Abstract EN:

This thesis aims at showing the presence of a French model in the birth of a modern Turkish literature. First limited to determined contacts, then to more prolonged but only technical exchanges, the relationship between France and the Ottoman Empire extends to the cultural level with Sinasi as avant-garde. It opens in the Empire a period of questionning and doubt about the identity. For the first generation of Tanzimat the influence is thought to be only instrumental; France remains "other". French influence in literature consists in numerous and often didactic translations and adaptations from French, in the work of Ahmet Mithat, but also in introducing new forms such as the novel or theatre, as by Namik Kemal. For the next generation of New Literature, united with the magazine Servet-i Fünun, French literature becomes a source for the own creation: Halit Ziya, who intends to write realist novels (Mai ve Siyah, Ask-i memnu) and Tevfik Fikret, as a "modern" poet, totally abandon the old forms. In the novels of Halit Ziya on the one side we can feel the grammatical and syntaxical influence of French on the Turkish language; he takes novels of Flaubert or Goncourt as a model for its style. We discovered that Tevfik Fikret, in Rübab-i Sikeste, was under the influence not only of Coppée, but also of Hugo, Baudelaire, Musset, but creates an original work of art