French Classics: Free EPUB Editions

French literature reaches this shelf earlier than any other modern one, because the essay as a form starts here: Montaigne published the first two books of the Essais in 1580, and Descartes wrote the Discourse in French on purpose, so that anyone who could read could follow an argument about method.

Then the nineteenth century arrives all at once: Hugo’s Notre-Dame in 1831, Balzac’s Père Goriot in 1835, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1857, Zola’s Germinal in 1885, and Verne writing the adventure novel as a scientific itinerary in between. Thirteen authors, nineteen books, and two Nobel-adjacent centuries of prose.

Every French title on this shelf

Nineteen titles, oldest first, from 1580 to 1910 and about 3.3 million words.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1580	The Essays of Michel de Montaigne	Michel de Montaigne	Essays	517,000	29 h
1637	Discourse on the Method	René Descartes	Treatise	26,100	1 h
1670	Pascal’s Pensées	Blaise Pascal	Aphorisms	113,900	6 h
1759	Candide	Voltaire	Novel	38,738	2 h
1831	The Hunchback of Notre-Dame	Victor Hugo	Novel	184,000	10 h
1835	Father Goriot	Honoré de Balzac	Novel	105,000	6 h
1844	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	466,000	26 h
1844	The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	226,061	13 h
1845	Twenty Years After	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	242,155	13 h
1857	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	Novel	116,000	6 h
1862	Les Misérables	Victor Hugo	Novel	551,000	31 h
1864	A Journey to the Centre of the Earth	Jules Verne	Novel	88,854	5 h
1870	Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea	Jules Verne	Novel	104,016	6 h
1873	Around the World in Eighty Days	Jules Verne	Novel	63,000	4 h
1885	Bel-Ami	Guy de Maupassant	Novel	108,000	6 h
1885	Germinal	Émile Zola	Novel	177,000	10 h
1907	The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar	Maurice Leblanc	Novel	54,000	3 h
1907	The Mystery of the Yellow Room	Gaston Leroux	Novel	73,826	4 h
1910	The Phantom of the Opera	Gaston Leroux	Novel	84,181	5 h

How this list was made

Titles appear when the author’s first recorded citizenship, from Wikidata, is France or the Kingdom of France. Rousseau, born a citizen of Geneva, is included because his citizenship list puts France first and he wrote in French.

Word counts are for the English translations offered here, which run shorter than the French originals by roughly a fifth. Reading times use the site’s 300 words a minute.

Questions readers ask

Where should I start with French literature?

Candide, at about 40,000 words: a whole philosophy in a fortnight of disasters. Père Goriot is the next step if you want the nineteenth-century novel.

Why are there no Proust or Camus novels?

Because their French texts are still in copyright in the United States. The shelf stops where the public domain stops.

Is Montaigne an essayist or a philosopher?

Both, and that is the point of the form he invented: a mind thinking aloud, with quotations, digressions and revisions left in.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · American Classics · Irish Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.