Reading Companion

Which French classics are easiest to read for learners?

The easiest French classics are short books in plain prose: Maupassant’s stories, Le Petit Prince, Voltaire’s Candide, Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin and Jules Verne’s adventure novels, most of which our team rates B1 or B2. Long nineteenth-century novels such as Madame Bovary and Les Misérables are harder, and at A2 a graded adaptation of a classic is a better start than the original.

By the Readlang Mobile team (an independent app, not affiliated with readlang.com). Updated .

Which French classic should you read first?

Start with short stories, then short novels, and leave the long nineteenth-century novels for last. Short books let you finish something in a few evenings, and a story of a few thousand words is easier to restart after a hard page than a novel of a hundred thousand. Here are the classics learners ask about most, from easier to harder. The levels and word counts are from our table of free books by level; two books are not in it and are described from published sources.

  1. Maupassant’s stories. Le Horla (B1, 41,691 words) and Boule de Suif (B1, 36,423 words) are collections, so each story is a short read of its own.
  2. Le Petit Prince, Saint-Exupéry. Short and illustrated, and many readers know the story already. It is not in our table, so we have not rated it; see below.
  3. Candide, Voltaire. Candide, ou l’optimisme (B2, 34,450 words): a short satire in short chapters, with a fast-moving plot.
  4. Daudet and Leblanc. Lettres de mon moulin (B2, 49,509 words), stories and sketches from Provence; Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (B2, 55,408 words), detective stories with a gentleman thief.
  5. Jules Verne. Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (B2, 68,581 words) and Voyage au centre de la Terre (B2, 67,960 words): clear plots, but twice as long as Candide, with many technical and geographical words.
  6. L’Étranger, Camus. Simple grammar for a classic, but not in our table, so not rated by us; see below.
  7. Long nineteenth-century novels. Madame Bovary (C1, 112,892 words) and Les misérables, Tome I: Fantine (B2, 111,879 words in the first volume alone).

Our levels were set by hand by our team, judging the language of each whole book; they are not the result of a test with readers, as explained under How were the levels set? Use them to narrow the list, and let a page of the book decide: how to check a classic before you start.

Is The Little Prince good for learning French?

Yes, for many learners it is a good first classic: it is short, illustrated and made of short chapters, and many readers already know the story in their own language, which makes it easier to follow where the words run out. The French National Library lists the Folio junior edition at 113 pages with colour illustrations, for “bons lecteurs, à partir de 9 ans” (good readers from age 9). It was first published in 1943, in the United States, in French and in English, and it is often called the most translated book in the French language.

Two cautions. A book for children is not a graded reader: the vocabulary is not limited to a word list, and the ideas are written for adults as much as for children. And we have not measured or rated it ourselves, because it is not in our library of public-domain books (see Which French classics are free?), so we have no CEFR level to give it. Test a page before you buy.

If you can read a page of it with only a few unknown words, a Maupassant story such as those in Le Horla is a natural next step: it is free and, like Le Petit Prince, can be read in one sitting.

Is L’Étranger easy?

Its grammar is easier than that of most French classics; its ideas are not. Camus tells the story in the first person and in the passé composé, the past tense learners already use in speech. The linguist Émile Benveniste observed that the narration of L’Étranger is “entirely in the passé composé”, as Renée Balibar quoted him in 1972. Most older French novels are narrated in the passé simple, a written tense that learners rarely use themselves.

The harder parts are elsewhere. The second part of the novel follows a trial, with the language of the courtroom, and the book is famous for what it leaves unsaid, so you may follow every sentence and still miss what the story is about. We have not rated L’Étranger, because it is not in our library: it is still in copyright in France and the rest of the EU until the end of 2030, 70 years after Camus died in 1960.

If you want a free book that is close to it in form, try the title story of Le Horla: a first-person diary whose short entries are in the present and the passé composé (“J’ai passé toute la matinée étendu sur l’herbe”), although the longer episodes are told in the passé simple.

Is Madame Bovary too hard for a first French book?

For most learners, yes. Madame Bovary is the hardest of the classics on this page in our table, and also one of the longest:

  • Level. Our team rates it C1, against B1 for Maupassant’s Boule de Suif.
  • Length. 112,892 words. The median B1 book in our table has 6,729. At 200 to 100 words per minute, Madame Bovary takes about 9.5 to 19 hours, against 3 to 5.5 for Candide.
  • Vocabulary. 13,138 different word forms, against 6,800 in Boule de Suif and 5,485 in Candide. Longer books tend to have more different words, so part of the gap is length, but the gap is still wide.
  • Grammar. The passé simple appears in the first sentence: “Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra…"

That does not mean you have to wait for C1. If a page from the middle passes the one-page test below, read it: it is free, and finishing a novel you care about is worth more than any list. If it does not, read Maupassant first: his stories are from the same period, and the whole of Boule de Suif, twelve stories, is about a third as long. Les Misérables raises the same problem in another way: its first volume, Les misérables, Tome I: Fantine, is as long as all of Madame Bovary.

