Teaching La Princesse de Clèves

This website has been designed to offer strategies for teaching this seminal work to intermediate-level college students in a way that is dynamic, engaging, and perhaps most importantly highlights the connection between Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century work La Princesse de Clèves and the contemporary social concerns of young people in today’s world. 

There was a recent heated debate in France about the modern relevance of this literary text that began when Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that the study of this text was useless. His comments incited fervent discussion in French academic, artistic, and political circles. The compelling history of the text, along with its importance in contemporary French society and culture, makes the study of this work highly relevant for students.

The La Princesse de Clèves website is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA) International license.