French books to read at B1 and B2: short classics in order of difficulty

10 November 2026

Twelve French classics for intermediate learners, from a ten-page story to a full novel, in the order we would read them. All are in the public domain, and four are free to read on Lexico with a translation one tap away.

The usual advice for a first book in French is a novel that is 300 pages long and still in copyright. This list goes the other way: start with something you can finish in a week, by an author whose sentences are short, and work up.

The levels are our estimates of what you need when a translation is within reach. Without any help, add half a level.

The list

"Free libraries" means Project Gutenberg, Wikisource or Ebooks libres et gratuits. Our guide to where to get ebooks legally explains how to download from each.

Start here: Maupassant

Maupassant is the best first author in French, and it is not close. He wrote more than three hundred short stories in plain, fast sentences, about people who want money, love or revenge. The vocabulary is everyday, the plots move, and most stories end with a turn you will remember.

La Parure is the classic first one. Mathilde Loisel borrows a diamond necklace for a ball and loses it on the way home. It is about ten pages, and French schoolchildren read it too.

Clair de lune gives you three more stories of the same size. Boule de suif is longer and better: a coach of respectable citizens flees occupied Rouen with a prostitute among them, and their gratitude to her does not last. It is the story that made him famous.

Le Horla is a good next step because it is written as a diary. A man comes to believe that an invisible being is living in his house. Diary entries are short and written in the first person, so you meet the je forms that third-person stories never show you.

Stories with a plot to pull you along

When the language is hard, a plot does half the work. Three books here were written to be impossible to put down.

Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur is nine stories about a thief who is cleverer than the police and politer than his victims. Leblanc wrote for a magazine audience, so the French is modern and the chapters are short. If you have seen the television series, you know the tone.

Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours is Verne at his most readable: Phileas Fogg bets that he can go round the world in eighty days, and his servant Passepartout pays for most of it. Expect some vocabulary of ships, trains and geography. You know the story, which helps.

Le Mystère de la chambre jaune is one of the first locked-room mysteries. A young reporter, Rouletabille, sets out to explain an attack in a room nobody could have entered or left. It is a full novel, so read it after a few shorter books.

A step up

Lettres de mon moulin is a collection of short pieces set in Provence. Start with La Chèvre de monsieur Seguin. Each piece is a few pages long, which makes the book easy to read in small sessions, but Daudet likes regional words.

Candide is older than everything else here and easier than you would expect. Voltaire writes short chapters, thirty of them, in clear sentences, and the joke is the same from start to finish: terrible things happen and someone explains that all is for the best. Some eighteenth-century words will need a tap.

Bel-Ami is the novel to read once Maupassant's stories feel comfortable. Georges Duroy, a penniless former soldier, climbs through Paris journalism and the beds of well-connected women. It is long, and it reads fast.

Un cœur simple and La Vénus d'Ille are short, but they are the hardest on the list. Flaubert's story of the servant Félicité has rich, exact vocabulary in almost every sentence. Mérimée's tale of a bronze statue in a Roussillon village is told by a learned narrator who likes long sentences. Both repay the effort.

The one thing you need to know first: the passé simple

Every book on this list tells its story in the passé simple, a past tense that spoken French gave up long ago. You will see il fut where you expect il a été, elle prit for elle a pris, ils allèrent for ils sont allés.

You do not need to learn to use it. You need to recognise it, and the regular forms are easy: il parla, il finit, il vendit. The irregular ones hide the verb, so learn these few by sight:

In Lexico, tapping a verb tells you its tense and its dictionary form, so the passé simple stops being a puzzle after the first chapter.

What about Le Petit Prince and L'Étranger?

They are the two books everyone recommends, and both are good choices at B1. Neither is free. Camus died in 1960, so L'Étranger is in copyright in Europe and the United States, and Le Petit Prince is still protected in France and the United States.

Buy them as ebooks without copy protection and you can convert your own copy to read the same way as the classics above. The guide to legal ebooks lists French stores that sell without DRM.

How to use the list

• Read one short story before any novel. Finishing something matters more than what it is.
• Stay with one author for a while. A writer repeats their own vocabulary, so the second Maupassant story is easier than the first.
• Test a book on its first page. If you follow the gist with fewer than half the sentences translated, it fits. If not, move up the list and come back.
• Guess before you check. The method is in how to read your way into a language.

The whole French shelf, with the opening of each book as the app shows it, is at French books with English translation.