Bonjour Tristesse

A look at Françoise Sagan’s 'amoral' French classic

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In the opening lines of Françoise Sagan’s 1955 novel Bonjour Tristesse, her 17-year-old narrator Cécile states:

‘A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness.  In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism.  I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness.’ 

That these lines are spoken from the viewpoint of such a young narrator is made more remarkable in that they were taken from an 18-year-old author’s first novel.

The story involves seventeen-year-old Cécile as she spends the summer in the French Riviera with her likeable, playboy father, a 40-year-old widower who lost his wife – and Cécile’s mother - 15 years earlier.  They begin the summer at a house on the coast in the company of Elsa, whom Cécile tells us is her father’s ‘current mistress’.  A summer of hedonistic pleasure rolls out in front of them, until Cécile’s father gets a call from her mother’s old friend Anne, who is coming for a visit.

Though Cécile clearly has affection and respect for Anne, she soon realizes that her arrival heralds a curtailing of her freedom, particularly in respect to her days spent lounging onboard a small boat belonging to a young student Cyril, with whom she is contemplating a romance.

When Cécile’s father and Anne declare their plan to marry, Cécile begins to hatch a plan to send Anne away, so that she can continue the free and easy life she and her father enjoy and of which Anne disapproves. 

Sagan’s novel immediately reminded me of JD Salinger’s writing, particularly The Catcher in the Rye, in its representation of the disillusioned teenager, and it is easy to see why the book went on to appeal to ongoing generations of young fans.

Despite the novel’s title, (which translates as ‘Hello Sadness’ and was taken from a poem by Paul Èluard), I found the book to contain very little in the way of real sadness.  Instead, the heat of the French Riviera and the glamorous lifestyle felt like an escape.  I think this is also due to Sagan’s young narrator; though she spends the novel plotting against Anne, I found myself rooting for the young protagonist.  The fact of her youth engenders the feeling that there is not actually a lot at stake, and I think Sagan cleverly sets up the first-person narrative so that Anne is not really given a voice in the story.  It is difficult to feel much sympathy with her, I found, and in this respect, it is unclear whether Sagan is representing Cécile as an unreliable narrator.  

Written in 1955, the novel shocked French society, with the French literary establishment labelling it as ‘amoral’ in its portrayal of a young girl’s summer romance.  As with most scandalised literature however, this ensured its young author a bewildering success, with the book still garnering fervent support and fond memories from readers today.

Reminiscent of a Fitzgerald novel, full of Mediterranean sunshine, beautiful people and hedonistic lifestyles, the story of Françoise Sagan is just as fascinating. 

Sagan was born Françoise Quoirez (she later adopted the name ‘Sagan’ from Proust’s Princesse de Sagan from In Search of Lost Time) in 1935 to a bourgeoise family who had a home in the prosperous 17th arrondissement in Paris. Expelled from two schools, Sagan passed her Baccalauréat on her second attempt, gaining entry to the Sorbonne, but later failing to graduate.

In this respect, her character of Cécile is a similarly indifferent student, something which Anne in the novel tries to remedy.

In the summer of 1953, Sagan was forced to miss the usual family holiday in order to attend a cramming session in Paris in order to re-take the failed Baccalauréat.  Although she managed to pass this the following October, securing a place at the Sorbonne, Sagan was reported to spend more time during that summer sitting in café’s and writing in blue exercise books.  Expressing ‘a strong desire to write’, Sagan set out to test her ability to write a full novel.  Taking only 2-3 months, the manuscript for Bonjour Tristesse was completed and sent to a publisher, who wrote to the family’s home address offering 50,000 francs for the publication, negotiated with her parents due to her age. 

Photo by Marloes-Hilckmann on Unsplash

Though not setting out to create a major work of literature, Sagan was quickly compared with a young Collette, going on to win the prestigious Prix des Critiques, as well as receiving positive reviews from big names including the Nobel laureate François Mauriac.  Many other literary critics however feared that the novel would dismantle the reputation of young French women, due to its protagonist’s sexual relationship with Cyril.

Sagan herself responded to critics on the amorality of the book to claim that in a still predominantly Catholic France, ‘It was inconceivable that a young girl of 17 or 18 should make love, without being in love, with a boy of her own age, and not be punished for it’.  She also suggested that the novel would have been more acceptable to critics had the young Cécile been pregnant by the end of the book, instead having autonomy over her own body and deriving pleasure from it without penalty. 

Despite (or because of) the negative publicity, the book went on to sell more than 350,000 copies in France alone within the first two years of publication.

Claims were made against Sagan that the novel must have been written by a much older writer, most likely male, and released under a pseudonym to ensure its notoriety and therefore popularity.  Sagan was also accused of representing her own experiences through her teenage character of Cécile, something which she disputed. 

Despite such rumours of Sagan’s authorship, her follow-up novel Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile), written in third person narration and featuring the story of a 20-year-old Sorbonne student, was another runaway success, securing her place as a legitimate young author. 

Inevitably with such success came the release of a film version of Bonjour Tristesse in 1958, starring David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Jean Seberg as Cécile, though some critics have pointed to the lack of emotional shading which can be found in the original novel.  

Sagan’s early success had its downsides for the young writer, however, who became an almost instant celebrity.  She earned a lot of money in those early years, much of which she spent on a Left Bank apartment and luxury convertibles, one of which resulted in a life-threatening accident, as well as picking up the bill on meals out with friends old and new. 

In her personal life, Sagan married twice, with both short marriages ending in divorce. She went on to have affairs with both men and women, including a long-standing 10-year relationship with fashion stylist Peggy Roche.  Addictions to alcohol, drugs, and gambling followed her, and her later television appearances began to show an emaciated Sagan. She eventually shut herself away at her country residence, sparking fears from friends, following the death of Roche in 1991 from pancreatic cancer.

When Sagan died in 2004 aged 69 of a pulmonary embolism, she reportedly left around €1m of debt.   

Following on from Bonjour Tristesse, Sagan went on to write a total of 20 novels, as well as three collections of short stories, two biographies, many non-fiction articles, and nine playscripts.  It was her first novel however, written when she was just a teenager, which both made her name and remains her most popular work. 

The opening lines, spoken by the young protagonist of her most famous novel: ‘Today something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me’, seem to be sadly apt at the ending to Sagan’s own remarkable story. 

Footnote Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse, Translator: Irene Ash, (John Murray : London), 1955, [1978].