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The cosmogony of French fantasy
The title is not by me - this is actually the title of an article I want to kind-of-translate kind-of-recap here. "Cosmogonie de la fantasy française - Genèse et émancipation", "Cosmogony of French fantasy - Genesis and emancipation", by Marie-Louise Bougon. It was an article part of the "Worldbuilding" issue of the French National Library review (La revue de la BNF), back in 2019, and it brings a lot of interesting element for those who are curious about what fantasy literature looks like currently in France (since all the fantasy we talk about is mostly American or British).
Here is the rough translation/summary:
Fantasy only appeared quite late in France - and if the first translations of English-speaking fantasy only come from the 1970s, we will have to wait for the new editorial dynamic of the 1990s for a true "French fantasy" to appear and specialize itself - many talk of a "French touch" that makes these books clearly different from their English companions.
I) The first translations: a fragmented territory
The first translations in French of fantasy books started in the 70s. The decisions of publishing houses at the time made it quite hard for a reader to identify "fantasy" as its own genre. Indeed, most fantasy authors (especially British ones) were published by houses specializing in "general literature" - The Hobbit was translated as "Bilbo le Hobbit" in 1969 by Stock, before it took care of the Cycle de Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, while in 1972 Christian Bourgeois releases the first French translation of the Lord of the Rings. Another part of fantasy books - more American, these ones, the inheritors of the pulp aesthetic, the sword and sorcery books - was rather translated in collections dedicated to either science-fiction, or fantastique. [N.o.T.: The French term "fantastique" designates a specific literary genre in which supernatural elements suddenly happen in an otherwise normal, regular and mundane setting identical to our own - as opposed to "merveilleux" which is about describing worlds where the magical and fabulous is mundane. Dracula would be "fantastique" while fairytales are "merveilleux".] There was the collection "Aventures fantastiques" by the editions Opta, or the science-fiction collection of Lattès.
Fantasy was perceived originally as merely a sub-genre of science-fiction - an idea that was kept alive by collections such as "Pocket science-fiction" or "J'ai lu - SF" that published a mix of science-fiction and fantasy works throughout the 80s. Outside of the short-lived collection "Heroic Fantasy" by Stan Barets at the Temps futurs publishing house (it only lasted from 1981 to 1983), we would have to wait for quite some time before publishers started to understand that fantasy was its own genre. In 1988, the Atalante creates the "Bibliothèque de l'évasion" (Library of evasion) collection. Fleuve noir creates in 1998 a fantasy collection called "Dentelle du cygne" (Swan's lace), that in 2002 was replaced by "Rendez-vous ailleurs", "Meetings at other places". These were for large formats - pocket formats also started their own specific collections. J'ai lu Fantasy in 1998, for example, and in 1988 the Pocket SF collection started to add sub-titles such as "Fantasy", "Dark Fantasy" or "Science-fantasy" to differentiate the works. However, despite all these efforts, the original decades-old confusion between fantasy, SF and general literature hindered the growth of the genre in France, since it never got a true visibility...
II) Cartography of the "great old ones"
If people only start to realize and understand the genre itself at the end of the 80s, it doesn't mean that there never was any French fantasy works until this date. In fact, the Callidor editions, specializing in "fantasy archeology", have made an effort to dig up and bring back to light the works that shaped the French fantasy - and for them, the oldest French work of fantasy would be the epic Les Centaures, in 1904, written by André Lichtenberger. In 2005, the author Laurent Kloetzer went even further than this - he claimed that Flaubert's Salammbô (an 1862 sensual, violent and Orientalist historical novel) was one of the earliest examples of French fantasy. Kloetzer notably pointed out the similarity between Salammbô's baroque style, and the one of Michael Moorcock's Gloriana, and how the way Robert Howard described bloody battles was quite close to Flaubert's own war descriptions. By retrospectively considering these works as fantasy, this would make the French fantasy a continuation of the merveilleux genre (see my mentions above).
