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Enter through a theme 146
The world's works sometimes answer one another where you least expect it.
For the classroom 6
- Classroom reading pathsOn one theme, a French text and three texts from other countries, with passages, leads and questions (in French).
- First texts in FrenchShort texts for those learning French.
- First texts in EnglishShort texts for those learning English.
- First texts in SpanishShort texts for those learning Spanish.
- First texts in ArabicShort texts for those learning Arabic.
- French baccalauréat 2027 (première syllabus)The works on the French première syllabus for the 2026-2027 school year, from Chrétien de Troyes to Rimbaud.
Genres and forms 26
Ways of telling: genres and forms.
- American film noirNocturnal America of crime and fatalism, from the 1940s and 1950s.5 works
- American GothicThe dark, fantastical vein of American letters.5 works
- American slapstick silent comedyThe golden age of visual comedy, from chases to acrobatics.5 works
- Animated cinemaThe great masters of drawn and stop-motion animation.5 works
- Auteur documentaryReality filmed as a gaze and as a form of writing.4 works
- Autobiography and life writingFrom a prince's memoirs to childhood narratives, a life told by the one who lived it.13 works
- Coming-of-age novelsFrom childhood to adulthood, the novel of formation.10 works
- Commedia all'italianaAcid Italian comedy, a cruel and funny mirror of society.5 works
- Crime and noir fictionCrimes, investigations and shadowy corners, from the genre's origins to noir fiction.9 works
- Dystopias and speculative fictionFuture worlds and imagined societies, from utopia to warning.9 works
- Erotic literature and cinemaDesire spoken plainly, and what it has cost books and films.11 works
- European silent cinemaFrom the Italian epic to Soviet montage, European cinema before sound.14 works
- Founding tales, myths and legendsThe stories that run through every culture, from ancient epics to collected folk tales.12 works
- French baccalauréat 2027 (première syllabus)The works on the French première syllabus for the 2026-2027 school year, from Chrétien de Troyes to Rimbaud.10 works
- Giallo and exploitation cinemaThe bloody, stylized Italian thriller of the 1960s and 1970s.5 works
- Golden Age American comedyHollywood laughter of the 1930s and 1940s, screwball and satire.5 works
- Horror and fantasy cinemaCinematic thrills, from Universal Studios to modern fantasy film.6 works
- Oral forms turned poeticSix authors who brought a spoken form into written literature.8 works
- Science fiction in filmCinema that contemplates the future, the machine and the elsewhere.5 works
- The art of the short storyMasters of brief narrative, where everything unfolds in a few pages.10 works
- The classic WesternThe great founding American narrative, from conquest to twilight.5 works
- The English Gothic novelThrills, ruins and the supernatural in the English Gothic novel.5 works
- The fantastic and the strangeThe supernatural and the unsettling, on the blurred border between reality and dream.11 works
- The Hollywood musicalHollywood's sung and danced dream, from the 1930s to the 1950s.5 works
- Theatre that shaped the stageFrom ancient tragedy to modern theatre, the plays that made the stage.13 works
- Travel writingThose who set out, and what they brought back from the road.12 works
Motifs 20
Human questions that run through cultures and periods.
- Childhood and the fresh gazeThe world seen through a child's eyes.12 works
- Crime and moral punishmentWrongdoing, guilt and its inner cost, beyond the detective novel.11 works
- Exile and uprootingLeaving, losing one's country, remaking oneself elsewhere.11 works
- Impossible love and passionThe great tales of thwarted love.14 works
- Madness and reasonThe blurred boundaries of the mind.10 works
- Nature and the wildMan facing the wild world, between belonging and confrontation.12 works
- Power and tyrannyThe mechanisms of domination and servitude.12 works
- Satire of societyLaughing at manners in order to better judge them.11 works
- The city and the crowdThe modern metropolis as character and as ordeal.10 works
- The condition of womenWomen confronting the constraints of their time.10 works
- The double and the portraitMan facing his reflection, his shadow, his other self.11 works
- The ghost of the past and memoryThe weight of what has been, the haunting memory.12 works
- The pact and temptationSelling one's soul, crossing the forbidden line.10 works
- The quest and initiationThe journey that transforms the one who undertakes it.11 works
- The sea and the voyageThe call of the open sea, the crossing, the shipwreck.10 works
- The trial and justiceThe individual crushed or revealed by the machinery of justice.11 works
- The working class and povertyLabour, the factory and poverty as subject matter.10 works
- War and its aftermathWar and its traces, seen from the trenches, the front and the home front.13 works
- War seen from belowConflict at human eye level.11 works
- Writers and regimesThe documented relation of an author to a regime, set out without comment.42 works
Movements and schools 100
The movements, schools and moments that marked their time.
