These are the famous books in French that people still read, still quote and still argue about. Seventy of them, free to download in PDF.
A good part of this list was written in French to begin with, by Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. The rest are world classics in their French editions, so Austen, Dostoevsky and Orwell are here too.
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French Originals
Classics of French Literature
These are the books France wrote about itself: the Paris of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, the coal towns of Émile Zola, the provincial boredom of Gustave Flaubert. Read in the original language, they land differently than any translation.
Hugo's sprawling novel of Jean Valjean, the convict who spends a lifetime trying to outrun his past. The complete unabridged French text, covering the Paris barricades, the sewers and the police inspector who never stops looking.
The medieval Paris novel built around the cathedral, Quasimodo and Esmeralda. Hugo spends as much time on the architecture of the city as on the characters, which is exactly why the book saved the building.
Emma Bovary marries a country doctor, finds provincial life unbearable, and goes looking for the romance she read about in novels. Flaubert's prose is the reason this book is taught as the birth of the modern novel.
A retired pasta merchant ruins himself for two ungrateful daughters while a young law student learns how Paris really works. The novel that opens Balzac's Comédie Humaine and introduces its recurring cast.
A miser's daughter in a quiet provincial town falls for a cousin from Paris, and money decides everything that follows. Shorter and tighter than most of Balzac, which makes it a good place to start with him.
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son with Napoleon on the brain, climbs through the church and the aristocracy of Restoration France. A study of ambition that reads like a thriller.
Zola takes you down into a northern coal mine and stays there through hunger, strike and collapse. The most powerful novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle and the one that made mining conditions a public scandal.
Gervaise opens a laundry in working-class Paris and watches drink take apart everything she built. Zola wrote it in the slang of the street, which is part of why it caused an uproar.
Georges Duroy has no talent and no money, but he has a face and no scruples, and that turns out to be enough in Paris journalism. Fast, cynical and very readable.
Short sketches and tales from Provence, written from an old windmill. Each piece runs a few pages, so this is one of the easiest French classics to read in small sittings.
World classics in their French editions, from Jane Austen and Fyodor Dostoevsky to George Orwell and Gabriel García Márquez. Good picks if you already know the story and want to meet it again in French.
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy get off to the worst possible start in Austen's comedy of manners, here in French. Familiar enough that you can follow it even when the vocabulary gets ahead of you.
The March sisters grow up during the American Civil War while their father is away. Warm, episodic and gentle on the reader, which makes it good French practice.
Both parts of Cervantes' novel about the country gentleman who reads too many chivalric romances and rides out to fix the world. Over sixteen hundred pages in French.
An orphan becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall and finds out what her employer keeps upstairs. The classic Lesbazeilles Souvestre translation, complete and unabridged.
Victor Frankenstein builds a living creature and then abandons it, and the creature comes looking for an explanation. The full French text of the novel that started science fiction.
Winston Smith rewrites history for a living in a state that watches everything, including what he thinks. The complete French text, with the appendix on Newspeak.
Seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo, where the extraordinary is treated as ordinary. The founding novel of magical realism in French.
Scheherazade tells stories to stay alive, and the stories keep opening into other stories. A large French collection of the classic tales, including the ones everyone knows.
Austen's send-up of gothic novels, following a young woman who reads too many of them and expects Bath and Northanger Abbey to behave accordingly. Light and quick.
Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne built the modern adventure novel, and they built it in French. Expect sword fights, a submarine and a trip around the world in eighty days.
Edmond Dantès is imprisoned on a false charge, escapes, finds a fortune and spends the rest of the book settling accounts. The best revenge story ever written, in the original French.
Phileas Fogg bets half his fortune that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and sets off with a French valet and a detective on his heels. Short chapters and constant movement.
Huck fakes his own death and floats down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, a man escaping slavery. Funnier and darker than the Tom Sawyer book that precedes it.
A scout and his two Mohican companions escort a pair of sisters through hostile country during the French and Indian War. The frontier adventure that set the template for the genre.
D'Artagnan arrives in Paris with a horse nobody wants and manages to pick three duels before lunch. Dumas at his most entertaining, complete and in French.
Professor Aronnax goes hunting a sea monster and ends up a guest aboard Captain Nemo's Nautilus. This edition carries the original illustrations by Neuville and Riou.