So, French precursors did exist - but they remained lonely and rare experimentations, that never got any true success upon their release. Nathalie Henneberg, an author of science-fiction (who often published under the name of her husband, Charles Henneberg) did made a few fantasy pauses in her SF career during the 1960s - Le Sang des astres (The blood of celestial bodies) and Les Dieux verts (The Green gods), republished by Callidor in 2018. However the most notorious example of this "primitive French fantasy" would be Jacques Abeille's Cycle des contrées, published in 1982 at Flammarion, then re-edited in 2012 by the Attila editions, and finally released in pocket format by Folio SF in 2018. This cycle, that describes the exploration of another world full of wonders and magics, took more than thirty years to be recognized as a fantasy works - and that despite Abeille having sent his manuscript to Julien Gracq, one of the greatest French fans of Tolkien at the time. If people did notice a similarty between fantasy books and Abeille's works, editors made nothing of it - one would have to wait for the more modern reedition for the "fantasy" aspect to be advertised. In 2011, in an interview, Jacques Abeille recalled a sentence one of his readers said to him: "As a kid, I watched Star Wars. As a teen, I read Tolkien. As an adult, I read you."
Abeille's new success in modern fantasy is however an exception, since other "precursors" of fantasy never regained such a late recognition: for example, Isabelle Hausser's Célubée, published in 1986 by Julliard, is still not sold as a fantasy work, and that despite being re-edited by Fallois in 2000 (with a Marc Fumaroli preface). Among other French early attempts, we can find Sous l'araignée du Sud (Under the South spider), a 1978 novel by Dominique Roche and Charles Nightingale, published by Robert Laffont. Unlike the previous works, this novel actually had a consciousness that it belonged to a new and "infant" genre. The back of the book doesn't use the "fantasy" word yet, but it does describe it as "a marvelous and terrifying fairy tale, in the line of Tolkien's work, in the heroico-fantastical tradition of the Anglo-Saxons, but this time written in French, in a rich and visual language, sparkling with humor."
In the 1980s, we see an hesitaton, an ambiguity between publishing/editing decisions that made the birth of this first fantasy completely invisible to the public, and a slow, creeping recognition by authors and publishers of a new genre. In 1983, Francis Berthelot's Khanaor duology was published in the Heroic Fantasy collection of Temps futurs - and in the preface the author clearly states its "fantasy" status. "No need to lie to ourselves, the same way general literature disdains SF, the SF disdains heroic fantasy. It makes it a sub-sub-genre, a doubly-poor parent of the Letters with a big L." This preface highlights the bad reputation of the genre at the time - for French people of the 80s, fantasy was just a sub-science-fiction, less thoughtful, less prone to reflexion, more turned towards adventure and entertainment. Despite all this criticism, fantasy will still manage to grow away from science-fiction, and find its place in the "genre literatures".
III) An expanding universe
It was around 1995 that a true turn of event happened, around the same time the first French publishing house entirely dedicated to fantasy were created (Mnémos and Nestiveqnen). Mnémos, originally conceived by Stéphane Marsan and Frédéric Weil to publish role-playing game novelizations, still edited during its first years French authors such as Mathieu Gaborit, Fabrice Colin, Laurent Kloetzer, Pierre Grimbert and Sabrina Calvo. Nicknamed "the Mnémos generation", these authors created a true boom and multiplication of the French fantasy works in the 2000s. Les Chroniques des Crépusculaires (The Chronicles of the Dusk-people), of Mathieu Gaborit (1995-96) and Le Secret de Ji, by Pierre Grimbert (prix Julia Verlanger in 1997) form the two first commercial successes of French fantasy.
