The first great French writer was Rabelais, in the 16th century, a boisterous, life-affirming satirist. Many writers in the Age of Enlightenment which followed emphasized the classic tradition of reason, clarity and objectivity in their work. The 19th century was the golden age of the French humanist novel, producing Balzac, with his vast fresco of contemporary society; Stendhal, a fierce critic of the frailties of ambition in Scarlet and Black; and Victor Hugo, known for epics such as Les Misérables. George Sand broke ground with her novels such as The Devil's Pool which depicted peasant life, albeit in an idealized way.
In the same century, Flaubert produced his masterwork Madame Bovary, a study of provincialism and misplaced romanticism. In contrast, Zola wrote Germinal, La Terre, and other studies of lower-class life. Marcel Proust combined a poetic evocation of his boyhood with a portrait of high society in his long novel, Remembrance of Things Past. Others have also written poetically about their childhood, such as Alain-Fournier in Le Grand Meaulnes and Collete in My Mother's House.
A new kind of novel emerged after World War I. Jean Giono's Joy of Man's Desiring, and François Mauriac's masterly Thérèse Desqueyroux, explored the impact of landscape upon human character. Mauriac, and also George Bernanos in his Diary of a Country Priest, used lone spiritual struggle as a theme. The free-thinker André Gide was another leading writer of the interwar years with his Strait is the Gate and the autobiographical If it Die.
In the last 40 years, Alain Robbe-Grillet and others have promoted an experimental style known as the Nouveau Roman, subordinating character and plot to detailed physical description. Critics of the style feel that it has contributed to the recent decline of the novel.