A courier for the Tsar has to cross Siberia with a message, through enemy lines and worse weather. One of Verne's best paced novels and less well known than it should be.
From the first detective story ever written to Gaston Leroux and his locked room, plus the gentleman burglar who made France root for the thief. Arsène Lupin is the one to start with if you want something French and fast.
The first collection of Holmes short stories, from the Bohemian scandal to the speckled band. Each case runs about twenty pages, which makes it ideal for reading in French one sitting at a time.
A respectable London doctor and the brutal stranger who keeps turning up in his affairs. Short enough to finish in an evening, and told as an investigation rather than a confession.
The first detective story ever written, with Dupin solving a locked room murder in Paris by pure reasoning. Forty pages, and every detective since owes it something.
Dickens died halfway through this one, so the mystery of what happened to Edwin Drood has no official answer. Readers have been arguing about it ever since.
A family curse, a moor at night and a hound that should not exist. The best known Holmes novel, and the one where Watson does most of the legwork alone.
A woman in white stops a man on a road outside London at midnight, and the conspiracy behind her takes eight hundred pages to unravel. Told through several narrators, one of whom steals the book.
A woman is attacked inside a room locked from the inside, with no way out for the attacker. The reporter Rouletabille takes the case in the most famous locked room puzzle in French.
The last Holmes novel, split between an English country house murder and a long flashback to a mining valley in America. Moriarty is behind it somewhere.
Told entirely through letters, diaries and ship logs as a group of people slowly work out what they are dealing with. The vampire novel that defined the rules everyone else now breaks.
France's answer to Sherlock Holmes, except he is the thief. Nine short stories introducing Lupin, who robs the rich with better manners than his victims.
Le Petit Prince, Alice, Pinocchio and the rest of the books that taught generations to read. Short sentences and familiar stories make this the easiest section on the page.
A pilot crashes in the desert and meets a boy from a very small planet. Simple sentences, the author's own watercolours, and the most quoted French book in the world.
A map falls into young Jim Hawkins' hands and the ship's cook turns out to be the most dangerous man aboard. Every pirate cliché you know started here.
Two children, a trail of breadcrumbs and a house made of sweets. Eight pages, which makes it the shortest read on this page and a good first French text.
A tornado drops Dorothy in Oz and she walks the yellow brick road picking up companions. Seventy pages, with the scarecrow, the tin man and the lion all present.
Molière, Racine, Corneille and Beaumarchais sit next to Shakespeare and Sophocles, all in French. Theater is written to be spoken, so read these out loud if you are working on pronunciation.
A con man plays the holy ascetic and moves into a rich household, and only the audience can see through him. Molière's comedy in verse, banned on its first run for obvious reasons.
Four people each love someone who loves someone else, and all of them have power over each other. Racine's tragedy in alexandrines, tight and merciless.
Two teenagers from feuding families marry in secret and everything goes wrong inside a week. The French text of the tragedy everyone can already summarise.
The prince of Denmark is told by a ghost that his uncle murdered his father, and then spends five acts deciding what to do about it. The François-Victor Hugo translation.
Three witches tell a Scottish general he will be king, and he decides not to wait. Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, in the Guizot translation with an introductory notice.
Antigone buries her brother against the king's explicit order and accepts what follows. Sixty pages, and still the sharpest argument about law versus conscience.
A prince raised in a tower is drugged, given a throne for a day, and told afterwards that he dreamed it. The great philosophical play of the Spanish Golden Age, in French.
Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine broke French verse open, and Jean de La Fontaine wrote the fables every child in France learns by heart. Short pieces with a big payoff.
The collection that got its author prosecuted and then rewrote French poetry anyway. Baudelaire on the city, boredom, beauty and decay, in an illustrated edition.
The fables every French schoolchild memorises, starting with the cicada and the ant. Short, rhymed and illustrated, which makes them one of the friendliest ways into French verse.
A French selection of the poems Dickinson wrote in near total obscurity and mostly never published. Very short pieces, heavy on the dashes and the silences.
That is the full set of famous books in French, from the nineteenth century novel to the plays and poems that came before it. Download them one at a time, or take the whole page in a single ZIP.