This new fashion was certified by the creation in 2000 of the Bragelonne editions: this very prolific publishing house released translations of English works, but also promoted the writers of the "Mnémos generation", while discovering new authors. For example, Henri Loevenbruck with his Celtic saga La Moïra (2001-2002), or the Ange duo (already famous for their work on comic books and roleplaying games) with their cycle Trois Lunes de Tanjor (Three Moons of Tanjor, 2001-2003, re-edited in 2005 under the title Ayesha). Les Editions de l'Oxymore (The Oxymoron Editions), created in 1999, also allowed numerous French authors to start in the genre, via periodical anthologies - these anthologies contained short stories from authors now quite well-known, such as Justine Niogret, Mélanie Fazi or Charlotte Bousquet. The editorial expansion follows all the way throughout the 2000s, with new publishing houses opening regularly. Le Bélial', which created the Bifrost journal, published fantasy novels since 1998 (their collection "Fantasy", renamed "Kvasar" in 2011). The webzine ActuSF becomes an editing house in 2003, and dedicates its collection "Trois souhaits" (Three wishes) to French authors. Les Moutons électriques (The electrical sheeps) were born in 2004, and made famous Jean-Philippe Jaworski, while La Volte, around the same time, started the very noticeable Horde du Contrevent (Horde of the Counterwind) by Alain Damasio. The years 2010s also saw a few house apparitions - such as the Critic, Callidor and Scrineo editions - and there was also a very dynamic microedition market.
Of course, French youth publications also stayed very rich and prolific - finding a true audience after the Harry Potter phenomenon. Two famous French series played on the idea of "the adventures of a young wizard" - the Tara Duncan series by Sophia Audouin-Mamikonian, started in 2003 and a mass commercial success, and also started in 2003 the saga of the "world of Gwendalavir" by Pierre Bottero. While these works all evoke the Potter-phenomenon (teenage characters promised to a great destiny and magical powers in a fantastical parallel world), they do keep an original voice, find their own themes and specificities, and thus gain a faithful audience. In the Fantasy forum of the university of Artois, Pierre Bottero was the most frequently mentionned French author when participants were asked "Who is your favorite author?", making him a good rival of English-speaking fantasy authors.
If French fantasy managed to build itself, and to singularize itself - and if the genre became even more visible thanks to the recent mediatic success of the Game of Thrones TV series, Jérôme Vincent (director of ActuSF) made a quite disappointing observation in a 2017 interview. He noted that the "wave" expected did not happen. "The big cinema blockbusters all belong to either science-fiction or fantasy, the great TV series are all tied one way or another to fantasy, that's the same thing in comic books and video games, and that's without talking of role-playing games... [...] But it seems that is no effect, no repercusion of this onto fantasy literature." In order to ameliorate the visibility and the sales of fantasy books, since 2017 publishers created the "Mois de l'imagination" (Month of the imagination), a way to rival the "literary new year". While it is too early to establish if this worked or not, it is quite a hopeful sign to see that in "fantasy reading recommandations", French names start to pop up alongside the great English ones. As Estelle Faye wrote, "French fantasy seems to still suffer from an inferiority complex" - but we can only hope authors and readers will manage to fight it off.
IV) A world of its own ?
Is there a "French touch", a specificity to French fantasy? This question, frequently debated by fan forums, became the subject of a podcast produced by the website Elbakin.net, in which was noted the lack in France of huge cycles carried over several volumes (a very prominent feature of English-written fantasy). French fantasy authors prefers one-shots, short series (rarely more than a trilogy), or series of distnct novels merely sharing a same world (for example, the works of Lionel Davoust that take place in the Evanégyre world). This formal difference would however be due to the "fear" of editors, who do not dare putting in the world too-ambitous projects. Due to this format specificity, it seems that there is a lesser importance of the worldbuilding in French fantasy - which might be why its authors had a hard time building an audience in the beginnings. As David Peyron wrote it in Culture geek, fantasy fans tend to prefer the quality of the worldbuilding over the quality of the style. "If the quality of the world becomes essential, in return some traits such as the literary style, which gives its value to a cultural object in a classical system, are pushed aside." French fantasy, which is less of a worldbuilder and much more literary than its English counterpart, is as a result swimming against the stream. However, nowadays this particularly is accepted by the fans. Indeed, in recent reviews and articles, several French authors such as Jean-Philippe Jaworski or Alain Damasio are praise for their mastery of style - the first one because of how he writes like Alexandre Dumas, the second because of how versatile he can be with tones and genres. These literary qualities are obviously tied to the inspirations of the French authors, who do not have the "pulp inheritage" and rather take from French classics or swashbuckling novels. Of course, we also cannot ignore the theory that French readers are more sensible to the style when it comes to writing in their own language.
