PagineSwashbuckling musketeers, a convict hunted for stealing bread, a doctor’s restless wife, a submarine under the sea — French classics include some of the most loved stories in the world. Here are 74 essential French novels, plays and poems, from Molière to Camus, with short guides to the great French authors, where to start, and dozens you can read free online in English translation.
New to French literature? Begin with one of these — or follow our step-by-step guide, What to Read for French Classics →
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Short biographies, what to read first, and every book of theirs on this list.
Molière (the stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) is France’s greatest comic playwright — French is even called “the language of Molière.” He spent years touring the provinces as an actor-manager before winning the patronage of Louis XIV. His comedies mock hypocrites, snobs, misers and quack doctors: Tartuffe (banned for years after its 1664 premiere), The Misanthrope, The Miser and The Imaginary Invalid. He collapsed on stage while playing the hypochondriac in that last play and died hours later.
Where to start: Tartuffe
On this list: Tartuffe · The Misanthrope · The Miser · The Imaginary Invalid
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) was the sharpest wit of the Enlightenment — a poet, historian, philosopher and campaigner against religious intolerance and injustice who was twice locked in the Bastille and spent years in exile. His short satirical novel Candide (1759) sends an innocent young man through wars, earthquakes and disasters while his tutor insists this is “the best of all possible worlds,” ending with the famous advice to “cultivate our garden.”
Where to start: Candide
On this list: Candide
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) followed Napoleon’s army to Moscow and back, loved Italy and wrote two of the first great psychological novels. The Red and the Black (1830) follows the ambitious carpenter’s son Julien Sorel climbing French society; The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), written in 52 days, opens with a dazzling account of the Battle of Waterloo.
Where to start: The Red and the Black
On this list: The Red and the Black · The Charterhouse of Parma
Honoré de Balzac set out to portray all of French society in La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) — around 90 linked novels and stories in which characters reappear from book to book. Fuelled by legendary amounts of coffee and chased by creditors, he wrote Eugénie Grandet (1833), Père Goriot (1835) and Lost Illusions, founding modern literary realism.
Where to start: Père Goriot
On this list: Eugénie Grandet · Père Goriot · Lost Illusions · Cousin Bette
Victor Hugo was France’s great Romantic poet, playwright and novelist — and a fierce campaigner against poverty and the death penalty. Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; in English, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) helped save the cathedral itself from neglect. After opposing Napoleon III he lived nearly twenty years in exile on the Channel Islands, where he finished Les Misérables (1862), the story of the ex-convict Jean Valjean. When he died, some two million people followed his funeral to the Panthéon.
Where to start: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
On this list: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame · Les Misérables · Toilers of the Sea
Alexandre Dumas wrote the adventures everyone knows. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to a French nobleman and an enslaved woman and became a general in the Revolutionary army. Dumas turned French history into page-turners with the help of his collaborator Auguste Maquet: The Three Musketeers (1844), with d’Artagnan and “all for one, one for all,” and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–46), the great revenge story. In 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon.
Where to start: The Count of Monte Cristo
On this list: The Three Musketeers · The Count of Monte Cristo · Twenty Years After · The Man in the Iron Mask
Gustave Flaubert spent days hunting for the single right word — le mot juste — and it shows. Madame Bovary (1857), the story of Emma Bovary’s romantic dreams and provincial boredom, was prosecuted for offending public morals; Flaubert was acquitted and the novel became a model of modern realism. Sentimental Education (1869) and Three Tales (1877) followed. He mentored his young friend Guy de Maupassant.
Where to start: Madame Bovary
On this list: Madame Bovary · Sentimental Education · Three Tales
Jules Verne, often called a father of science fiction, is one of the most translated authors in history. His “extraordinary voyages” mixed real science with adventure: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) with Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus, Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) and The Mysterious Island (1875).
Where to start: Around the World in Eighty Days
On this list: Journey to the Center of the Earth · From the Earth to the Moon · Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea · Around the World in Eighty Days · The Mysterious Island · Michael Strogoff
Émile Zola led the Naturalist movement, studying characters like a scientist studies heredity and environment. His twenty-novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart follows one family across the Second Empire, including L’Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880) and Germinal (1885), the story of a coal miners’ strike. In 1898 his open letter “J’Accuse…!” defended the falsely convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus and forced him into exile in England.
Where to start: Thérèse Raquin
On this list: Thérèse Raquin · L’Assommoir · Nana · Germinal · The Beast Within
Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert’s protégé, wrote around 300 short stories in little more than a decade, becoming one of the masters of the form. “Boule de Suif” (1880) made his name; “The Necklace” (1884), with its famous twist, is read in classrooms everywhere. He also wrote the novels Bel-Ami (1885) and Pierre and Jean (1888).
Where to start: The Necklace
On this list: Boule de Suif · The Necklace and Other Stories · Bel-Ami · Pierre and Jean
Marcel Proust spent his last years writing, often in bed in a cork-lined room, the seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) — a vast exploration of memory, love, art and society. In its first volume, Swann’s Way, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea brings the narrator’s childhood flooding back. The second volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1919.
Where to start: Swann’s Way
On this list: Swann’s Way
Albert Camus grew up poor in French Algeria, edited a Resistance newspaper during World War II and became one of the defining writers of the 20th century. The Stranger (1942), with its detached narrator Meursault, and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus explore the “absurd”; The Plague (1947) follows a town under quarantine. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at 44, and died in a car crash three years later.
Where to start: The Stranger
On this list: The Stranger · The Plague
14 of these are free to read in Pagine right now (📖 Read free). The rest link to a free public-domain edition or to Open Library, where many can be borrowed free.
Print it, save it as a PDF, email it to yourself or share it with a friend, book club or class. Every copy links back to pagineapp.com, and the free Pagine app tracks every book you finish.
iPhone & iPad
Android17 free books by French authors in Pagine — including titles beyond this list.
Every title on the list links to the free sources that may have it. Public-domain books are free to read and download; newer books can often be borrowed free.
Older translations are in the public domain and free, but they can feel formal. If one feels heavy, try a modern translation from your library for the books you love most. Many of the 19th-century novels on this list — Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, Flaubert, Verne, Zola and Maupassant — are free in the Pagine e-reader, and you can track every book you finish in the free Pagine app.
The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, Candide by Voltaire and Maupassant’s short stories are lively, accessible first choices.
It is long — over 1,400 pages — with digressions on Waterloo and the Paris sewers. Many readers skim those chapters on a first read. The story of Jean Valjean is gripping all the way.
Yes. Most 19th-century French classics are in the public domain in older English translations, and many are free to read in Pagine, including Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
It is written for children and adults alike. It was published in 1943; check your library for current English editions.
Alexandre Dumas (père, “the father”) wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. His son, Alexandre Dumas fils, wrote The Lady of the Camellias, the basis of Verdi’s opera La Traviata.
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