half include a romantic plot, and almost all resemble folkloric tale types. Most distinctively, Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales from Past Times, 1697), or Contes de ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose Tales) as they are perhaps best known, feature an infantilizing narrative voice and a succinct neo‐classical French style with limited description. Combined, these traits led 19th‐ and early 20th‐century folklorists and literary critics to consecrate Perrault's enormously popular tales as the cultural monument they had already become through reprints and chapbooks. So doing, however, scholars exaggerated Perrault's ‘faithfulness’ to the oral tradition and oversimplified the tales' complex ideological and psychological meanings. The appearance of Marc Soriano's seminal Les Contes de Perrault (1968) addressed these issues straight‐on and cleared the way for a critical reassessment of Perrault and his tales by historians, psychologists, semioticians, and feminists, among others. All of these approaches continue to shed light on the enduring popularity of Perrault's tales not only in France but throughout the world.

In spite of their instant success, the Mother Goose Tales did not inspire direct imitations among writers of fairy tales in 17th‐ and 18th‐century France. Contrary to what is often asserted, the other writers were not following Perrault's but a different and parallel path. To be sure, like Perrault's, many of their tales can be traced (probably indirectly) to folkloric sources; yet, they are also far more indebted to motifs from novels and make more prominent use of magic characters and settings. While Perrault's collection was recognized from the beginning as being exceptional, if not inimitable, many tales by his contemporaries were no less popular well into the 19th century. Almost all of the fairy tales published between 1690 and 1715 were republished and anthologized later in the 18th century, but d'Aulnoy's tales came the closest to matching the popularity of the Mother Goose Tales. None the less, Perrault's and d'Aulnoy's fairy tales were popular for different reasons. Whereas the concision of Perrault's tales made them accessible to children and their irony simultaneously appealed to adults, d'Aulnoy's expansiveness, both in style and descriptions (e.g. variety of animals), resonated with adult readers steeped in the adventure novels popular at the time. And whereas Perrault recycles an age‐old gaulois humour replete with misogynistic jibes, d'Aulnoy, like several other of the women writers of fairy tales, gives central billing to heroines and mothers, thereby probably appealing to women, the most avid readers of novels.

Notwithstanding the differences among their tales, all of these writers were conscious of developing a fashionable literary form for an élite public. Following the literary convention of their time, most of them presented their tales as ‘pleasing’ in order to be ‘instructive’, although their most immediate imperative was to create ‘bagatelles’ (‘trifles’) that entertained readers. Only a few critics took the trouble to dignify what they doubtless saw as a marginal and passing phenomenon, among them the austere abbé de Villiers, who in 1699 virulently denounced ‘this heap of tales that has plagued us for a year or two’. What this dismissive critic failed—or refused—to see was that the vogue was by no means insignificant, and this for two reasons. First, it was intricately linked to the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ that was shaking French cultural life at this time. In separate manifestos, both Perrault and his niece Lhéritier argue that the literary fairy tale demonstrates the superiority of indigenous French culture over ancient Greek and Roman models. And, implicitly, all the fairy tales from this period illustrate the ‘modernist’ position. Secondly, the vogue cleared the way for new forms of fantasy fiction in 18th‐century France, fantasy that is based only minimally on indigenous oral traditions and even less on Greek and Roman mythology and that is put to an ever‐wider array of uses, from humorous escapism to social and political critique.

2. the second vogue: 1722–78

Although a steady stream of fairy tales appeared over a period of almost 100 years (1690–1778), it is useful to distinguish between the 17th‐ and 18th‐century manifestations of the genre. After the explosion of 1697–1700, fairy tales were not published with anything resembling the same intensity until the 1740s. Overall, more tales appeared during the second vogue (approximately 144 between 1722 and 1778) than during the first (approximately 114). This increase in quantity was matched by an increase in diversity. In 18th‐century France, the genre blossomed into a myriad of forms, including oriental, sentimental, philosophical, parodic, satirical, pornographic, and didactic tales. This diversity is an indication of the distinct social and intellectual groups that produced fairy tales in this period, as opposed to the collective effort that provided the impetus for the earlier vogue. Many of the 17th‐century writers knew each other, met regularly in the same salons, and in some instances engaged in friendly competition with each other to compose stories based on the same plot (e.g. ‘Les Fées’ (‘The Fairies’) by Perrault and ‘Les Enchantements de l'éloquence’ by Lhéritier). The same cannot necessarily be said of the 18th‐century writers. Gatherings such as the salons of the duchesse du Maine at Sceaux, of Mme Le Marchand, and of Mlle Quinault, and the ‘Société du bout du banc’ were responsible for some of the fairy tales published during the second vogue (for example, Jean‐Jacques Rousseau probably composed ‘La Reine Fantasque’ for the salon of Mlle Quinault); but the majority of the writers of the second vogue conceived and published their tales independently. Moreover, a much smaller proportion of the 18th‐century tales were written by women than during the first vogue, suggesting that the conte de fées had entered the male‐dominated literary mainstream.

