French Studies: Digital Primary Resources

ARTFL-FRANTEXT includes more than 3,500 French language texts spanning from the 12th through the 20th centuries, 215 million words and 675,000 unique word forms. Excellent for researching the usage and evolution of particular words.

A digital copy of Diderot and d'Alembert's famous Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres, with 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772.

Search the full text of Montaigne's Essais.

Comprehensive resource for Voltaire's writings, fully searchable.

Rousseau Online is a full-text, fully-searchable online edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings.

A cultural newsletter distributed between 1753 and 1790, written and produced most famously by Friedrich Melchior, baron von Grimm, and including contributions from Denis Diderot and Madame d’Épinay.

Jean-Paul Marat's newspaper L’Ami du peuple, comprising nearly 700 issues published in octavo between September 1789 and September 1792.

From the site: "Le gigantisme de la Méthodique reflète les évolutions scientifiques démesurées et les transformations sociales fabuleuses de la fin du 18e et du début du 19e s. Ainsi, Panckoucke présente une nouvelle constitution des savoirs qui est toujours d’actualité.

456 French plays and other theatrical texts, containing more than 6.3 million words and nearly 70,000 individual word forms, from the period between 1617 and 1798.

Key research sources of the French Revolution, including parliamentary papers and digital images of approximately 14 000 individual visual items, primarily prints, but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects, which display aspects of the Revolution.

The Newberry Library's French Revolution Collection consists of more than 30,000 pamphlets and more than 23,000 issues of 180 periodicals published between 1780 and 1810.The collection represents the opinions of all the factions that opposed and defended the monarchy during the turbulent period between 1789-1799 and also contains innumerable ephemeral publications of the early Republic.