The origins of the French Bildungsroman can be seen in medieval ‘quest’ narratives and in the education of Rabelais’s youthful giant Pantagruel. But arguably Lafayette’s seventeenth-century The Princesse de Clèves is the first true Bildungsroman of France, and of Europe. The ‘classic’ structure is developed in the eighteenth century with, for example, Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, and reaches its zenith in the nineteenth century with famous Bildungsromane by Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. But crucially almost all these French Bildungsromane take a different form and tone from their English and German counterparts. From The Princesse de Clèves on, the understanding achieved by protagonists is accompanied by renunciation, even abjection, maybe death; there is no final stepping forward into sunlit uplands. Indeed, in post-Revolutionary, post-Terror France, Bildung, ‘learning’, is often ironised: the irony directed at the very structure of the Bildungsroman as well as at the protagonist. However, in the early twentieth century Proust (who admired Goethe and the English novel) effects a striking reversal of the ‘French model’. His narrator can be seen as the hero of a Bildungsroman that ends with a newly joyous grasping of the future. Such interpretations have been deemed naive, but they are currently finding favour with Proust critics.