No purely academic studies of Stevenson were published in France before World War I – it was too soon and there was not enough distance to gain any historical perspective. But in the many periodical articles about Stevenson and in the first biographies, a sense emerges of how French readers of various social, cultural and literary backgrounds approached and interpreted his novels – for it was his novels that were most readily available in France. Some appraisals were necessarily impressionistic, but they nonetheless illuminate the literary and cultural zeitgeist and the generational tensions being worked out as Naturalists morphed into Decadents into Symbolists into Modernists, and as the new generation sought to make its mark on French literature. This book began with an analysis of Stevenson’s perspective on French literature, how he perceived it to be evolving, and how he might fit in to its evolution, as well as how it formed part of his literary and stylistic apprenticeship. The present chapter reverses the angle and looks at the question from a French perspective. It aims to analyse Stevenson’s place in the development of French literature and position his works within the debates taking place on the evolution of the novel in France. Stevenson’s role in the (re)birth of the adventure novel with the generation of Alain-Fournier, André Gide, Pierre Mac Orlan and Jacques Rivière has been established. This chapter will move the historical goalposts back slightly to show that even before this, Stevenson’s work was being interpreted in France in terms of how it offered a countermodel to Naturalism; it was only subsequently that the emphasis was less immediately reactionary and shifted to the elaboration of a new concept of adventure.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, there were continual comings and goings between French and British fiction.