If we go towards themes, we can see several recurring motifs and traditions shared by both English-speaking and French-speaking fantasy. For example, Arthurian fantasy has sparked a certain interest in France - La Trilogie des Elfes (The Elf trilogy) of Jean-Louis Fetjaine (1998-2000), or Justine Niogret's Mordred (2013). However, French authors truly seem to express a taste for historical but non-medieval fantasy. Jean-Philippe Jaworski's Gagner la guerre (Win the war, 2009) takes place during a reinvented Renaissance, Johan Heliot's takes an interest in the rule of Louis XIV in his Grand Siècle (Great century) saga (2017-2018), Pierre Pevel choses the 17th century for the setting of his Les Lames du cardinal (The Cardinal's blades, 2007-2010), and finally Fabrice Anfosso takes inspiration from World War I in his Le Chemin des fées (The road of fairies, 2005). Urban fantasy also has a big success in France - especially one focusing on a reinvented Paris. There are numerous works reimagining the French capital as either filled with surpernatural beasts, either invaded by a scientific-marvelous touching to both the steampunk and gaslamp fantasies. For examples you have the Paris des merveilles cycle, by Pierre Pevel (Paris of marvels, 2003-2015), Un éclat de givre by Estelle Faye (A fragment of frost, 2014), Les Extraordinaires et Fantastiques Enquêtes de Sylvo Sylvain by Raphaël Albert (The Extraordinary and Fantastical Investigations of Sylvo Sylvain, 2010-2017), or Les Confessions d'un automate mangeur d'opium by Mathieu Gaborit and Fabrice Colin (Confessions of an opium-eating automaton, 1999).
Jacques Baudou described with enthusiasm the originality of French fantasy, whose main specificity is - according to him - a tendency to go to the margins. "The best works of French fantasy [...] operates a subversion of the codes, they practice the art of mixing, and as thus come off as greatly original literary objects". It seems indeed that, due to its late apparition, French fantasy benefited from a certain look-back on its own genre, making it easier for French authors to play with or subvert its codes. Anne Besson, however, nuances this opinion: she points out that the small number of French fantasy authors (compared to the mass of English-speaking authors) makes the differences in tones, themes and motifs much more obvious - which creates what is merely a feeling of a greater diversity.
Another element of French fantasy that seems to be born of its "lateness" is its reflexive dimension: French authors have a strong tendency towards the commentary and the erudition. For example, the fantasy anthologies of the Editions de l'Oxymore include between its short stories things such as critical files or textstaken out of classics of French culture. These practices seem to be an attempt at legitimizing a genre that still has a hard time being recognized as "true literature" - even though modern days receive fantasy works with much more benevolence than before.
V) To the conquest of the world ?
If French fantasy grew enormously since the first experiments of the 70s, and if it now benefits from a much better visibility, its market stays quite weak. A proof of that: the numerous funding campaigns launched these last years by different actors of the genre. French fantasy also has a hard time crossing the frontier. Le Livre et l'épée by Antoine Rouaud (The Book and the sword, first volume released in 2013) was translated in English, German, Dutch and Spanish. Le Secret de Ji of Pierre Grimbert (Ji's Secret) was also published in English via Amazon Crossing in 2013. But these are exceptions to the rule. But there is hope for future French publications - for example the Bragelonne publishing house established a partnership with the British Gollancz, a science-fiction specialist.