God bless the French. They gave us French kissing, French bread, Brigitte Bardot and Tati. They gave us useful terms: ennui and guillotine. They gave us The Statue of Liberty.
And the French gave us existential fiction—a gift that keeps on giving.
Born of a Danish thinker, Soren Kirkegaard, and a German, Friedrich Nietzsche, Existentialism seeded the world primarily on the winds of French literature, inspiring many works of art that characterized the bleak and blundering 20th century.
From Existentialism sprang Samuel Beckett, his characters forever waiting for Godot. Jean Genet, Andre Malraux and Eugene Ionesco celebrated the gospel of Existentialism. Later came the novels of Cormac McCarthy, who puts his human beings on soulless plains, in worlds bereft of gods or goodness, their only faith that of certain death in the end.
The Existentialist movement dramatically influenced Hollywood. Screens have swarmed with Existential anti-heroes, rebels without a cause and rebels without a clue, shaking their fists at the heavens even if nothing but rain was up there. Think of Dean. Mitchum. Brando, and works directed by Ingmar Bergman.
In painting, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon rose from the movement. Pop music produced Robyn Hitchcock, Goth music, then like the great white shark of Existentialism, The Sex Pistols.
For all this, we can thank French writers, mainly Albert Camus and his friends Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who carried the stone tablets down from Mt. Kirkegaard and Mt. Nietzsche to the masses. These writers basically considered the universe to be absurdly functioning, completely free of any divine hand or supernatural influence. The heavens were just heavens, not happy habitats for supernatural deities.—Mon dieu!