While respecting the aesthetic defined by their 17th‐century predecessors, the 18th‐century writers also produced fairy tales with far fewer discernible folkloric traces (one‐tenth of the second vogue vs. one‐half of the first vogue). It is a measure of both the genre's development and the changing literary climate that writers increasingly used it to give free rein to their imaginations rather than to adapt extant oral and written traditions. Numerous are the novel‐like fairy tales that continue to rely on the sentimental romance scheme so frequently employed by the 17th‐century women writers. However, in stories by Philippe de Caylus, Marie‐Antoinette Fagnan, Louise Levesque, Catherine de Lintot, Mlle de Lubert, Henri Pajon, Gabrielle‐Suzanne de Villeneuve, and others, stock fairy‐tale features are exaggerated and/or complicated; for instance, conflicts among good and evil fairies are sharply accentuated and the obstacles to the lovers' union become dizzyingly complex. Less apparent in these particular tales is the didactic imperative that their 17th‐century counterparts seek to uphold, even if only superficially. Indeed, prefaces by Lintot and Lubert define the genre for the first time as pleasurable, but not necessarily instructive. This shift by no means implies that the 18th‐century conte de fées was devoid of ideological, social, or philosophical import; rather, the ludic pleasure of fairy‐tale writing, only timidly and discreetly suggested during the first vogue, was openly recognized and accepted during the second vogue.

In addition to these novel‐like fairy tales, the 18th century produced other strains unlike those of the earlier period. Perhaps the single most significant of these is the oriental tale. Between the first and second vogues appeared the immensely popular 12‐volume translation/adaptation of The Arabian Nights (Les Mille et une nuits, 1704–17) by Antoine Galland, which included the first (and most influential) version in a Western European language of such famous stories as ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp’, ‘Ali Baba’, and ‘The Voyages of Sindbad’. If the fairy tales of the first vogue laid the groundwork for Galland's best‐seller, this work in turn rekindled interest in the conte de fées and spawned stories that incorporate vaguely ‘oriental’ motifs, characters, and decors. More often than not, such oriental ‘material’ is superimposed upon Western European folklore, as in Thomas‐Simon Gueulette's Mille et un quarts d'heure (Thousand and One Quarter‐Hours, 1715) and the abbé de Bignon's Aventures d'Abdallah (Adventures of Abdallah, 1712–14). The reverse is apparent in Gueulette's Soirées bretonnes (Breton Evenings, 1712) in which authentic ‘oriental’ folklore is given French dress. Arguably, the vast numbers and immense popularity of 18th‐century oriental wonder tales played a decisive role in the development of Western European ‘orientalist’ stereotypes that not only found their way into literary works of social critique (such as Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Voltaire's Zadig) but that also prepared the way, ideologically, for 19th‐century European colonial expansion into North Africa and the Middle East.

