Such was the presence of French fiction in nineteenth-century Britain that there is hardly a British author who did not, at some point, write about French literature. The French novel featured extensively in debates on the morality and the corrupting power of literature. It also came to represent high art and scandal as opposed to the middle-class mediocrity of the books available through the system of circulating libraries. Reviews and essays on French literature regularly appeared in journals and magazines like the Athenaeum and the Fortnightly Review. From the beginning of the century to the end, whether it be in terms of the roman feuilleton, the great romantics like Victor Hugo and George Sand, stylists like Gautier, Baudelaire, Flaubert and the Goncourts, or the Naturalism and Decadence of the 1880s and 1890s, French literature was a phenomenon to be reckoned with in Victorian Britain. While some authors, like Henry James, collected their writings on French literature in volumes, others – the majority – shared their ideas in reviews, columns and books alongside articles and chapters about English literature. Running through these debates were attempts both overt and covert to clearly delineate the distinct national literary characteristics of the French and British novel. The present chapter will explore how Stevenson fits in to this dynamic. It will begin by examining Stevenson’s essays on French literature in relation to the development of the novel across national and generic boundaries. At the same time, it will demonstrate how Stevenson positions himself within this literary evolution. It will then turn to Stevenson’s better-known essays on realism from the 1880s, so as to show how they function as responses to debates on realism and Naturalism in France. Finally, it will study Stevenson’s reading of popular and non-canonical nineteenth-century French writers, as well as emerging figures in French literature who were attempting to renew the novel. In so doing, it will highlight how this reading relates to Stevenson’s interest in generic innovation that merges plot-centric storytelling with stylistic sophistication.