Les Fées: The Fairies of France and Why They Are Nothing Like the Fairies of England

The French fairy tradition, les fées, is one of the oldest and most sophisticated in Europe, and it differs from the English fairy tradition in ways that are worth understanding before assuming they are the same thing in different languages. The French fée is not primarily a small winged creature of garden whimsy. She is a powerful supernatural woman of full human size, sometimes beautiful and generous, sometimes terrifying and lethal, who inhabits a specific relationship with the human world that is defined by the terms of that relationship rather than by any fixed moral character.

The word fée derives from the Latin fata, fate, which connects it directly to the Roman Fates and to the concept of destiny rather than to the English word fairy, which has a murkier etymology. A fée is etymologically a woman of fate, a being whose interactions with humans tend to involve the determination or alteration of their destinies, which is precisely what the great French fairy figures — Mélusine, Morgan le Fay, the fairy godmother of Perrault’s tales — actually do. They intervene in human destinies. They set conditions. They give gifts that come with consequences.

The Regional Traditions

The French fairy tradition is not uniform across the country but varies significantly by region, reflecting the extraordinary cultural and linguistic diversity of France before the Revolution’s centralising project and the long subsequent process of cultural standardisation. Brittany has the korrigans, small fairy folk with specifically Breton characteristics. Normandy has its own fairy traditions distinct from those of the south. The Pyrenees have the matagot and other southern French supernatural beings. The Franche-Comté has the Vouivre. The fairy tradition of France is really a collection of regional traditions that share a common vocabulary while expressing very different local concerns.

What connects them is the basic structure of the human-fairy relationship: fairies inhabit the wild places, the forests, the springs, the high moorlands, and they must be acknowledged and respected in those places. They can be helpful or harmful. They have their own rules and their own values that do not necessarily match human ones. And the stories told about them are almost always stories about what happens when humans encounter them without understanding the terms of the relationship.

The Literary Fairy Tradition

France produced one of the most important literary fairy traditions in Europe through the work of Charles Perrault, whose late seventeenth century collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé, known in English as Tales of Mother Goose, codified versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and Bluebeard that have remained the dominant versions of those stories in Western culture ever since. Perrault’s fairy godmother, the benevolent supernatural woman who transforms Cinderella’s circumstances, is one of the most enduring images in the entire European fairy tradition.

Perrault’s contemporaries, particularly the women writers of the conteuses tradition — Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie de Murat, and others — produced fairy tales of considerably greater complexity and subversiveness than Perrault’s relatively didactic versions, exploring the fairy tradition’s possibilities for commentary on gender, power, and the conditions of aristocratic life in ways that Perrault’s male-authored moralising tales did not. The full French literary fairy tradition is much richer and stranger than the Perrault versions that became canonical suggest.

Morgan le Fay and the Arthurian Connection

The French fairy tradition’s most internationally significant figure is probably Morgan le Fay, the fairy enchantress of Arthurian legend, whose character was substantially developed by French Arthurian writers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The French Arthurian tradition took the Welsh and Anglo-Norman Arthurian material and expanded it into the vast prose cycles — the Lancelot-Grail cycle, the Vulgate Cycle — that made Morgan one of the most complex supernatural women in medieval literature.

Morgan in the French tradition is simultaneously Arthur’s sister, his enemy, and ultimately his rescuer: she is one of the queens who takes him to Avalon after his final battle. She is the fée par excellence of the French tradition, a woman whose power is real, whose relationship to the hero is irreducibly ambivalent, and whose ultimate role in the story cannot be reduced to simply villain or helper.

For more on the folklore of France, the Mélusine article covers the most important individual fée in French tradition. The Korrigans article covers the fairy folk of Brittany. The France folklore hub page has every article in the cluster.