No less numerous than the oriental tales were the 18th‐century satirical and ‘licentious’ (or pornographic) tales. The conte de fées was hardly the only literary form to include satire and ‘licentious’ descriptions at this time. Yet, the genre's predictable structures and moralizing pretext lent themselves particularly well to these subversive uses. Capitalizing on its (purported) innocence, writers such as Louis de Cahusac, Jacques Cazotte, Claude‐Prosper de Crébillon fils, Charles Duclos, Charles de La Morlière, Rousseau, Henri‐Charles de Senneterre, and Claude‐Henri de Voisenon satirize religious and political personages and, occasionally, social and philosophical norms. In tales by Cahusac, Crébillon, Senneterre, and Voisenon especially, such satire is put in starker relief—or overshadowed—by (usually euphemistic) anatomical and sexual descriptions. Although often highly coded, the critique in these tales is conveyed through blatantly obvious humour. In addition, several contes de fées are explicit illustrations of Enlightenment thought (e.g. La Morlière, Angola (1746) and Rousseau, ‘La Reine Fantasque’ (1754)). On the whole, however, these tales are by no means the most radical form of social and political critique in pre‐Revolutionary France, but instead portray the mores of the most privileged classes.

Central to the satirical and pornographic tales is parody of the fairy tale itself. Indeed, the humour in these strains of fairy‐tale writing derives from ridiculing the characters, descriptions, and plots used so frequently during the first vogue. Parody was not a uniquely 18th‐century phenomenon, however. In the midst of the first vogue, Anthony Hamilton wrote three fairy‐tale parodies (1703–4), although they were only published some 30 years later. In addition, two short fairy‐tale comedies (one by Dancourt and another by Dufreny de la Rivière), staged in 1699, poke fun at fairies and their magic. Yet, it was only during the second vogue that the fairy‐tale aesthetic was sufficiently well established to inspire numerous parodies. If the line between ‘serious’ and ‘parodic’ fairy tales is not always clear because some writers, notably Mlle de Lubert, delight in exaggerating the already hyperbolic features of the genre, several writers nevertheless state an unequivocal parodic intent through meta‐commentaries on the stories made by storyteller and listeners (e.g. Crébillon's ‘Ah quel conte!’ and Rousseau's ‘La Reine Fantasque’). That nearly one‐third of all 18th‐century fairy tales employ parody demonstrates the genre's significant contribution to the increasingly self‐reflexive literature of this period.

Decidedly ‘serious’ and unparodic are the tales in Marie Leprince de Beaumont's Magasin des enfants (Young Misses Magazine, 1757), which includes the most famous version of ‘La Belle et la bête’ (‘Beauty and the Beast’). These stories break with the established tradition of French fairy tales and blaze a new—and henceforth, dominant—path for the genre. Often considered to be the inaugural text of French children's literature, this primer written for English schoolgirls learning French is one of only two collections of tales written explicitly and exclusively for children during both the first and second vogues (the other is Fénelon's Fables, published posthumously in 1718). For the most part, Leprince de Beaumont's collection adapts—that is, reduces and simplifies—previously published fairy tales (her version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is a rewriting of a longer and more complex tale by Villeneuve) and always presents a clear moral lesson for each of the stories. Alternating between fairy tales and Bible stories, this text features a series of conversations between a governess and young girls who draw practical moral lessons from the stories told. Such an explicitly pedagogical approach shifted emphasis away from the genre's aristocratic roots and promoted a complex of bourgeois Christian values that was to be at the core of 19th‐century children's literature. In her own way, then, Leprince de Beaumont reinvigorated the injunction to ‘please’ and ‘instruct’ that was used by writers of the first vogue to justify the newly created genre but that was quickly and conveniently ignored as a conventional commonplace. Coming at the very end of the second vogue (only two short tales, by Rétif de la Bretonne, were to appear after hers), Leprince de Beaumont's Magasin des enfants created a new model for fairy‐tale writing in France. The pedagogical imperative it upholds even became a determining factor in the republication of fairy tales from the first and second vogues. At the end of the 18th century, when Charles‐Joseph de Mayer edited the massive 40‐volume Cabinet des fées (1785–9), he was careful to defend the genre as being morally instructive and, simultaneously, to exclude almost all parodic and ‘licentious’ tales.

Notwithstanding these attempts to rejuvenate it, the conte de fées had been used overwhelmingly throughout the 17th and 18th centuries to advocate an aristocratic ethos incompatible with emerging democratic ideals. And so it is understandable that, by the time of the Revolution, writers had long since ceased publishing fairy tales.