- 1944, the Estonian exileTwelve authors who left ahead of the Soviet advance.12 works
- American experimental cinemaThe American avant-garde, from filmed dream to structural film.5 works
- American independent cinemaOn the margins of Hollywood, a free and personal cinema.5 works
- American realism and the frontierThe American novel confronting industry, the city and the West.8 works
- Anglophone African poetryAfrican poets writing in English, around the journal Black Orpheus.4 works
- Armenian letters and 1915A literature cut down in full flower.8 works
- Australian cinemaThe Australian new wave of the 1970s and 1980s.6 works
- Brazilian ModernismThe 1922 break that invented a distinctly Brazilian language.6 works
- British Free CinemaThe English realist revival of the late 1950s, set in factories and working-class housing estates.5 works
- Cambodia after 1975A culture destroyed, then slowly pieced back together.4 works
- Chinese social realismThe great Chinese novel of the first half of the twentieth century, between satire and fresco.6 works
- Classic 19th-century Russian literatureThe great Russian novel, the pinnacle of realism.7 works
- Classic BollywoodThe golden age of popular Hindi cinema, melodrama, song and excess.6 works
- Classic British cinemaThe golden age of English studios, from adventure to muted noir.5 works
- Classic Yiddish literatureThe founders of the novel and tale in the Yiddish language.6 works
- Classical Arabic poetryThe masters of Arabic poetry, from its origins to the Abbasid golden age.4 works
- Classical Persian poetryThe masters of Persian poetry, the bedrock of a civilization.8 works
- Czechoslovak New WaveThe flourishing of Czech and Slovak cinema in the 1960s.5 works
- DecadenceArtifice, ennui and vertigo at the turn of the century.6 works
- Early French silent cinemaThe very beginnings of film, from the Lumière actuality to the fantastical serial.5 works
- Egyptian and Arab cinemaThe great cinema of Egypt and the Arab world, from melodrama to auteur film.5 works
- Elizabethan theatreThe great English stage around 1600.5 works
- English Romantic poetryThe great English Romantic poets, between nature and imagination.6 works
- ExistentialismFreedom, the absurd and choice at the center of the narrative.6 works
- First national filmsThe first feature film shot in a country, from 1905 to 2001.46 works
- French Poetic Realism1930s French cinema, with mist, fatalism and the poetry of everyday life.5 works
- German ClassicismThe surge, then the balance, of German letters around Weimar.7 works
- German Expressionism1920s German cinema, with shadows, distorted sets and the fantastical.5 works
- Great 19th-century novelsThe sweeping narratives that gave the novel its modern form.11 works
- Greek cinemaGreek auteur cinema, from the historical long take to intimate drama.5 works
- Hong Kong cinemaMartial arts, stylish crime thrillers and urban melancholy.5 works
- Indian cinema, popular and auteurFrom Bengal to Bombay, two faces of Indian cinema.6 works
- Indian social realismCommitted fiction from the subcontinent, around the Progressive Writers.5 works
- Iranian cinemaA cinema of simplicity and cunning, between children and landscapes.5 works
- Italian NeorealismPostwar Italian cinema, shot in the streets with ordinary people.6 works
- Japanese New WaveYoung Japanese film-makers breaking with the classicism of the studios.7 works
- Japanese realism and naturalismThe realist turn of the modern Japanese novel, around 1900.6 works
- Jena RomanticismEarly German Romanticism, between poetry, philosophy and the fairy tale.5 works
- Korean cinemaFrom postwar drama to an auteur awakening, a long-overlooked cinema.5 works
- Latin American indigenismoFiction that places the indigenous peoples of the Andes and Mexico at its center.6 works
- Magical realismThe marvelous embedded in everyday life, at the heart of the Latin American novel.10 works
- May Fourth Chinese poetryChinese poetry of modernity, around the May Fourth Movement.5 works
- Mexican Golden Age cinemaThe great Mexican cinema of the 1940s, between melodrama and lyricism.5 works
- Modern Scandinavian fictionThe great Nordic voices, from Ibsen to Laxness.7 works
- ModernismThe great formal break at the start of the twentieth century.8 works
- NaturalismThe novel as a clinical observation of society.6 works
- NégritudeThe literary affirmation of Black identity in the French-speaking world.5 works
- New German CinemaThe renewal of German cinema in the 1970s, demanding and political.6 works
- New HollywoodThe generation that reinvented American cinema, from the late 1960s through the 1970s.7 works
- New Latin American CinemaThe continent's committed and inventive filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s.5 works
