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none-ofthisnonsense · 5 months ago

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Hi! I hope you don't mind me adding on - I have my bac this year, so I can definitely tell you what I studied!

These are only the books my school studied, curricula vary between schools!

6ème:

Madame Leprince de Beaumont, La Belle et la Bête

Charles Perrault, Contes

Hans Christian Andersen, La Petite Sirène (The Little Mermaid)

Ovide, Les Métamorphoses (only a few. I have never seen anyone read the entire thing, and we studied.... 5? I think?)

Homère, l'Odyssée (don't read the full version. Seriously. Everyone reads a very shortened version. I remember my teacher saying "buy another one" when someone showed up with the whole thing.)

Jean de la Fontaine, Fables (again, only a few. Most people have learnt some of these in primary school: mandatory ones (= that everyone knows) are Le Corbeau et le Renard, la Cigale et la Fourmi, and le Lion et le Rat.)

1 piece by Molière: I happened to read Le Médecin Malgré Lui

Basically 6ème is very Antiquity-focussed because French is supposedly learnt chronologically. (They basically just shove as many things from one era at you one year and the next era the following one.)

5ème:

Chrétien de Troyes : one of his things. My school chose Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion

Le Roman de Renart (unknown author).

Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou la Vie Sauvage (sometimes teachers will also have you read Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe)

Jules Verne, Un Hivernage Dans Les Glaces (or Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours, or Voyage au Centre de la Terre. Maybe even Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers)

Poems: I remember studying some by Louise Labé but I have no idea which one, sorry.

Poems: Pierre de Ronsard - various choices. I personally learnt Quand vous serez bien vieille...

Molière, a comedy. I studied Les Fourberies de Scapin

5ème is very focussed on the Moyen Âge (Middle Ages) as a continuity of the Antiquity studied in 6ème.

4ème:

Georges Simenon, Le Chien Jaune

Bernard Solet, Il était un capitaine

Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (may have been done in 5ème idk)

Pierre Corneille, Le Cid

Guy de Maupassant, La Parure & autres nouvelles (we studied Apparition)

Théophile Gautier, La Morte Amoureuse

Honestly you can miss out on most of these ones, I know I hated half of them. Le Cid and Cyrano de Bergerac are important though. 4ème is a lot of XIXth century

3ème:

Anne Frank, Journal

Jean Anouilh, Antigone

Stefan Zweig, Le Joueur d'échecs

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (or Ray Bradbury stories or other stuff by Philip K. Dick)

George Orwell, La Ferme des Animaux (= Animal Farm)

That's all I can remember for 3ème - I'm fairly sure there was some other stuff. It's pretty modern or contemporary works.

2de:

Jean Racine, Phèdre

Émile Zola, La Fortune des Rougon/Au Bonheur des Dames

I'm sure there's other stuff but I don't remember it.

1ère:

Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin

Molière, Le malade imaginaire

Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut

François Rabelais, Gargantua

La Bruyère, Caractères

You have the French Bac at the end of year, so it's the last year where you study French in class!

(Found this in my drafts so I'm posting it now.)

Can you please when you have time ofc, write a list of the books any French high-school graduate should have read? Like the baccalaureate curriculum for example. I'm seeking to catch up my general knowledge of universal literature + attempt to read directly in French

Sure!

Now curriculum may vary and there was a reform of education since I left high school so it might have changed but what any french graduate should have read: (authors in bold, titles in italics)

Poetry (middle ages and early Renaissance):

Any three poems from Joachim du Bellay or other poets from the Pleiade. Most important is Heureux qui comme Ulysse.

Also look up who the Pleiade were.

16th and 17th centuries novels:

La Princesse de Montpensier, by Madame de Lafayette. 90 pages but very, very antiquated language.

Gargantua, by Rabelais. It's NOT cheating to take the modern-french translation. Native speakers do it. It's not cheating either to just dump it half-way through because you don't understand half of it. Native speakers do it too.

La Belle et la Bête, by Madame Leprince de Beaumont.

