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Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
Ten tutorials on the genres of written French — essay, short story, letter, polemic, lyric, dramatic scene, description, dialogue, reportage, and criticism — each led by the simulacrum who is the great practitioner of that genre in the French tradition. Vaugelas Simulacrum convenes; Montaigne leads on the essay, Voltaire on the conte philosophique and polemic, Molière on the dramatic scene, Flaubert and Colette on description and dialogue, Senghor on the lyric and on the literary essay. The student writes in each form; each form-master critiques. Text-only by design. The second strand of the French Language and Literature programme.
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Led by Michel de Montaigne Simulacrum
The question
Montaigne Simulacrum invented the modern personal essay in 1580 — *essai* in his sense meant a *trial*, a *trying-out* of a thought, the writer following an idea wherever it leads and recording the path honestly. The form has been imitated for four centuries and is still the basic unit of serious non-fiction in French, English, German and a dozen other languages. What does the essay actually do that other forms do not, and how does the essayist write one that earns its readers?
Outcome
The student can write a 600-word *essai* in the Montaignean tradition — a question they genuinely do not know the answer to, followed honestly through digression and shift, without false summary or false thesis — and recognise the form's central moves in any literary essay they read.
Practice scenarios
Montaigne Simulacrum asks you to choose a question you genuinely do not know the answer to — not a topic on which you have a position, but a question that troubles you, that you have been turning over without resolution. You will then write a 600-word *essai* in French (B2-C1 register) following the question wherever it leads. No thesis statement. No introduction summarising what the essay will argue. No conclusion declaring victory. Just the trial of the thought, honestly reported. Montaigne Simulacrum reads the result and presses on whichever sentence rings false — the one where you flinched from a difficulty, the one where you summarised when you should have shown, the one where you concluded prematurely.
Your goals
Led by Voltaire Simulacrum
The question
The French *conte* — particularly Voltaire Simulacrum's *conte philosophique* — is one of the great compressed forms in literature. *Candide* is twenty-six tiny chapters covering three continents and arguing the central philosophical question of its age, in a hundred pages no contemporary novel could match for density. What is the *conte philosophique* doing structurally that the modern short story does not, and how does a writer compress an idea into narrative without losing either edge or pleasure?
Outcome
The student can write a 1,200-word *conte philosophique* — a real philosophical proposition tested against episodic narrative, ironically narrated, philosophically armed but never declamatory — and recognise the form's central moves in any specimen they read.
Practice scenarios
Voltaire Simulacrum gives you three philosophical propositions to choose from: *the meritocracy is just*; *technological progress makes us happier*; *the educated are wiser than the uneducated*. Choose one. (Choose the one that you actually believe is wrong; the form does not work if you secretly agree.) Then write a 1,200-word *conte philosophique* in French (B2-C1 register) — a naive protagonist who has been taught the proposition, sent through a sequence of episodes that test it against the world, ironic narration, short chapters, ending that lands the disabusal without stating it.
Your goals
Led by Voltaire Simulacrum
The question
The French letter — *la lettre* — is one of the great forms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French prose, and it survives today in the *lettre ouverte*, the personal essay framed as letter, the formal letter of complaint or petition, and the literary email. The form has its conventions (*formules d'appel*, *formules de politesse*, the implicit audience) and its possibilities. Voltaire Simulacrum wrote thousands of letters that were also essays, and his *Lettres philosophiques* (1734) is a book of letters that is in fact a sustained argument. What does the letter form give the writer that direct exposition does not?
Outcome
The student can write three different French letters at the appropriate registers — a personal letter, a formal letter to an institution, a *lettre ouverte* arguing a public point — observing the conventions of each and using the addressee productively as form.
Practice scenarios
Voltaire Simulacrum gives you three brief letter-prompts: (1) a personal letter to a friend who has hurt you, where you have to say so without ending the friendship — 200 words, intimate register; (2) a formal letter to the *Mairie* of a town you have never visited, asking for information about a public-records matter — 150 words, *register soutenu*, full conventions; (3) a *lettre ouverte* to a newspaper editor on a public question of your choice — 350 words, addressee named but the public reader the actual target. You write all three in French. Voltaire Simulacrum reads each in turn.
