Books like Le diable au corps by Raymond Radiguet

Victor Hugo’s historical epic follows peasant Jean Valjean, unjustly imprisoned and pursued by the relentless inspector Javert, exploring themes of justice, redemption, and the social conditions of 19th-century France.

In a journal‑style narrative, a historian in a northern French port confronts existential despair as his senses dull and he becomes disenchanted with his own existence.

After the Great War, two wounded French veterans navigate a society that has left them behind, resorting to cunning schemes to survive as they seek justice and redemption in post‑war France.

Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) is André Gide’s 1925 novel that explores identity, imitation, and sexuality through intersecting narratives, including a meta‑fictional framing device and a protagonist modeled on Gide himself.

The tale is recounted by François Seurel, whose father heads the village school where Augustin Meaulnes comes to board. A tall, somber youth of 17, he instantly becomes the class ringleader, and is soon known as le grand Meaulnes. When the youth sets off on an impetuous errand of a few hours and doesn't return for several days, events take a darker turn. After Meaulnes's reappearance, Seurel notices his companion's unrest, and tries to uncover its source. He wakes in the midwinter nights to find Meaulnes pacing the room "like someone rummaging about in his memory, sorting out scraps." Meaulnes remains disconsolate, but finally reveals the nature of his travels, and the strange days of revelry at his unintended destination--the "lost domain" to which he is desperate to return and doesn't know how to find. Seurel rightly guesses that Meaulnes met a young woman there, and that he is in love. The two friends set about retracing Meaulnes's path, and their journeys take them into manhood, when Meaulnes finds at last a way to bring his quest full circle.