Any fairy tale by Perrault.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos. Please. Do. Not. Read. It. It's awful, the protagonist rapes a 15yo girl but it's ok because him loving her is making him into a better person (Yikes), the whole thing is about the protagonist and his long-time on-and-off girlfriend (who's married to someone else) teaming up to dirty/perverse two (maybe three?) innocent young ladies. It's studied because it's a classics, not because it's good. Please. Don't subject yourself to it.

Les Lettres Persannes, by Montesquieu. letters from a bunch of fictional characters to the others, two iranians (but at the time Iran was called Perse) visit France and criticize everything (way for Montesquieu to criticize but be able to say "nah it's my characters saying that not me"). TW of suicide and incest iirc. Not something too graphic either, since it's always second-hand testimonies or third-hand.

Theatre of the 17th and 18th centuries:

Le Cid, by Pierre Corneille.

At least one play by Molière. Can't recommand because I don't remember much of it. Do read summaries for a few of his plays though because some characters names have passed into common language to mean the type of characters they were (a Harpagon is going to be a greedy man, a Tartuffe a guy pretending to be devoted but being a hypocrite...)

Le Mariage de Figaro, by Beaumarchais. It's a political satire but also people are jumping from the window so that the husband doesn't find them in the lady's room. Basically.

If you fell in love with theatre at that point, you can look up Racine but fair warning, all of those have old language but Racine (along with Corneille) have very old language.

19th century novel:

Short version of Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. I'd recommand the long one but only the short one is required and also the long one has 40 pages of description of the parisian sewers system with no relevance at all to the story and that's not the only long digression so... Do what you want.

A book by Honoré de Balzac, whichever you'd want. If you want to read the whole series, it might be best to look up the order on wikipedia, they'll know better than me. Basically him and the next author on the list had a bibliographic universe before Marvel made it cool. 60-or-so books with common characters but not the same protagonists. I'd recommand you simply go with Le Lys de la Vallée, slightly royalist and apparently the easiest to read? (so i've been told but i didn't read it myself so...)

Any book by Emile Zola. I'd recommand Au bonheur des dames because it has to be the only one with a happy ending and a cute romance out of the 40-and-more books by Zola.

Bel-Ami, by Guy de Maupassant. The protagonist has no morals but it's funny. Kinda.

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. A tad bit depressing. Not the most interesting either. But it's one of the few that have been studied more than once in my schooling so I know it's an important one.

19th century theatre:

Hernani, a play by Victor Hugo. Tragedy, so a bit sad. But do look up the Battle of Hernani (sorry there's not a big choice of languages for this one on wikipedia). Basically founded the french romantic genre. Quite a scandal.

If per chance Hernani was love at first reading for you, you might also like Ruy Blas, still Hugo, although i found it a bit less good. If you want a ridiculously overdramatic, over-the-top movie freely inspired by Ruy Blas but in which no one dies, you've got La Folie des Grandeurs, a comedy with Louis de Funès.

Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand, and if the style of the author makes you want to read more, go for l'Aiglon, which is about Napoleon's son but is a bit sadder.

19th century poetry:

Les fleurs du mal by Baudelaire. Awful. Simply awful. I mean you can try a few. I hated them all. Not necessary to have read all of them by any mean.

20th century:

A Ionesco play, either La Cantatrice Chauve or Rhinoceros, for the Theatre de l'Absurde. La Cantatrice Chauve is funnier I think.

Actually I won't give you any novels from that century because most of the ones studied suck and also it's for post-bac (after graduation) studies so it doesn't fall under the ask.

Now if I had to give you a few classics to read, what I'd recommand:

Les Trois Mousquetaires, by Alexandre Dumas.

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, (ibidem). Luckily this one is on substack format at the cristo account.

Notre-Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo.

I think that's all. If you've got any more questions, about books or about whether or not it's worth reading That Book instead of watching an adaptation or reading a summary, or which adaptation of, for example, Les Miserables, is the best, I'm here to answer them.

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