Your goals
Led by Voltaire Simulacrum
The question
The polemic — *la polémique*, *le pamphlet*, *la diatribe* — is the form for argued attack, sustained over enough pages to do real damage. French has a long polemical tradition: Voltaire Simulacrum's *Traité sur la tolérance* (1763), Zola's *J'accuse...!* (1898), Camus Simulacrum's *Lettres à un ami allemand* (1943-44), Sartre's polemics of the 1950s. The form is fast, urgent, controlled in its anger. What separates an effective polemic from a rant, and how does the polemicist hold readers who do not already agree?
Outcome
The student can write a 700-word polemic in French — a specific target, the rhetorical structure intact, controlled irony, marshalled evidence, sentence-rhythm alternated for effect — that an unconvinced reader could be brought to take seriously.
Practice scenarios
Voltaire Simulacrum asks you to choose a specific contemporary public injustice — a particular event, decision, or piece of legislation, named precisely, not a general grievance. (Specific: this court verdict, this policy, this institutional decision. Not specific: *l'État*, *le système*, *la société*.) You then write a 700-word polemic in French, structured as *exorde / narration / argumentation / réfutation / péroraison*, using controlled irony where it sharpens rather than softens, marshalling at least three specific pieces of evidence, anticipating at least one counter-argument and disposing of it. Voltaire Simulacrum reads it as a polemicist, not as a sympathiser.
Your goals
Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum
The question
French has one of the great lyric traditions — Villon, Ronsard, Racine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Valéry, Senghor Simulacrum, Césaire. The forms are codified (the *alexandrin*, the sonnet, the *ode*), the music is precise, the diction is — until Rimbaud and after — held to a high register. How does a writer working in twenty-first-century French write a lyric poem that does not feel pastiche, that earns its line breaks and its concentration, that carries the inheritance without being crushed by it?
Outcome
The student can write a fourteen-line lyric in French — an unrhymed contemporary poem if they prefer, or a sonnet to formal specification — that earns its line breaks, holds register, and adds something the inherited tradition does not already say.
Practice scenarios
Senghor Simulacrum asks you to write a fourteen-line lyric in French. You may choose: a sonnet with full formal observance (*alexandrins*, the rhyme scheme of your choice, alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes); or an unrhymed contemporary lyric (free metre, but the line must still earn its break). The subject is yours, but it must be something specific (not "love", not "death" — *the moment a friend told you something they had never told anyone* is specific; *grief* is not). You write the poem; Senghor Simulacrum reads it as a poet, asking on each line: does this line do work the line above did not, and is the diction held throughout?
Your goals
Led by Molière Simulacrum (French Department)
The question
A scene is the basic unit of theatre — two or more characters in a defined space with a defined relationship and a question between them, dialogue building from there to a moment of change. Molière Simulacrum wrote the great French comedies in the seventeenth century and his scenes are still studied as masterclasses in dramatic construction. What does a scene need on the page to come alive when read silently, and how does the playwright let the characters' voices differentiate while keeping the language consistently French rather than transcribed-speech?
Outcome
The student can write a 200-line scene in French — two or three characters, a defined situation, a change between beginning and end, distinct voices, sub-text functioning, *didascalies* doing structural work — that holds together when read silently on the page.
Practice scenarios
Molière Simulacrum gives you a setup: two characters, a kitchen, late at night, one of them has just discovered something the other has been hiding. You decide who, what, and from there. You write a scene of approximately 200 lines (about a thousand words) in French — *register courant* with whatever register-shifts the characters require — full *didascalies*, distinct voices, the rule that *something must be different by the end*. Molière Simulacrum reads it the way he read his actors at the Palais-Royal: looking for the line that does not work, the voice that has slipped into the playwright's own, the moment where the scene loses its driving question.
Your goals
Led by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette Simulacrum
The question
Description is what most novice writers find hardest, because the temptation is either to over-detail (the cliché list of every visible thing) or to under-detail (the wave at *a beautiful garden* that asks the reader to do all the work). Good description selects. It chooses the two or three perceptions that carry the scene and trusts the reader to fill the rest. Colette Simulacrum is the great French descriptive writer of the twentieth century — her prose is sensuous and exact in equal measure. How does the writer select?
Outcome
The student can write a 400-word descriptive passage in French — a place, a person, an object, a moment — that selects rather than exhausts, that uses sensory range beyond sight, and that no one writing about a different subject could have written.