Why are older French classics harder to read?

Three things make a classic hard for a learner, and length is only one of them:

Reading classics in an order that keeps these problems small is what makes the order in the list above work: short, then longer; diary and dialogue, then dense narration.

Which French classics can you read at A2?

At A2, read a classic as a graded adaptation, not in the original. No French book in our table of free originals is rated below B1. Publishers of readers for learners of French retell classics at lower levels: Hachette’s Lire en français facile series lists Le Tour du monde en 80 jours, Les Trois Mousquetaires and the first two volumes of Les Misérables at A2, and Maupassant’s Les Contes de la Bécasse too. CLE International lists its own Le tour du monde en 80 jours, 64 pages long, at B1.

A level belongs to an edition, not to a story: an A2 Les Misérables is a short retelling of the plot, not Hugo’s text with easier words. How much of the original an adaptation keeps is on How much of the original book do adapted classics keep?; the French series and their levels are compared on Which French graded readers are really A1, A2 and B1?, and when to switch from adaptations to originals is on Graded readers or original books? For short originals to read first, see Free short stories in French for beginners.

Which French classics are free?

All the books on this page that are in our table are free: Candide, Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Voyage au centre de la Terre, Le Horla, Boule de Suif, Lettres de mon moulin, Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur, Madame Bovary and the first volume of Les Misérables. They are in the public domain in the United States, and each title above opens a page with a link to the free edition on Project Gutenberg, which publishes books that are in the public domain in the United States. Copyright differs by country, so check yours before you download. Every French book in our table, sorted by level, is on Free French books.

Le Petit Prince and L’Étranger are not free in every country, and Project Gutenberg has neither (searched on 1 November 2026):

  • L’Étranger. In the EU, copyright lasts for the author’s life and 70 years after, counted from 1 January of the year after death. Camus died in 1960, so the novel is in copyright in France and the rest of the EU until the end of 2030.
  • Le Petit Prince. Saint-Exupéry died in 1944, and the book has been out of copyright in the United Kingdom and Ireland since 2015. In France it stays protected longer: French law counts wartime extensions and adds 30 years for authors who died “pour la France”, as he did. Catriona Seth of Oxford calculated in 2016 that it enters the French public domain in April 2033.
  • Translations. An English translation has its own copyright, separate from the French text.

How to check a classic before you start

Open the book in the middle, read one full page and count the words you could not translate. Names don’t count. On a page of about 250 words, five unknown words means you know about 98% of the words, the share that Hu and Nation’s study of reading fiction pointed to. If you stop more often than that, pick a book from earlier in the list above or an adaptation. The full test is on Is this book right for my level?, and how many evenings a book will take is on How long does it take to read a book?

Sources

  1. Reading Companion (2026). Free books by CEFR level, CSV file with levels, words and different words, CC BY 4.0; stories per collection from Free short stories for beginners. readingcompanion.org/data/books-by-level.csv
  2. Project Gutenberg. Permissions page (“The vast majority of Project Gutenberg eBooks are in the public domain in the US”), book pages and searches for Saint-Exupéry and Camus, checked 1 November 2026. gutenberg.org, Madame Bovary, Le Horla, Riquet à la Houppe
  3. Balibar, R. (1972). Le passé composé fictif dans « l’Étranger » d’Albert Camus. Littérature, 7, 102–119, checked 1 November 2026. persee.fr
  4. Bibliothèque nationale de France (2013). Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), Gallimard, Folio junior 100, 113 p., public “Bons lecteurs, à partir de 9 ans”, catalogue record, checked 1 November 2026. catalogue.bnf.fr. Camus’s dates (1913–1960): catalogue.bnf.fr
  5. Greenberg, C. (2014). 70 years of Le Petit Prince. Cambridge University Library, Language Collections blog, checked 1 November 2026. languagecollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk
  6. European Parliament and Council (2006). Directive 2006/116/EC on the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights, Articles 1(1) and 8, as adopted, checked 1 November 2026. legislation.gov.uk
  7. Seth, C. (2016). Who owns Le Petit Prince? Adventures on the Bookshelf, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford, 24 February 2016, checked 1 November 2026. bookshelf.mml.ox.ac.uk
  8. Hachette FLE. LFF (Lire en français facile), pages 1 and 2 of the collection with levels, checked 1 November 2026. page 1, page 2
  9. CLE International (2016). Le tour du monde en 80 jours, Niveau 3/B1, Lectures CLE en français facile, 64 pages, product page, checked 1 November 2026. cle-international.com
  10. Hu, M. and Nation, P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403–430. doi.org/10.64152/10125/66973

Next: Free French books, sorted by level.