SOURCE: George, Albert J. “Conclusion.” In Short Fiction in France, 1800-1850, pp. 225-35. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1964.

In the following excerpt, George focuses on the formal transformation of the French conte into the modern short story in the first half of the nineteenth century.

During some fifty years of anguished travail, French short fiction slowly groped its way to mature respectability. In that relatively short time it managed to overcome the taint of plebeian origins which for centuries had kept the brief narrative in literary limbo. Long-deferred change overtook time-honored but limited forms when the coincidence of a technological revolution with major political and social disruptions forced early nineteenth-century writers to transform the conte into a more supple instrument for artistic communication.

When the age of romanticism opened, French writers firmly held to a premise established by classical theorists, namely, that form somehow preceded content, from which it...