French literature is the literature of France. It also includes literature that is written in French, even if the writer is not from France. There are countries besides France where French is also spoken. These countries include Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Senegal, Algeria, and Morocco. Works that are written in French but not from France are called Francophone literature.

History of French literature
The French language grew out of Latin. French is a Romance language, related to other languages like Spanish and Italian. French was also influenced by the Celtic and Frankish languages.

French Nobel Prize in Literature winners 
The following French or French language authors have won a Nobel Prize in Literature:
1901 - Sully Prudhomme (The first Nobel Prize in literature)
1904 - Frédéric Mistral (wrote in Occitan)
1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian)
1915 - Romain Rolland
1921 - Anatole France
1927 - Henri Bergson
1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
1947 - André Gide
1952 - François Mauriac
1957 - Albert Camus
1960 - Saint-John Perse
1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
1969 - Samuel Beckett (Irish, wrote in English and French)
1985 - Claude Simon
2000 - Gao Xingjian (writes in Chinese)

Selected list of French literary classics

Fiction
Middle Ages
 anonymous - La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland)
 Chrétien de Troyes - Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain, the Knight of the Lion), Lancelot, ou le Chevalier à la charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart)
 various - Tristan et Iseult (Tristan and Iseult)
 anonymous - Lancelot-Graal (Lancelot-Grail), also known as the prose Lancelot or the Vulgate Cycle
 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung - Roman de la Rose ("Romance of the Rose")
 16th century
 François Rabelais - Pantagruel, Gargantua
 17th century
 Madame de Lafayette - La Princesse de Clèves
 18th century
 Voltaire - Candide
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse
 Denis Diderot - Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist)
 19th century
 Stendhal - Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma)
 Honoré de Balzac - La Comédie humaine ("The Human Comedy", a novel cycle which includes Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet)
 Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Salammbô, L'Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education)
 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt - Germinie Lacerteux
 Guy de Maupassant - Bel Ami, La Parure (The Necklace), other short stories
 Émile Zola - Les Rougon-Macquart (a novel cycle which includes L'Assommoir, Nana and Germinal)
 20th century
 André Gide - Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), The Immoralist
 Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time)
 André Breton - Nadja
 Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)
 Colette - Gigi
 Jean Genet - Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
 Albert Camus - L'Étranger  (The Stranger)
 Michel Butor - La Modification
 Marguerite Yourcenar - Mémoires d'Hadrien
 Alain Robbe-Grillet - Dans le labyrinthe
 Georges Perec - La vie mode d'emploi
 Robert Pinget - Passacaille

Poetry
 François Villon - Les Testaments
 Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and other poets of "La Pléiade" - poems
 La Fontaine - The Fables
 Victor Hugo - Les Contemplations
 Alphonse de Lamartine - Méditations poétiques
 Charles Baudelaire - Les Fleurs du mal
 Paul Verlaine - Jadis et naguère
 Arthur Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer
 Stéphane Mallarmé - Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ("A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance")
 Guillaume Apollinaire - Alcools
 Francis Ponge
 Raymond Queneau

Theater
 Pierre Corneille - Le Cid
 Molière - Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, Dom Juan
 Jean Racine - Phèdre, Andromaque
 Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
 Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
 Edmond Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac
 Jean Giraudoux - The Trojan War Will Not Take Place
 Jean Anouilh - Becket, Antigone
 Jean-Paul Sartre - No Exit
 Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot, Endgame
 Eugène Ionesco - The Bald Soprano, Rhinoceros
 Jean Genet - The Maids, The Blacks

Non-fiction
 Michel de Montaigne - The Essays
 Blaise Pascal - Les Pensées
 François de La Rochefoucauld - The Maxims
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, The Social Contract
 François-René de Chateaubriand - Genius of Christianity
 Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
 Adolphe Theirs - History of the French Revolution, History of the Consulate and Empire
 Jules Michelet - Histoire de France, La Sorcière
 Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
 Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism, Being and Nothingness

Literary criticism 
Roland Barthes
Paul Bénichou
Jacques Derrida
Julia Kristeva
Jacques Lacan
Jean-François Lyotard

Poetry 

Parnassian
Romanticism
Symbolism (arts)
Surrealism

Related pages 
 French culture
 French art
 List of French language authors
 List of French language poets
 French science fiction
 Fantastique

Other websites 

 French Language & Literature Resources at Yale University 
 Littérature francophone virtuelle (ClicNet) online texts
 Athena Textes Français online texts
 ABU online texts
 French Literature at Digital Librarian 
Jean-Michel Maulpoix & Co.: Modern and contemporary french literature site maintained by prominent French poet Jean-Michel Maulpoix
 Full text of Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author"