The main ARTFL database (FRANTEXT, formerly Trésor de la Langue Française) is a corpus consisting of nearly 2000 texts in French, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. There is also a Provençal database that includes 38 texts in their original spellings. The ARTFL French Women Writers Project is a searchable database containing works by French women authors from the 16th to the 19th century. Currently, the Women Writers Project is separate from the main ARTFL database; eventually the texts here will be merged with the ARTFL database.
Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to these editions.
This corpus of French texts is an important resource not only for lexicographers, but also for many other types of humanists and social scientists engaged in French studies.
Coverage: medieval period to the 20th century