- Noh theatre and Japanese classicismThe founding forms of classical Japanese stage and narrative.5 works
- Palestinian literatureThe writing of Palestinian exile and memory.5 works
- Polish auteur cinemaThe great Polish school, moral and formal.5 works
- Polish RomanticismThe great poets of the stateless Polish nation, in the nineteenth century.5 works
- Portuguese ModernismThe Portuguese avant-garde around the journal Orpheu.5 works
- Postwar JapanJapanese writers after 1945, between trauma and modernity.5 works
- Postwar Nordic cinemaThe lights of the North, from intimate drama to burlesque melancholy.6 works
- Quebec cinemaThe cinema of Quebec, from direct cinema to auteur fiction.5 works
- RomanticismThe surge of feeling and nature, at the dawn of the nineteenth century.12 works
- Russian avant-gardesThe flourishing of Russian poetry in the early twentieth century, from Symbolism to Futurism.8 works
- Scandinavian silent cinemaThe golden age of Nordic silent film, between nature, sagas and the fantastical.5 works
- Socialist realismThe official novel of the Soviet world.5 works
- Soviet and Russian auteur cinemaThe great auteur tradition, beyond silent-era montage.5 works
- Soviet montageSoviet silent cinema and the art of editing as shock and meaning.5 works
- Spanish auteur cinemaFrom Francoist satire to lyricism, the great voices of Spanish cinema.5 works
- Sub-Saharan African cinemaThe founders of African cinema, from folk tale to social critique.5 works
- SurrealismThe writing of dream, chance and the unconscious.5 works
- Surrealist cinema and the avant-gardesThe avant-gardes of the 1920s, between dream, provocation and pure experimentation.4 works
- SymbolismThe poetry of suggestion, symbol and music.7 works
- Taiwanese New WaveTaiwanese cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, slow, expansive and melancholic.5 works
- Tang dynasty poetryThe golden age of classical Chinese poetry.5 works
- The African novel of decolonizationThe African novel confronting the end of colonial rule.9 works
- The American RenaissanceThe founding moment of American letters, around the mid-nineteenth century.7 works
- The Anglophone CaribbeanThe emergence of a distinct literary voice in the British West Indies.7 works
- The Beat GenerationThe breath and the road of 1950s American counterculture.5 works
- The Bengal RenaissanceThe great intellectual and literary awakening of Bengal.6 works
- The Bloomsbury GroupThe intellectual and literary circle of early twentieth-century London.5 works
- The Chicago RenaissanceThe literary revival of the American Midwest in the early twentieth century.5 works
- The Dutch and Flemish Golden AgeThe letters of the Netherlands at their peak.5 works
- The English Victorian novelThe great social panorama of nineteenth-century England.8 works
- The French EnlightenmentFrench thought and fiction of the eighteenth century.8 works
- The French New WaveThe renewal of French cinema in the late 1950s, free camerawork and a fresh tone.8 works
- The Generation of '27Spanish poets of 1927, between tradition and avant-garde.7 works
- The Generation of '98The renewal of Spanish letters after 1898.5 works
- The golden age of Japanese cinemaThe great Japanese masters of the 1950s, from family drama to samurai film.7 works
- The Great Terror and Belarusian lettersThe Nasha Niva generation, largely shot in 1937.5 works
- The Greek civil warA generation shaped by the Resistance and then broken by the civil war.4 works
- The Greek language questionA hundred and fifty years of conflict between the learned and the spoken language.5 works
- The Harlem RenaissanceThe Black American literary flowering of the 1920s.5 works
- The Hebrew RenaissanceThe revival of Hebrew letters, from Europe to Palestine.14 works
- The Irish RevivalThe Irish literary awakening around 1900, in theatre and poetry.5 works
- The Italian RenaissanceThe founders of Italian letters and humanism.7 works
- The Latin American BoomThe generation that established the Latin American novel on the world stage.8 works
- The Lost GenerationDisillusioned Americans after 1918, often based in Paris.6 works
- The Mahjar, Arab exileThe literature of Arab emigrants in the Americas, between nostalgia and renewal.5 works
- The New Novel (Nouveau Roman)The French rejection of traditional plot and character.4 works
- The ParnassiansFrench art-for-art's-sake poetry, before Symbolism.5 works
- The Spanish Golden AgeThe peak of Spanish letters, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5 works
- Theatre of the AbsurdThe stage of incommunicability and nonsense.6 works
- TranscendentalismAmerican idealism from Concord, between nature and conscience.5 works