The Grasshopper and the Ant, The Crow and the Fox, The Town Rat and the Country Rat, The Fox and the Stork, The Lion and the Gnat, The Hare and the Tortoise, The Wolf and the Lamb … Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95), a lyric poet and a writer of sporadically bawdy tales in verse, is best known for the 230 Fables he published between 1668 and 1694, of which the animal fables are by far the most celebrated. Learnt by heart by generations of French children, they have made La Fontaine one of the most often quoted and one of the best-loved French writers.

The Fables: art and ideology

If the fable exists at all in French literature as a poetic form, it is thanks to La Fontaine. By the seventeenth century, the fable was no longer taken seriously. Because he was working in a minor genre, he was free of the rules laid down for other literary forms. The fruit of that freedom can be seen in the variety of tones and styles he adopted. A master of prosody, irregular verse and aural patterning, he was a master, too, of a wide range of registers – satire, comedy, personal lyric, aphoristic wit, heroic rhetoric and down-to-earth speech – which sometimes merge into each other in quick succession. The Fables represent a pinnacle of poetic charm and sophistication.

From its origins in classical literature (Aesop most notably), the fable was explicitly designed to offer moral lessons, and was a more obviously didactic form – at least on the surface – than practically any other branch of literature. Like so many of his contemporaries, La Fontaine accepted this view. His originality, however, lay in his rewriting of the old classical tales in a distinctive poetic style, in which the moral is often ambiguous or even omitted altogether.