Le roman bourgeois: Ouvrage comique

by Antoine Furetière

"Le roman bourgeois: Ouvrage comique" by Antoine Furetière is a novel published in 1666. This groundbreaking work abandons traditional romance plots to present interconnected sketches of middle-class Parisian life. The first part follows naive Javotte and her suitors, alongside cunning Lucrèce, exposing greed, foolishness, and vanity. The second part satirizes litigation-obsessed characters and concludes with a biting portrait of the literary world through a deceased author's pitiful manuscript collection. Furetière's sharp parody challenged conventional storytelling with its deliberately fragmented structure and unflinching mockery of bourgeois pretensions.