It is during the period known retrospectively as the Belle Époque that the conditions emerged for the large-scale production of middlebrow fiction. In the decades between the establishment of the Third Republic (1871) and the outbreak of the First World War (1914), France saw the growth of a mass reading public with an apparently insatiable appetite for the printed word, and developed the technologies and commercial infrastructure to feed this demand. In an era of economic expansion and intense modernisation, the growing middle class sought reading material that would both help to explain their changing habitus, by recasting it in legible form, and provide that paradoxical combination of self-recognition and escape from the boundaries of the self that characterises immersive fiction.

The literary market: lowbrow and highbrow

Literacy rates in France rose from 60 per cent in 1870 to 95 per cent in 1900, in part thanks to the new Republic's introduction of free, mandatory, universal state education up to the age of 13 (1881–82). Progress in the technologies of paper and printing enabled a massive expansion of both the press and the publishing industry, and production both responded to and further swelled the market for news and stories. By the 1900s France had four popular dailies each selling close to a million copies a day: Le Petit Parisien, Le Petit Journal, Le Matinand Le Journal, and a plethora of smaller dailies, magazines and reviews. Virtually all of these carried at least one feuilletonor serialised novel, for the need to know ‘what happens next’ ensured customer fidelity; some of the weekly magazines were largely composed of serialised fiction. After publication in episode form, most of these novels were then repackaged in single volumes and marketed by one of the entrepreneurial publishers, such as Calmann-Lévy, Dentu, Fayard, Rouff or Tallandier, who flourished under the economic and social liberalism of the new Republic.