Nietzsche’s writings belong to a hybrid genre that pertains as much to literature as to philosophy. The first wave of French Nietzscheanism, dating from the 1890s to the First World War, occurred primarily in the field of literature. By contrast, in the eyes the philosophers who held sway in the university system, Nietzsche was considered too much of a poet and brilliant essayist to be a serious philosopher. A further explanation for the seductive power Nietzsche exercised on French writers is that he himself had a predilection for writers and thinkers in the tradition of Montaigne and Pascal over the French moralists, including his most immediate contemporary in France, Hippolyte Taine. Nevertheless, the reception of Nietzsche among French writers was selective and critical. André Gide saw in Nietzsche a fellow immoralist, but he kept a distance from Nietzsche the philosopher. Paul Valéry was happy to acknowledge the pleasure that reading Nietzsche’s prose gave him, but he was a harsh judge of what he deemed Nietzsche’s disregard for conceptual precision. Marcel Proust treated Nietzscheanism as a social phenomenon in À la recherche du temps perdu, sprinkling remarks about the author of The Case of Wagner across his characters while remaining himself a committed Wagnerian.

The two decades between the First and Second World Wars were a period of political turbulence and social and cultural change in France. Céline and André Malraux gave voice to right- and left-wing ideologies in their work, while François Mauriac and others offered a religious perspective on contemporary mores. Formal innovations came from Surrealism and modernism, and the voices of female, black and gay writers made themselves heard more boldly than ever before: André Breton, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Colette, Irène Némirovsky and René Maran were significant literary figures of the period. At the same time, cinema and radio challenged the cultural dominance of the novel, and within literature the landscape was changed by the beginnings of the bande dessinée and the burgeoning of mass-market popular fiction, including Delly’s romance novels and Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.