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Culture
The concept of culture is of paramount importance in France - a country whose people have all but cornered the world market on urbane savoir faire - and the country's devotion to Frenchness is all-consuming.
The first distinctively Gallic architecture was Gothic, which originated in the mid-12th century in northern France and is preserved in the seminal Chartres cathedral and its successors at Reims and Amiens. In the realms of architecture and the visual arts, the Renaissance - which first showed its face at the end of the 15th century - was largely an imported phenomenon with few homegrown modifications. Local writers showed more verve, with Rabelais and Montaigne producing literary landmarks.
During the Baroque era, which lasted from the end of the 16th century to the late 18th century, painting, sculpture and architecture were integrated to create structures of great subtlety, refinement and elegance. French Baroque music was influential throughout the continent, informing much of the wider European output, while Nicolas Poussin was the first French painter who really ba-rocked. French theatre guffawed with Molière, the era's most popular comic playwright of his time.
In the 18th century, Jean-Baptiste Chardin brought the humbler domesticity of the Dutch masters to French art. Later, Napoleon named Jacques Louis David, a leader of the 1789 Revolution, official state painter. David produced vast pictures, including one of Revolutionary-dictator Marat lying dead in his bath. The literature of this period is dominated by philosophers, among them Voltaire and Rousseau, while the music scene was dominated by Impressionists Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and Berlioz, who founded modern orchestration and produced operas and symphonies that sparked a musical renaissance.
Victor Hugo is the key figure of 19th-century French Romanticism. By the mid-19th century, Romanticism was evolving into new movements, both in fiction and poetry, and three stalwarts of French literature emerged: Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and the controversial, innovative and powerful work of Émile Zola. The poet Arthur Rimbaud, as well as crowding rugged and exotic adventuring into his 37 years, produced two enduring pieces of work: Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). Sculptor Auguste Rodin, regarded by some critics as the finest portraitist in the history of the art, rendered sumptuous bronze and marble figures. Painting as portraiture was simultaneously revamped by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix, while landscape painting was transformed first by Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School, then by Édouard Manet and the realists. Manet's later work is influenced by the Claude Monet-prefected Impressionist school, which numbered Camille Pisarro and Edgar Degas among its students.
Post-impressionism gave way to a bewildering diversity of styles in the 20th century, two of which are particularly significant: Fauvism, à la Henri Matisse, and Cubism, personified by Pablo Picasso. These were followed by the Dadaists, who reacted to the negativity of WWI by acting weird.
Marcel Proust dominated early 20th century literature with his exquisitely excruciating seven-volume novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Poets André Breton and Paul Éluard were militant surrealists fascinated with dreams, divination and all manifestations of 'the marvellous'. After WWII, Existentialism developed around Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, who stressed the importance of the writer's political engagement. De Beauvoir, author of the ground-breaking The Second Sex, had a profound influence on feminist thinking.