Nineteenth-century French short stories were devoured by their readers
with an insatiable appetite. A reading public that was itself expanding
rapidly, as education and leisure opportunities grew, created an
unprecedented demand for short fiction. Writers quickly responded to
this; it was a lucrative market, and at the same time it offered the
intrinsic artistic challenge of brevity. From Romanticism to Naturalism
and beyond, novelists such as Balzac and Zola explored the potential of
the short story as an alternative form to the novel in depicting modern
life. The poetic intensity of 'contes fantastiques' in the manner of
Poe's mysterious and cruel tales was championed by Baudelaire. Flaubert
showed that short story fiction could be a serious as well as popular
literary form. Specialists of the short story emerged, such as Merimee
and Maupassant.

Richard Hobbs is Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol and the author of 'Odilon Redon', Studio Vista, 1977