A few years ago, I assembled a list of “100 Books with 100 Authors“–a ranking of fiction at Project Gutenberg according to my usual metric of popularity but selecting only the most popular work for each author–and I thought it might be fun to do something kind of like that for 19th C. French literature, though not based on PG. So I didn’t have a set list of possibilities to work off of, but I poked around at a number of sources (such as this and this) to build a list of French-language fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from the 19th C., ranked it according to the square of each title’s normalized Goodreads rating multiplied by the log of the number of raters, and selected the top title for each author per category (allowing trifectas for figures like Hugo and Lamartine). But going a little further, I dug into the results in search of the most popular edition of each title and aimed to list editions that are in print and/or available online. Here’s the result, ordered by popularity:

1. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
2. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
3. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
4. Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters
5. Hector Malot, Nobody’s Boy (seriously)
6. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
7. Émile Zola, Germinal
8. Alexandre Dumas, fils, La Dame aux Camélias
9. Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions
10. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
11. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
12. Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror
13. Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami
14. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
15. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours
16. Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems
17. Comtesse de Ségur, Les Malheurs de Sophie
18. George Sand, La Petite Fadette
19. Marcel Schwob, The Book of Monelle
20. Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse
21. Alphonse Daudet, Letters from My Windmill
22. Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings
23. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
24. Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden
25. François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
26. Victor Hugo, Selected Poems
27. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Diaboliques
28. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
29. Edmond & Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals
30. Eugène Sue, Mysteries of Paris
31. Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte
32. Henri Murger, Scènes de la vie de Bohême
33. Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century
34. Philippe-Paul de Ségur, Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign
35. Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite
36. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Amiel’s Journal (vol. 2)
37. Anatole France, Thaïs
38. Benjamin Constant, Adolphe
39. George Sand, Story of My Life
40. Prosper Mérimée, Carmen and Other Stories
41. Jean Lorrain, Nightmares of an Ether Drinker
42. Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour du Pin Gouvernet, Recollections of the Revolution and the Empire
43. Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain
44. Jules Renard, Nature Stories
45. Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit
46. Alfred Jarry, Three Early Novels
47. Rachilde, Monsieur Venus
48. Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite
49. Émile Gaboriau, Monsieur Lecoq
50. Claire de Duras, Ourika
51. Elisabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun, Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun
52. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt
53. Gérard de Nerval, Journey to the Orient
54. Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon
55. Alphonse de Lamartine, Graziella
56. Léon Bloy, Disagreeable Tales
57. Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy
58. François-René de Chateaubriand, Atala / René
59. Jules Vallès, The Child
60. Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah (selections)
61. Louise Michel, The Red Virgin
62. Charles Nodier, Smarra & Trilby
63. Victor Hugo, The Rhine
64. Petrus Borel, Champavert: Immoral Tales
65. Paul Féval, Vampire City
66. Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases, Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon (vol. 2, vol. 3, vol. 4)
67. Catulle Mendès, Bluebirds
68. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution
69. Rémy de Gourmont, Angels of Perversity
70. Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Obermann (vol. 2)
71. Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, The Vampire Soul and Other Sardonic Tales
72. Erckmann-Chatrian, The Conscript
73. Emile Verhaeren, Poems of Emile Verhaeren
74. Juliette Drouet, The Love Letters of Juliette Drouet to Victor Hugo
75. Émile Souvestre, An Attic Philosopher in Paris
76. Charlemagne Ischir Defontenay, Star
77. Alexandre Dumas, My Pets
78. Alfred de Vigny, Cinq Mars
79. Pierre Loti, My Brother Yves
80. Celeste Mogador, Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris
81. Tristan Corbière, The Centenary Corbière
82. Anatole Le Braz, La Légende de la mort
83. Marie Nizet, Captain Vampire
84. Jules Clarétie, Camille Desmoulins and His Wife
85. Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays
86. Paul de Kock, The Barber of Paris
87. Sibylle Riqueti de Mirabeau, Chiffon’s Marriage
88. Louise Colet, Lui, A View of Him
89. Jean Richepin, The Crazy Corner
90. François Coppée, Ten Tales
91. Xavier de Maistre, A Nocturnal Expedition Round My Room (sequel to the delightful A Journey Round My Room)
92. Prosper Mérimée, Letters to an Incognita
93. Louis Gallet, The Adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac
94. Eugénie Foa, The Boy Life of Napoleon
95. René Bazin, The Ink-Stain
96. Delphine de Girardin, Balzac’s Cane
97. Octave Feuillet, Monsieur de Camors
98. Fortuné du Boisgobey, The Red Lottery Ticket
99. Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, The Virgin Vampire
100. Jules Laforgue, Berlin: The City and the Court
101. Jules Laforgue, Essential Poems & Prose of Jules Laforgue
102. Paul LaCroix, Danse Macabre
103. Ernest-Aimé Feydeau, Fanny
104. Jules Sandeau, Mademoiselle de la Seiglière
105. Rose de Freycinet, A Woman of Courage: The Journal of Rose de Freycinet on Her Voyage Around the World, 1817-1820
106. Jenny d’Héricourt, A Woman’s Philosophy of Woman
107. Victor Cherbuliez, Count Kostia
108. Jules Janin, The Magnetized Corpse
109. Stuart Merrill, The White Tomb
110. Louis Ulbach, The Steel Hammer
111. Benjamin Leopold Farjeon, Devlin the Barber
112. Georges Ohnet, In Deep Abyss
113. Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus, &c.
114. Charlotte-Adelaïde Dard, Shipwreck of the Medusa
115. Gustave Kahn, The Tale of Gold and Silence
116. Sophie Cottin, Elizabeth, or The Exiles of Siberia

The following titles had no ratings at Goodreads, but I thought they might be worth including anyway for one reason or another:

• Amédée Achard, The History of My Friends, or Home Life with Animals
• Thérèse Bentzon, Jacqueline and The Condition of Woman in the United States
• Élie Berthet, The Pre-Historic World
• Marie-Anne de Bovet, Three Months’ Tour in Ireland
• Maxime du Camp, Recollections of a Literary Life (vol. 2)
• Théophile Gautier, Paris Besieged
• Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantès, Memoirs of Napoleon, His Court, and Family (vol. 2); see also, Madame de Rémusat, Memoirs (vol. 2) and Georgette Ducrest, Memoirs of the Court of the Empress Josephine (vol. 2, vol. 3)
• Marie Lafarge, Memoirs of Madame Lafarge (vol. 2)
• Alphonse de Lamartine, History of the Revolution of 1848 (vol. 2)
• Pierre Loti, “The Capture of Tonkin” & “The Massacre of the Annamites”
• Athénaïs Michelet, The Story of My Childhood
• Émilie de Pellapra, A Daughter of Napoleon