3. the 19th century

Early 19th‐century France did not share the enthusiasm for the literary fairy tale that swept romantic Germany. In France, unlike in Germany, folk and fairy tales were not used as a means of defining a national ‘essence’. (Ironically, though, the 17th‐ and 18th‐century contes de fées were an important source of inspiration for writers of the German romantic Märchen.) There was also resistance to including fairy tales in the growing corpus of children's literature. Several 18th‐ and early 19th‐century writers for children, including Stéphanie‐Félicité de Genlis, Arnaud Berquin, and J.‐N. Bouilly were openly critical of the literary fairy tale. Some writers, such as Genlis and Berquin, were highly suspicious of fairy‐tale magic and instead depicted natural wonders and Christian virtues. Institutional control of children's literature also thwarted the genre. Officially sanctioned children's literature for use in schools was controlled until 1871 largely by the Church, which was hostile to the idea of giving schoolchildren fiction, not to mention fairy tales. After the birth of the Third Republic (1871), control over schoolbooks was assumed by the State, whose ideological criteria were no less rigid than the Church's had been (although they were obviously of a different nature). The result was that little changed for the genre.

In spite of these obstacles, the fairy tale had a significant impact on readers from all walks of life, from the Parisian bourgeoisie to the provincial peasantry. With improvements in mechanical printing techniques came ever‐cheaper and more widely distributed chapbook and broadsheet versions of fairy tales, especially—but not exclusively—of Perrault's Mother Goose Tales. Although they had appeared throughout the 18th century, these versions literally flooded 19th‐century France (e.g. those published by the Oudot family of Troyes and the Imagerie d'Épinal), and it is difficult to overstate their importance. They transformed a small group of tales into ‘classics’ and engraved them into the collective French consciousness. They also had a knock‐back effect on the very oral tradition from which the fairy tales had been adapted—mostly indirectly—in the first place. No less consequential was the conception of the genre they promoted: the conte de fées, like many of the texts in the Bibliothèque bleue, was reduced to the status of a didactic tool that promoted conservative social norms.

At the same time as republishing existing fairy tales, 19th‐century France made its own contributions to the genre. Since they were excluded from both Church‐ and State‐sanctioned school curricula, contes de fées were published for domestic consumption. Among the most notable of collections were those produced by Pierre‐Jules Hetzel, perhaps the most prominent editor/publisher of secular, non‐official children's literature during the first half of the century. Besides a collection of 40 tales from the Cabinet des fées (Livre des enfants (The Children's Book, 1837)), he published the Le Nouveau magasin des enfants (The New Children's Magazine, 1844), which includes stories by Hans Christian Andersen but also by many of the period's best‐known French writers, including Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas père, Alfred de Musset, Charles Nodier, and George Sand. In addition to displaying their authors' deft use of a simple and direct style, the tales anthologized in this latter collection combine social realism with romantic fantasy. On the one hand, they repeatedly insist on the dignity of the economically disenfranchised; on the other, they depict a fantastical flight from modern life. Given the progressive bent (by the period's standards) of many of these tales, it is not surprising that they remained on the periphery of 19th‐century French children's literature.

More prominent were collections by two women writers, George Sand and the comtesse de Ségur. Although Sand's Contes d'une grand‐mère (Tales of a Grandmother, 1876) and Ségur's Nouveaux contes de fées (New Fairy Tales, 1857) share some superficial similarities (e.g. the minimal use of folkloric tale types and the nostalgic representation of country life), most aspects of their tales evince two very different conceptions of the genre. Sand's tales are by her own admission addressed to both children and adults and incorporate many of the philosophical and even scientific theories of her time. They are complex narratives that reveal a tension between social realism and nostalgic fantasy: Sand attempts to reconcile contemporary settings and characters with a muted fairy‐tale magic and an idealized country existence. Very different are the seven tales in Ségur's collection. Written explicitly for children in a simple, direct style, Ségur's fairy tales utilize interdiction‐transgression plots in order to convey a clear moral didacticism. In contast with Sand and the other contributors to Le Nouveau Magasin des enfants, Ségur gives scant attention to social problems but instead presents ethical dilemmas, solutions of which are meant to uphold solid bourgeois values. The publication history of Ségur's volume further distinguishes it from Sand's. Whereas Sand was already a successful writer when she published her tales (first individually and then as a collection) and continued to incorporate fairy‐tale motifs in subsequent works for both adults and children, Ségur used her Nouveaux Contes de fées to test the market before embarking on her phenomenally successful career as a writer of children's literature. However, never again did she return to the fairy tale.