Practice scenarios
Colette Simulacrum asks you to choose a specific real thing you can describe from memory: a room, a place, a person, a meal, a particular day. Specific — not "my grandmother's kitchen in general" but "my grandmother's kitchen on the Sunday in 1998 when we made the apple tart together." Then write a 400-word descriptive passage in French. The passage must use at least three senses. It must contain at least one perception only you would have made (because you were the one there). It must contain no generic phrasing that could be lifted into another description without changing anything. Colette Simulacrum reads it.
Your goals
Led by Gustave Flaubert Simulacrum
The question
Dialogue in narrative prose is different from dialogue on the stage. The novelist does not get the actor's voice, the audience's reaction, the live air of the theatre — only the page. So the novelist's dialogue must do work the playwright's does not: it must establish character, advance plot, reveal sub-text, and remain readable as French (not as transcribed speech) all at once. Flaubert Simulacrum worked obsessively at his dialogue, revising for years to get the rhythm right. What does novelistic dialogue need on the page?
Outcome
The student can write a 600-word dialogue passage in narrative prose — French conventions intact, the *incise* used economically, voice-differentiated, cleaned up but registering as natural, every line carrying at least two of the three loads — and recognise the form's central moves in any French novelist they read.
Practice scenarios
Flaubert Simulacrum gives you a setup: two characters, a café in a French provincial town, an autumn afternoon, an awkward first meeting between people connected through a third party who is not present. You decide who, why, and what they discuss. Write the scene as a 600-word passage of narrative prose — the dialogue itself in French conventions (*tirets cadratins*, *incises* placed economically), the dialogue interleaved with brief narration (description, *style indirect libre* where appropriate). Each line of dialogue must do at least two of: establish character, advance plot (toward whatever the meeting's outcome will be), reveal sub-text.
Your goals
Led by Voltaire Simulacrum
The question
Reportage — the literary essay grounded in observed reality, the long-form journalism that is also literature — has a French tradition running from the *Lettres philosophiques* through Camus Simulacrum's *Reflexions sur la guillotine* to the contemporary *Le Monde diplomatique*. The form combines the essayist's voice with the reporter's evidence: the writer goes somewhere, observes carefully, talks to people, and writes what they found. Cambridge 9898 doesn't have a reportage prompt, but the skill — observing accurately, integrating evidence into argued prose, holding register — is what every Writing-paper response wants. How does the writer write reportage that is neither dry journalism nor disguised opinion?
Outcome
The student can write a 1,200-word piece of reportage in French — a real subject observed, evidence and argument interwoven, the *je* deployed deliberately, the closing letting the evidence carry the argument — that holds together as both observed account and argued case.
Practice scenarios
Voltaire Simulacrum asks you to choose a real local subject you can observe (or have observed and recorded): a market, a public meeting, a court session, a school, a place of work, a neighbourhood event. Go (or recall in detail). Take notes on specifics — who was there, what they said, what time it was, what was on the walls, what the light was like, what was being argued. Then write a 1,200-word reportage piece in French. Interweave the observed specifics with the argued case the specifics support. Use the *je* where it earns its place; recede where the evidence speaks for itself. End by letting the reader see.
Your goals
Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum
The question
Writing about writing — the literary essay, the book review, the introduction, the catalogue text, the personal reflection on a work read or heard — is the form where French letters and French criticism meet. Senghor Simulacrum's essays on Aimé Césaire and on French poetry, Barthes's *Mythologies* and *Le Plaisir du texte*, Sartre's *Qu'est-ce que la littérature?* are all critical-reflective writing of the highest French tradition. The form expects deep reading, sustained voice, and a hospitable address to the non-specialist reader. The Cambridge 9898 Literature paper rewards this skill directly. How does a writer write criticism that is also literature?
Outcome
The student can write an 800-word critical-reflective essay in French — on a French literary work of their choosing, with sustained close reading, voice held throughout, *prise* and *clôture* working — that a reader of *Le Magazine littéraire* would recognise as belonging to the French critical tradition.
Practice scenarios
Senghor Simulacrum asks you to choose a French literary work you have read attentively — a poem, a short story, a chapter of a novel, an essay. (Choose a work you genuinely care about; the form does not work otherwise.) Then write an 800-word critical essay in French on the work. The essay must have a clear *prise* — the specific moment in the text from which your reading opens — a sustained body that quotes and analyses without becoming summary, and a *clôture* that returns the reader to the work changed. *Register soutenu* with literary register where the writing earns it.
Your goals