Sand's and Ségur's examples notwithstanding, fairy tales constituted a relatively small portion of the overall output of children's literature by 19th‐century French writers. Far more numerous were the fairy tales that were written for adults during the second half of the century by writers such as Paul Arène, Théodore de Banville, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Léo Lespès, Jean Lorrain, and Catulle Mendès. Between 1862 and 1922, approximately 500 tales were published in what might best be termed a third vogue. Issuing from the ‘decadent’ movement, this corpus of contes de fées departs sharply from the earlier vogues. Whereas the 17th‐ and 18th‐century vogues respect the same basic aesthetic, the 19th‐century ‘decadent’ tales meld literary naturalism with the marvellous. The result is fairy tales that undermine the self‐sufficient, other‐worldly universe so typical of the genre up to this point. The marvellous no longer comforts and reassures but rather disturbs and threatens as eroticism, ugliness, and sex wars take centre stage. In further contrast to their 17th‐ and especially 18th‐century predecessors, the 19th‐century writers do not create new plot scenarios as much as they rework Perrault's Mother Goose Tales by imagining sequels, developing minor characters or details, and juxtaposing fairy‐tale and realistic settings. Their narrators also eschew the feigned naïveté of the earlier contes de fées in favour of a (supposedly) positivistic erudition, claiming to uncover intentions and details left unstated in the original. As the irony of this narrative stance indicates (obtaining as it does in wonder tales), this third vogue was in fact a reaction against the hegemony of science and realism in the late 19th century. Given a similar reaction in late 20th‐century culture, it is perhaps not unexpected that many narrative features of the ‘decadent’ contes de fées reappear in contemporary fairy tales (particularly in English), even if the fin‐de‐siècle corpus seems to have had only a limited influence on subsequent writers.

4. the 20th century

As the ‘decadent’ movement waned, the literary fairy tale was reshaped by important institutional and scholarly developments. Beginning in the 1880s, fairy tales started to appear on recommended reading lists for pre‐school and elementary school children. And to meet this need new collections were published, such as those by Maurice Bouchor (Les Contes transcrits d'après la tradition française, (Tales Transcribed from the French Tradition, 1911–13)), which aim to defend secular Republican ideals while simplifying the language and toning down the violence of his originals. More important still was the rise of folkloristics. During the period 1870–1914, folklorists hurried to transcribe oral narratives from regions all over France, aware that their country was far behind the similar projects of other European nations. If these transcriptions were intended primarily as enthnographic evidence affirming regional identity (in opposition to central State authority), many of them served as the basis for popularized series of folk tales. Among the most famous of these are Henri Pourrat's Le Trésor des contes (Treasury of Tales, 1948–62), which in spite of Pourrat's claims are in fact artful retellings of folk tales, and the ongoing Gallimard collection Récits et contes populaires (Popular Stories and Tales), edited by Jean Cuisenier.

In scholarly circles, the painstaking fieldwork of fin‐de‐siècle folklorists culminated in the catalogue Le Conte populaire français (1957–85) by Paul Delarue and Marie‐Louise Tenèze, which uses the Aarne–Thompson index to classify French and Francophone oral narratives and is enormously useful to students of French folklore and literary fairy tales alike. Over the past 30 years, the fairy tale has become an increasingly dynamic field of study in France and has attracted scholars from a variety of disciplines and approaches, including literary criticism (Marc Soriano, Raymonde Robert), psychoanalysis (Jean Bellemin‐Noël, François Flahault), semiotics (Claude Brémond, Louis Marin), and history (Catherine Velay‐Vallantin).

For writers of the literary fairy tale, the 20th century has been no less productive than for folklorists and pedagogues. During the first half of the century, several major literary figures, notably Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau, produced fairy‐tale works designed, most decidedly, for adults. In different ways, both Apollinaire (poems in Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918)) and Cocteau (film, La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946)) were prominent exponents of the search for alternatives to conventional experience and reality and found in the fairy tale a convenient cultural reference for their projects. But it is for children that the vast majority of fairy tales have been written during the 20th century. Renowned series of children's books, such as the stories of Babar (created by Jean and François de Brunhoff) and Père Castor (created by Paul Faucher), both inaugurated in the 1930s, employ fairy‐tale‐like motifs and characters, even if they are not fairy tales in the strictest (i.e. folkloric) sense of the word. Moreover, the fairy tale has been the form of choice for scores of writers who devoted only part of their work to children's literature. Among the most significant of these are Marcel Aymé, Les Contes du chat perché (Tales of the Perched Cat, 1937–9); Béatrix Beck, Contes à l'enfant né coiffé (Tales for the Child Born with a Hairdo, 1953); Léonce Bourliaguet, Contes de la folle avoine (Wild Oat Tales, 1946); Blaise Cendrars, Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs (African Tales for White Children, 1928); Étienne Delessert, Comment la souris reçoit une pierre sur la tête et découvre le monde (How a Rock Falls on the Head of the Mouse and It Discovers the World, 1961); Paul Éluard, Grain d'aile (Little Wing, 1951); Maurice Maeterlinck, L'Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird, play, 1939); Antoine de Saint‐Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince, 1943); and Jules Supervielle, La Belle au bois (Beauty in the Woods, 1953).

Almost all of these fairy tales blend magic with realistic settings and psychology. More recent examples of the genre likewise use realism, but also make subversive use of the fairy‐tale form. Notable are Philippe Dumas and Boris Moissard (Contes à l'envers (Upside Down Tales, 1977)); Pierre Gripari (La Sorcière de la rue Mouffetard (The Witch of Mouffetard Street, 1967), Le Gentil petit diable (The Nice Little Devil, 1984), and Patrouille du conte (The Tale Patrol, 1983)); Grégoire Solotareff (Un jour, un loup (One Day a Wolf, 1994)); and Michel Tournier (Sept contes (Seven Tales, 1978–80)), who confront ecological, ethical, and social concerns through familiar day‐to‐day contexts, anti‐conformist characters, and role‐reversals. None of these writers hesitates to disturb rather than simply comfort young listeners/readers, sometimes through the depiction of vengeance and violence (e.g. Gripari); and all leave the ‘moral’ of their stories implicit rather than stating it explicitly. While such features underscore the double subversion at work in these tales (subversion of the ‘classic’ fairy‐tale form in order to produce subversive personal and social effects), they constitute a constructive more than a destructive use of parody.

When contrasted with literatures in English especially, it is striking that late 20th‐century French and Francophone literatures have produced so few literary fairy tales written primarily for adults. Be this as it may, those tales that have appeared attest to the rich diversity of contemporary writing in French. Beyond the use of fairy tales as important subtexts or cultural references (e.g. Daniel Pennac, Au bonheur des ogres (The Ogres' Happiness, 1985) and La Fée Carabine (The Fairy Gunsmoke, 1987)), Jean‐Pierre Andrevon (La Fée et le géomètre (The Fairy and the Geometer, 1978)), and Pierrette Fleutiaux (Métamorphoses de la reine (Metamorphoses of the Queen, 1985)) have reworked fairy‐tale plots so as to argue the necessity of ecological reform (Andrevon) and to depict erotic and even violent fantasies about feminine sexuality (Fleutiaux). By comparison, though, Francophone writers have of late contributed as much if not more to the genre than French writers. Benefiting from their own considerable knowledge of folklore in their homelands, writers such as the French Canadian Germain Lemieux (Les vieux m'ont conté (The Old People Told Me, 1977)), the Senegalese Birago Diop (Contes d'Amadou Koumba (Tales of Amadou Koumba, 1947) and Nouveaux contes d'Amadou Koumba (New Tales of Amadou Koumba, 1958)), and more recently the Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau (Au temps de l'antan: contes martiniquais (Creole Folktales, 1988)) artfully blur the distinction between transcription and adaptation while highlighting the specificity of indigenous folklore from Francophone countries. Of course, in addition to literary fairy tales by French and Francophone writers, countless translations of folk tales from all regions of the world remain popular among adults and children alike. As France and Francophone countries ponder their roles in a global economy and a much‐touted ‘new world order’, it is fitting that the fairy tale in French now encompasses such diverse—Francophone and non‐Francophone—national and ethnic traditions.

Bibliography

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